Making money online as an affiliate marketer sounds like a pretty straightforward affair when you break it down to its fundamental principles. You find an affiliate offer that you think is worth promoting. You drive traffic toward that offer. The traffic converts and you get paid. That’s all pretty basic stuff.
Of course, there are innumerable nuances you’ll have to face along the way. If it was super easy, everybody would be doing it and everyone would be rich. You’ll face challenges at every step along the way. How do you get the traffic? How do you get them to the offer? How do you convince them to convert?
That last question is perhaps the most profound and the most important, because it represents the biggest departure from traditional Internet advertising. Just seeing the offer isn’t enough. Just clicking on it isn’t enough. The visitor needs to complete an action.
And that’s why well-designed landing pages can be your magic bullet, the thing that separates you from everyone else who is promoting the same affiliate offer.
It’s not exactly child’s play, but you’ll find that if you are directing traffic directly to the advertiser’s page, the only competitive advantage you might have is your budget. You can spend thousands of dollars on search engine and social media traffic, but will that convert?
I’m not denying that this can be an effective strategy for many affiliate marketers, but it does mean that you’re throwing your name into the same hat as people who have much deeper pockets. Instead, it pays to invest in great landing pages so that your conversion rate is far higher than the average.
Consider this. Let’s say that you want your audience to buy a new camera on Amazon. You don’t get paid unless they complete the transaction. On the one hand, you can spend tons of money driving traffic directly to the product page on Amazon.
If that Amazon page is for a brand new product from a lesser-known company, there probably aren’t going to be many user reviews on there and this smaller company may not have invested a lot into the item description. A random person on the Internet who clicks on your ad and arrives here likely won’t buy the camera. You’ve wasted your money.
Now, let’s say that you set up a custom landing page instead. How would things be different?
On this landing page, you might explain why this particular camera is so much better than all the other ones on the market. You might post sample photos taken with this camera to demonstrate its quality. You might point out that this camera is an exceptional value and is far more affordable that similarly spec’d products. You can really sell this camera to your audience.
After someone has read through what you have to say and looked at all that evidence, they are in much more of a buying mood. They can feel a lot more confident about their purchase, so when they click on through to the actual product page, they’re much more likely to add that item to cart and checkout. And that’s how you get paid.
I’m using the example of a physical product on Amazon, but the same fundamental policy can apply to practically any other affiliate offer on the Internet. Yes, you will have to overcome the added hurdle of convincing your traffic to click on two links (one to get to your landing page and one to get to the advertiser’s offer page), but this generates much higher quality traffic that is specifically relevant to the offer. It’s win-win-win all around.
Invest a little money in some great landing page copy (like hiring a professional writer!) and the increased conversion will pay off that investment in spades. This is true from conventional landing pages, just as much as it is for mailouts, landing page videos, and microsites. It’s that extra nudge your visitor needs to convert.