If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Previous articles in this series:
Part 1: Create A Plan
Part 2: Laying The Foundation

Once you start receiving the initial content for your authority affiliate site, it is time to begin using that content to form landing pages. We will need to develop an easy system for creating many different landing pages targeted for different groups of keywords. These landing pages will be used with a PPC marketing campaign to get the cash flow started.

Upload Content To A Database

In order to create a manageable system of landing pages, you will need to upload your content to a database. You could hand build the pages, but what happens when you have one hundred (or more) landing pages? When you are testing and tracking your results, and optimizing for conversions, you will need to make many changes. This can become nearly impossible with more than a handful of pages.

By having all of your content in a database, you can create pages that pull information from a single source. Then, when you want to update that source information, you only have to do it once. Another useful advantage of pulling information from a database is that you can create one file for each type of landing page, and only make slight adjustments to change the content that is displayed.

Building Universal Landing Pages

As I eluded to previously, we are going to make a lot of landing pages; about one page for every ad group in our PPC campaign. The smartest way to do this is to create dynamic landing pages that can be customized with a few simple tweaks. Let me explain the two types of landing pages that I am currently using for my site:

Single Offer Page

The most basic landing page should be centered around a single offer. It is simply a complete review of the product or service that you are promoting. Within each review on my website, I have lots of text about the product or service, multiple affiliate links for it, pictures and screenshots that relate to it, and an area for user-generated ratings/comments about it. This is all done with a single PHP file that takes certain option variables and builds the correct landing page.

These pages will mostly be used for natural SEO purposes, but you should also contact the merchant to see if you can bid on their trademarked terms to promote through PPC. Most sensible merchants should allow this; you are, after all, trying to sell only their product or service from the page.

Multiple Offer Review Page

The main money-making landing page should be a review page, tailored to what your visitors are searching for. Using my website as an example once again, I have the following main elements on these pages:

• Simple list of products or services: This is situated at the top of the page, off to the left or right, and is simply a list of all the products/services on the page. Each item on the list is an affiliate link directly to that product.
• Introduction and presell paragraphs: Displayed next to the simple list, this is just some introduction text for the visitor to read. Tell them why you created the website, how you are going to help them out, and what your recommendations are based on. Also make sure to end with a call to action, tell them to try one or more (or all) of the recommended offers.
• Overview comparison chart: Next on the page is a table that shows a side-by-side comparison of each offer. You can include things like the price, reliability, customer service, delivery time, link to the full review, etc. For everything that is subjective (like reliability and customer service) just give them some kind of rating like “4.3″ or whatever. Obviously, make sure your “top-ranked” recommendation has the highest overall ratings, and then continue to scale it down as you move through your list.
• Individual summary reviews: Finally, the meat of your review page. You are going to be displaying a short summary review of each offer here. Most of your visitors will click links in this section so make sure there are plenty of them. You should include things like the offer’s title (obviously), a screenshot of the merchant’s landing page, a summary of your opinion, your subjective and objective ratings, and your overall ratings. Make all of the links in this section affiliate links, except for one which makes use of your full review pages, for people who want more information.

These pages will all be used as landing pages for traffic directly from your PPC ad groups. In most markets, they will convert extremely well because you are giving your visitors the power and help to make an educated buying decision.

Landing Page Logistics

Aside from my CSS stylesheets, images, and include files (database connection, functions, header, and footer), I am making many different versions of the pages described above from only two files. As I mentioned in the previous installment, if you don’t have any web-programming knowledge, this could be difficult for you. You always have the option to hire someone to do it for you, or simply build the pages by hand, but here is how I am doing it.

Each of the landing pages are carefully optimized for on-page SEO so that they can hopefully rank in the search engines for a direct product name search. I’m only talking about basic principles though, not extreme search optimization, because I don’t want it to alter the conversion rate. Basically, just make sure you have a keyword-rich title and heading tags.

One SEO dilemma that we have is that we don’t want to link all around our authority site from them for PPC (to prevent leaks) but we don’t want them to be orphaned pages for SEO (no other internal links coming in or out). The solution to this problem is to simply create a standard, search engine version and a PPC-only version. All of this, along with the configuration of page content, is handled with the use of option variables that are passed to the two PHP files. Those options include:

• Search Engine or Pay-Per-Click Version: If I tell the page to be a search engine version, it will contain all of the natural site navigation, will be indexable, and will be followable. On the other hand, If I tell the page to be a pay-per-click version, it will only contain affiliate links and links to the pay-per-click version of the full review pages. It will also contain meta tags that prevent search engines from indexing it (we don’t want duplicate content) and following links within it.
• Which Offers To Display In What Order: Similar to the previous option, this one tells the page which offers to display (only one for the single offer page or a list of offers for the multiple offer page). The pages take this information and then get the appropriate content from the database.
• Individual Page Information: Even though we are standardizing the pages so that there are only a couple files to manage, we still need to have the ability to make our multi-offer pages unique. Each landing page version is stored in the database with a title information, introduction and presell information, and the previous two options. Now, when you call the particular PHP file, and tell it which “individual” page to use, it can get all other necessary information and build a completely custom page.

Sorry if you don’t quite understand how all of this is done, but it does take some programming knowledge to create a complex website. If you can’t get this accomplished on your own, there are plenty of people, web sites, and books who would be more than happy to help you out.

Testing and Tracking

Now we are going to talk about the importance of implementing a tracking system from the start. Unless you know exactly what and why things are working or not working, you are relying on luck rather than effort to bring your profits.

One method of tracking that is extremely simple is to set up is CrazyEgg. I have been playing around with this for the past week or so and I must say, it is amazing. It takes only a few seconds to install and gives so much valuable information. I signed up for the $9/month plan, and it has already paid for itself through increased conversions. I like it so much, I will be writing an entire post on it as soon as I get some more real world results. This shouldn’t be your only source of tracking though because it does not show you which keywords converted to sales.

A second form of tracking that is also very easy to install is the conversion tools provided by the main PPC engines (AdWords, AdCenter, and YSM). The only downside of this is that you have to get the merchant to agree to place your tracking code on their website. This can be difficult when you are just starting to promote them because they don’t want to waste their time on someone who isn’t going to generate sales. You should, however, have better luck if you can show them a working example of your website.

The final method of tracking that I use is a bit more difficult to set up, but is 100% reliable and super valuable for increasing conversions. You need to pass ad-group-identifying tracking variables to your landing pages from your PPC ads. Then, your PHP page needs to grab those variables (just as it grabs the options I described above) and append them onto all of your affiliate links. This way, whenever you generate a lead, sale, or other conversion, you will know exactly which ad group it originated from.

Here are some more articles that I wrote on testing and tracking. Have a look at them to further understand the implementation and importance.

Next Article

While this article talked about the specifics of building your landing pages, the next article will talk about implementing an autoresponder sales funnel into them. This is a very necessary step in the process to build long term value with your website. It will help increase the value of each visitor that comes to your site, which will in turn allow you to bid more (on the PPC engines) than some of your competitors.