Product Specific Landing Page Tips

I previously wrote two posts on “Quick Tips to Improve Your Landing Page“, but what if you want to target towards specific products or services. Are you going to send traffic from your ad campaigns to your home page and hope for the best, or should you setup individual landing pages and campaigns for each product? Below I have included a few tips for you to use when building your product specific landing pages and campaigns.

1.) Don’t Sending Traffic to Your Home Page
Everyone loves to send and receive traffic to their home page. Unfortunately, when paying for search marketing, this is usually not the best scenario. When you send traffic to your home page, you are usually giving your users too many options and most will get frustrated and immediately leave. Instead of sending potential customers to your home page and offering several products, create multiple landing pages and ad groups based on different products. Not only will you provide your customers with what they are looking for, but you should also see a dramatic increase in conversions.

2.) Tell Your Customer What they Want to Hear
How many times have you gone shopping and asked a salesperson a direct question about a product, then they go on to tell you everything else about it and not what you wanted? If you are going to create landing pages to promote individual products and services, make sure you make it quick and easy for the customer to find what they need. Always provide a title, picture, description, specs, dollar amount and an easy to fund “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. These are the most obvious fields everyone is looking for. If you have more in-depth information to offer, you may want to add additional pages or provide it below the actual listing.

3.) Repeat the Search Term on Your Landing Page
Sending your targeted traffic to a landing page which points them to a product or service they are searching for is excellent. Being able to further monetize that page is even better. If possible, try and incorporate the “search term” that was used in your advertisement, and have it re-appear on your landing page. Additional methods for increasing conversions and order sizes, are to include related products.

Quick Case Study:
I went to Google and did a search for “buy flip camera“. The first listing was for Amazon.com, who are one of the best (if not the best) in landing pages and converting sales. Before setting up your landing pages for product specific items, take a look at some of the big retail sites like Amazon.com, Buy.com or WalmArt.com. All of these sites are very clean and to the point, providing the buyer with the basic information they need, then more specs and user reviews when you scroll down. The call to action on all of these landing pages it to buy the product.

Amazon.com Success: Title, Product Name & Picture, Price and Add to Cart

Once you have created your product specific landing pages, continue to test and compare what’s working and what could possibly increase your conversion. Remember, if you are currently converting 3% of your customers to a buyer and can increase that 4%… you are looking at a 25% increase in sales. Your landing pages and testing are key to your success.

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Affiliate Network Rewards Programs

With so many affiliate networks out there, they all have to work really hard to get your business. To show their appreciation, a lot of network have their own rewards programs. Let’s take a look at a few programs and how they are rewarding their Top Affiliates.

Market Leverage REWARDS PROGRAM
In addition to a whole new site design, a new rewards program was recently added to Market Leverage. The network now boasts that they have “The Highest Paying Cash Rewards Program in the Industry“. With the Market Leverage rewards program, you would receive an American Express Cash Gift Card worth 1% of the amount you earned in that monthly reporting period. The minimum commission to each an American Express gift card is $1,000, which is much lower than many other networks.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $1,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: 1%

- Join Market Leverage Affiliate Network

CX Digital Media REWARDS PROGRAM
Taking their rewards program to another level, CX Media Digital has a pyramid format and rewards in actual prizes and gift cards. To reach the first level of rewards point, you will first need to earn $15,000 in commission with the network. Rewards available on level 1 are in the range of $100.Once you’ve earned over $300,000 with the network, you can receive rewards such as a Panasonic TH-50PX60U 50″ Plasma HDTV valued at $2799.99.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $15,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join CX Digital Affiliate Network

Rocket Profit REWARDS PROGRAM
Every month you earn over $5,000 with Rocket Profit, you can receive at least a $25 gift card, or all the way up to a $500 gift card. Rocket Profit offers a wide selection of gift card to choose from, whether it be Barnes and Noble, Home Depot or clothes from the Gap.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $5,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join RocketProfit Affiliate Network

Copeac REWARDS PROGRAM
Increase you monthly earnings with Copeac by earning a gift card each month based on your performance. With a rather high minimum, an affiliate must generate $25,000 to earn a $50 gift card. If you are pushing some nice volume through the company and surpass $100,000 in commissions, you’ll walk away with an additional $500 gift card.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $5,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join Copeac Affiliate Network

AFFILIATE NETWORKS REWARDS BREAK DOWN

From the chart shown above you can see a break down of each affiliate network rewards program based on the minimum commission you must make to receive a Level 1 reward and the Level 1 reward amount. The last % Ratio column is a break down of how much each rewards program actually “rewards” you, based on your earnings. For example, for every $100 you earn in commissions with Market Leverages, you would receive $1 in rewards value, or 1%. Taking that same example and applying it to COPEAC network, you would earn .20 for every $100 in commissions earned (.20%), towards a reward.

Which Affiliate Program rewards program works best for you, and have you received any rewards lately?

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Picking the Right Niche Market

Everyone is always talking about niche marketing and how you can make good money if you dedicate yourself and target the right niche. So how are you supposed to know what niche market to target, without wasting your time and ad dollars. Here are a few quick questions and ideas to ask yourself when trying to find and target a new niche market.

1.) Make a Short List of Your Passions
It may sound cheesy or cliché, but it’s going to matter. For example, if you really enjoy watching or playing basketball, then creating a site based on basketball or selling basketball sports supplies, you will probably be that much more dedicated toward working on your site and getting it to work. Not only will you have an interest in your new niche area, but if it’s one of your passions, then you should know a lot about the topic and what you are talking about. Write a short list down of 5-10 passions of yours and see what you can come up with.

2.) Is this a Profitable Niche?
Once you have a few ideas and passions written down, take a look at them and see if there is a high demand or big money being spent in these markets. A very simple way to see if there is a lot of money to be made, is to do a simple Google search, then look at the advertisers on the right hand column. If you are seeing a lot of advertisers, there is usually a high demand for the product or service. Another obvious method for calculating is retail pricing. Will it be better for you to target a less competitive niche market (basketball skills training guides) and sell 100 items and make $10 or each, or try and target an over saturated market (sports tickets) and making $50-$100 per sale?

3.) Is there a Demand for this Niche?
Nearly just as important as how much people are willing to spend on your niche product or service, is how many people actually want it. Using the Google Traffic Estimator, you can get an idea on how often people are searching for a specific niche area or product. Not only will you be given estimates on daily search term traffic, but you can also use this tool as another resource to find how much others are paying to market in this niche, by looking at the average cpc cost.

Just using some simple “basketball” related terms, you can see there are multiple niche markets. You have less cost and traffic for targeting toward people that want to “increase vertical leap“, so it would be easier for you to take advantage of a larger portion of this niche market. On the opposite side, you could sell basketball tickets and memorabilia, where the average advertising is paying more money, with more traffic. Map out your passions and niche markets and see which opportunities make the most sense.

4.) Target Towards Yourself
Once again, going back to basing your new niche market on your passion… as a customer, learn to target towards yourself. If you are going to create a web site based on “increasing your vertical leap“, you should have prior / existing relation to the topic. If you were doing a search on Google for the same topic, what type of information would you want to find on the sites you are visiting. Since you are now the marketer and the potential buyer, you should be able to relate to your customers better than most. Create your new site and niche market to cater as much to your users as possible.

5.) Stay in It to Win It
If you are going to target to a niche market and find you are doing well with it, I would recommend focusing on this niche area for the long haul. Depending on what you are targeting it may be extremely difficult, or quite possible for you to become one of the main and prominent sites in this area. If you are going to target towards people looking to increase their basketball jumping ability vs. selling sports tickets, you will probably have a lot more success with the prior. Not only will you have less competition from heavily funded companies in search marketing, but if you provide a quality site and/or product in a small niche area, you can get a ton of exposure and sales from word of mouth. Before selecting your new niche market, ask yourself… “Can I become one of the top 5% marketers/sites in this area?”

These are just a few questions and tips to consider when starting in a new niche area. Niche marketing can be very fun and profitable, or very frustrating and a waste of time and money. Before jumping into a new niche market, make sure that you take the time and effort to map out your business plan.

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Focusing on a Niche Market: IronMan Movie

Initial numbers are out, and it’s no surprise… the IronMan movie is owning up the box office. As reported by Deadline Hollywood, here are what the first numbers look like and forecast:

‘IRON MAN’ FIRST SUMMER STRONGMAN: Friday’s $30 Million Dollar Marvel; $80+M Weekend, $30M Intl, 2008’s Biggest Yet

So what does this mean for you? Besides being one of the millions of people that are going to see this movie, why turn it around for once and make money off the movie, while enjoying it! If you have an interest in comics and or just like IronMan, the potential here is amazing. Just look at the Spiderman movie series, they have been marketing and commercializing the heck out of that movie since day one. If you got in early with promoting or marketing Spiderman products, you probably made out very well. Don’t let another Marvel Movie pass you buy without making some extra pocket change, not to mention you will be ready when the sequels come out too!

The IronMan movie has now been released and it’s already going to get massive overflow of people searching online for videos, screencaps, the IronMan story, comics and more… you name it! So how can you start promoting IronMan products or get in on the action. Be creative! Target to your audience and give them what they want. If you are good with ppc marketing, you can setup ad campaigns around IronMan, or you can simply setup an IronMan store and sell products, dvds and comics. Amazon.com and several other Affiliate Programs have thousands of IronMan products.

Another idea is to create a Build a Niche Store site. I created an IronMan comics sites just for the movie’s release. With the new movie coming out, you know there is going to be a huge interest in the comic book series. The creation of this IronMan comics site, using BANS, will also play into my case study for you to follow and watch. For now I have thrown together a basic design using the BANS program to give you an idea of what an out of the box site would look like. As of now, I have just registered a domain and created a header image for the site and will now document and write a tutorial of how I made the basic site into a monetized IronMan dedicated comic and memorabilia site. Through the week updates will follow with screen captures and what changes were made the to site. This should not only give you ideas on how to target to niche markets, but also how to monetize a page to the maximum.

What are your ideas for creating a revenue generating campaign around a new movie? If you are targeting towards a movie that is already bound for success, the branding and audience is already there. You just need to focus on providing a quality products and getting users to your site.

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Hidden Gems of Niche Marketing… What are people searching for?

Looking for a new niche market, or tired of your current ad campaigns? Spice your marketing up by aiming what people are searching for. Below are just a few resources you can use to target and search out new niche markets and hot products.

What are people buying on eBay?
One of the best and most in-depth resources for accurate and up to date “hot search” for products is through eBay’s Express Top Search. Not only does eBay break down their top 10 categories, then provide the 10+ more top searches for each, but they also provide network wide search queries. To top off eBay’s Express Top Searches, at the bottom they also list the Top Bestselling Movie Artists, Music Artists, Authors and Top Products.

Lycos Top 50
One of my longtime favorites is the Lycos Top 50. In addition to breaking down the Top 50 search terms, they also list categories and write ups on what’s hot and why. Ever wonder what was hot last year at this time or even further back? Use the Lycos 50 “Archives” and you can see what was HOT all the way back to 1999! Other great features of the Lycos 50 are their blog and Movers & Shakers lists.

These are just two of many resources you can use to find what people are searching for around the web. Get creative and see if you can incorporate some hot topics into your marketing campaign… you may just find a way to double or triple your existing revenue!

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