Landing Page Copywriting Tips

Copywriting is an important part if your business. You might do it yourselves you might use our copywriters; you might even hire some copywriters to do the job for you. Good written landing page copy can boost your conversions like crazy!

When you’re selling your own products you might know exactly what to write, but what should you keep in mind when you’re promoting somebody else’s products ?

• Be your visitor: Put yourself in your visitors shoes (or browser window) who is your visitor ? what does he want to see ? If you are targeting Latin American guys between 18 and 26 make sure your site speaks their language; use the words they use. Speak their language !
• Format your page clearly: do not use paragraphs longer than 5 lines, and make sure the content is readable and well stacked. Use bolds to highlight important headings or bullet points. Use CAPITALS to highlight important and conversion stimulating words in your body text.
• 5 Second Rule: Web users are picky as hell! If you’re page doesn’t have what they are looking for, or they THINK it doesn’t have what they’re looking for they are gone. I heard on a copywriting conference a couple of years ago that if a user can’t find what he’s looking for within 10 seconds he’s on your page he’s going to ASUME you can’t provide him with what he’s looking for and he’ll leave. So make sure your page titles holds the keyword of what the user is looking for and mention the keyword several times on the landing page. Well placed pictures on your website also help.
• Don’t sound like Home shopping: Do you remember those annoying home shopping infomercials where they always talk about the product like it’s heaven. On the web this is comparable to stupid e-book sites. Promote products like alternatives to.. and don’t say how and why they are in fact “Good” tell people why they are BETTER!
• Registration Forms: Don’t scare people away with registration forms. Be kind and give some info away without acquiring that e-mail address.
• Proof: If you make a statement, provide your visitors with proof. If you say red shoes are more popular than blue shoes, provide proof! (for example: a picture of a nightclub where 8 out of the 10 girls have red shoes and the remaining 2 have blue shoes)

If you want, feel free to print this out and take this as a small reference guide for building new landing pages. Next week we’ll dive into actual landing page tips.

P.S. Another good resource is Google’s Conversion University.

Got Google Slapped, now what .. ?

One of the most famous phenomenons in our industry is the terrifying Google Slap. While there are always ways you can optimize for it. Even the best of us get hit by the slap one time or another.

The problem is that one way or another, your site will get through a manual review, and we believe this is where the flag is being placed. So what should you do when you get slapped:

• Do nothing. For the first days to nothing, the Quality Score algorithm update usually takes 3-4 days and so before you can get a clear view of the damage don’t do anything.
• Register a Fresh Domain name for about 2+ years plus period
• Create a fresh Google account
• Copy your old campaigns into the new account with the Adwords Editor (But don’t upload)
• Get in the shoes of a user, and see where there’s room to improve your site.
• Check the Google Adwords Spam Guide and make necessary changes to your page
• Add a Privacy Policy, a Blog, a Terms Page, About us and Contact Us page
• Cloak or Hide your Affiliate Links
• Link to other websites in the same category/niche
• Upload your files to the new domain
• Install Google Sitemaps on your Domain
• Upload your Offline Adwords campaign.
• Resume/Activate your Campaign

As you can see slightly more complicated than just changing the new domain and up and running again in 30 minutes. Take your time to do this, and you’re good to go until at least the next Quality Score update. Perhaps even longer.

So far our affiliate mini site campaigns have remained unaffected by the current algorithm update. Strangely enough one of our direct campaigns did get slapped. We’re still investigating and will keep you posted.

Note: Our Premium members can have their sites checked by us to see if everything is in order. Contact the SEM Guru’s from the Guru’s Page.

AffiliateSupportTeam Gear Available !

Yesterday Bruno finalized doing the last items of the official AffiliateSupportTeam GEAR ! Do you like what you see here ? Are you proud to be a subscriber of the team or do just really wanna get a replacement for that old smelly t-shirt then.. go here for the official AffiliateSupportTeam Gear !

We’re so proud of our branded items that we’re going to do a small contest next month. More info later..

Submit to these Directories

All the “real world” PPC guru’s have no doubt about it: incoming links effect your AdWords Quality Score. So make sure you’ve got some!

At SMX Advanced they determined that these directories are the best and most efficient ones to get a backlink from:

Best of the Web Directory
Yahoo Directory
DMOZ (Kind of Hard to get into make sure you have a useful Affiliate Site)
Joe Ant
Blog Catalog

Continuously creating more backlinks is important factor of success for your long term affiliate websites. Therefore, spending a couple of hundred bucks for a directory submission is probably one of your best investments.

Note: Our premium subscribers can grab their discount promo codes from the resources page.

FireFox Download Day Huge Success

The release of FireFox 3, on June the 17th was a HUGE success! Within 24 hours, the latest software release of their awesome internet browser was downloaded 8,002,530 times ! However, people keep talking about how it breaks the world record, but this was a first attempt: there was no previous record. Anyway, congratulations to the FireFox team: their browser is truly awesome!

Easy Ads Interview

While we were checking out the conference floor at Ad-Tech Miami, we came by a company called EasyAds. We had never heard of them, but it looks like they’re doing a pretty good job.

They’re buying up all the ad spaces on websites that haven’t been taken yet, and are a little bit lower in the food chain than networks like AdBrite, AdEngage and Etology but this also means lower cpc, and they might be a good opportunity to get cheap traffic on that you can monetize.

We’re in the middle of a case study with them right now: so more news later.

Anyway here’s the brief Q & A I did with them.

Google Affiliate Network

Yesterday Google Officially announced the retirement of their Pay-per-action Beta and the introduction of Google Affiliate Network.

Introduction might be a bit too big of a word, since the Google Affiliate Network is just the acquired Performics network, which was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004.

I’m very curious to see what impact this will have on the Affiliate Marketing community. Google’s Quality score bot, never had a good taste for Affiliate Websites. Will this change now ? For the bigger part Google dislikes Affiliate Sites because they suck up the commission that they feel should go to them. But what if your offer includes the Google Affiliate Network ? Will they treat Google Affiliate Network offers differently ?

A lot of questions pop up. And for now the only answer is: time will tell (cliché)

So far the interface still looks like the (Double Click) Performics Interface, and I would love to see it as a more integrated part of Adwords. Where you can just export your CPA Offer to Performics.

I’d love to hear your 2 cents. What impact do you think the Google Affiliate Network will have on the Affiliate Marketing Industry?