Landing pages are something that many affiliates talk about, yet only a few manage to get them right. A good landing page will draw a user into an offer, causing them to become genuinely interested in completing the desired action (be it purchasing a product or generating a lead). It is important to mention that a good landing page isn’t always the one that’s the most graphical- what looks cool may not convert, while a simple, easy to navigate and understand landing page may experience massive conversions.

If you are promoting via PPC, you should be using a landing page. Preselling a customer on an offer increases conversions, and with affiliate marketing that’s the name of the game. Create a landing page that conforms to the three guidelines below:

1. It is original – Don’t be afraid to get creative with this. Nothing will limit your affiliate marketing efforts more than producing dull, uninspired material. Be honest: would you buy from one of your landing pages?

2. It doesn’t “sell” the offer – You don’t need to sell the offer, as the merchants page will do that for you. Your job is to get the user genuinely interested. I’ve done this using reviews, AIM conversations, even price comparisons. The sky’s the limit with this so long as you get it right.

3. It can be reproduced – In the beginning, create landing pages that can be modified to work with other offers. Each page should be unique enough that the user doesn’t feel as if they’ve seen it around before, but simple enough that you can slap on a new header, stock photo, and some content and voila- a new landing page is born.

Without getting into the specifics of content and design (I’ll save those for later articles), I will say that Google will really penalize your quality score if you lack quality content. Many people will purchase an article (from a copywriter like me, for example) and have it appear beneath their ad. When the GoogleBot crawls the page it will detect unique content, making you less likely to be penalized.