For example, in the header of the page, I had the text that reflected the NAME OF THE DOMAIN.  Even though that target page had a different focus.  By putting my domain name there in big headline letters, I may have been confusing people who arrived via a different keyword search.

That was easy enough to fix, but hte sort of thing that perhaps is only paid attention to by a more experienced marketer.

I now have that single page nicely tuned, so I copied the page, and targeted for a different keyword that I looked up in Wordtracker. I did a search that resulted in about 3 good longtail keyword phrases.  My plan is to optimize a page for each keyword, and then create a new adgroup for each landing page.

This really is a lot of work, it’s not “Make Money Fast” on the internet.

I know this is a product that sells, and I’ve proven it already.

But now I’m focused on making this a profitable campaign and squeezing all I can out of the niche through many different angles, mastering one angle at a time.

Worse, is the fear of stopping something that’s working in order to test something that’s unknown.  Without exception, experienced marketers have learned that a well optimized landing page for your ad, keyword or article, will result in MORE affiliate sales than a direct linking campaign to the sales page.  The trick is in learning how to keep your landing page from getting in the way of your sales.

Ed Dale calls this “slippery-ness” of your content. If your content is slippery, your reader will click through to your link to learn the rest of the story, read the punchline, or satisfy his curiosity that you’ve raised in your copy.

Wealthy Affiliate includes one-on-one mentoring and coaching with Carson & Kyle via PM on the site.  After then landing page I had set up last week (the one I started with Site Rubix & polished with Dreamweaver), I thought I had a “perfect” campaign set up.  OK, not really, but it was at least a campaign in which I thought I’d followed all the basic rules of affiliate marketing:

• Compelling landing page
• Targeted keywords
• Common Keyword Technique (learned on Wealthy Affiliate’s 8 week course)
• Good Converting Merchant Product

Thankfully Carson was honest and pointed me to additional tutorials on the site.  I modified my landing page (yes, it’s better), then simply redirected my current (converting) direct linking campaign to have those same ads point to my own landing page & mini-site.

So far, my CTR (click through ratio) is good, but it’s only been a few hours.  The real test will be if my content on the landing page is “Slippery” and results in clicks to my merchant page.

I’ll keep you all updated.

Why Create a Mini-Site?

A mini-site is a great tool to use when you have found a niche or a market, or even a specific product that is converting well. in this case, I was using a technique called “google cash” to send prospective buyers directly from my Google Ad to a landing page with my affiliate link. Google Cash can be expensive due to the fact that google will only display one ad per top level domain in each search. So if other people are “direct linking” to the same landing page that you are, you have to compete against their keyword bids, and either pay a premium price, or not have your ad shown at all.

Despite these limitations, I’ve found a product and a niche that seems to be converting well. Despite trying to increase my daily ad impressions and clickthroughs in order to increase my daily sales, I seem to be stuck at 10-14 clicks per day.

Time to set up a mini-site!

With a mini-site, you first purchase a domain name that is keyword rich, or at least relevant to your niche. My favorite technique is to go to www.GoDaddy.com to look for the domain, since GoDaddy gives you a variety of name options if your primary name is taken. When I find a domain name that I like, I will head on over to 1 and 1 to register the domain. It’s a little bit cheaper, and private registration is included.

I currently have my hosting set up at HostGator (the Baby Croc package), so my next step is to set the Name Servers from 1 and 1 to my HostGator assigned nameservers.

The final piece of this puzzle is to log into my HostGator Cpanel account, and add my new domain as an addon domain.

In 24-48 hours, all the pieces of the puzzle get connected in the ether and the files I upload to my HostGator account will show up when someone types in my new domain name.

Phew! That is a bit of work just to get a new domain going. It’s not really that hard, there are just a lot of steps if you’ve never done it before. For that reason, I like to purchase several domain names at once…they are cheap, and when I’m ready to set one up, I’ve saved myself a step and a lot of time searching for a name.

Site Rubix to the Rescue

The next step is to create a landing page. I used this free template for a landing page and pasted it into Site Rubix. With another window open that contained the sales page of my product, I began typing up a landing page. I didn’t have a lot of great direction, I just scanned the sales page and typed up some text that I thought sounded Relevant, and not too pushy. The goal of an affiliate’s landing page is NOT to sell…that is the job of your product’s sales page. The job of the affiliate is to PRE-SELL.

I put myself in the shoes of someone who had been helped by the product, and wrote a review style page. I actually own the product, so that makes it a lot easier to write good Pre-sell copy. The author of the ebook mailed me a copy, plus his bonuses after I sold a few copies of the ebook.

Site Rubix helped me by allowing me to drag and drop modules, drop in a nice looking header banner, overlay some text, and it even has a nice page layout with shadowed borders and bottom. It also allowed me to upload a photo (that I had obtained at iStockPhotos), and an “Order Now” button that came with the free landing page template I talked about above.

After I had a nice looking site designed, I downloaded the files in a zipped format to my hard drive, unzipped them and then opened up Dreamweaver on my desktop.

Why Dreamweaver when you had already used Site Rubix?

In order to comply with many affilate programs’ terms of service, I wanted to add a privacy policy and terms of service. In addition, a form based “Contact” page gives a professional touch to the site, while hiding your email address from automated email scrapers.

To do this, I simply rename the index.html from Site Rubix to index.php using Dreamweaver, and use an “include” PHP statement to pull in a simple “footer.html” file.

This footer.html contains just 3 links. The first is a copyright link that connects back to the index.php page. The second is the contact form and the third is the privacy and terms page. Each of the linked pages (contact, privacy, terms) is also renamed with a PHP extension, and the footer.html is pulled in with an include file.

This allows me to make changes to the footer as needed without having to update each page. I could do the exact same thing with the header portions of each page, pulling in the header graphic, but it wasn’t really necessary in this case.

The final result…

The final result is a mini-site with three-four pages, with a dynamic footer that’s nicely styled, clean looking graphics thanks to using Site Rubix and a mini-site that meets Google’s demands for a privacy page, that will also lead to reduced ad costs when sending traffic to the page.

What next?

Next I have several choices in order to drive traffic to the page. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is fast, but costs money. Article Marketing on the other hand, is slower and requires a lot of time to set it up (write articles or have them written for you), but it’s free to do. Many people find success with Article Marketing after about 30 days of posting articles, but I don’t want to wait that long.

My next post will talk about how I set up the Adwords campaign for this site, and in a few days I can give you updates on how the campaign is running.