Lately, I've been experimenting with both single-page landing pages as well as mini sites. A single-page landing page, as you might imagine, is a landing page that links to no other sites but the jump/hop links. Mini sites are an extension of single-page landing pages in that they have other pages, such as the "about us" page, the "contact" page, and the like.

What I've discovered is that for some offers, mini sites seem to do four good things:

1. The site looks like a legitimate website vs. just a sales pitch, so people are less likely to leave right away (increases stickiness).
2. Because they look like actual websites, they increase the trust factor and therefore, increase conversions for some offers (decreases skepticism).
3. Provides a site people can actually look to and gives the search engines something to index, so your chances of getting free sales go up (increases organic traffic).
4. Search engines like sites with multiple pages as they provide a better end-user experience (increases search engine friendliness).

All these things contribute to an overall increased profit margin. However, there are a few drawbacks to mini sites:

1. They give the user a distraction from the sales pitch. Landing pages are built to be a funnel to the end goal: a sale.
2. They take longer to build. Not everyone is going to want to build a whole website for each offer they run.
3. They're harder to change for split testing. Basically, you have to adapt the whole site to a split testing environment in order to make this feasible.

So, where landing pages are a quick pitch and a quick build, mini sites are a bit more complicated to implement. And keep in mind, they don't always lead to better conversions but, of course, you know to split test everything you do. In general, mini sites lead to a better user experience and are much easier for search engines to index. And I'm a firm believer in organic traffic as it it leads to free conversions in the long-run.

One little trick I've been doing lately is making an HTML-based landing page with links to a Wordpress blog on the back-end. So if my site is http://www.awesomelandingpage.com/awesome_item.php, then it contains several links to very contextual information I post in the site's blog, located (hypothetically) at http://www.awesomelandingpage.com/blog and that does a couple of cool things. First off, it automatically gives search engines something to spider and secondly, it also does a ping-back to sites like Technorati and the like, which provides even more traffic.

Overall, my results have been positive. Just make sure you clear up any out-going links on your blog. Your site should be a funnel to the hop-link, as that's where the sale occurs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.