Image is everything – Sort out your landing pages

For many people and businesses their internet presence serves one main purpose and anything else is a bonus. This one purpose is obviously to drive sales. Knowing this, why do you so often come across landing pages which are so awful they immediately put you off buying anything. Skellie describes perfectly the type of page I am talking about in her post “13 Sure Signs Your Landing Page is a Turn Off”.

In brief these points are:

1. It is one really long page
2. Almost every word starts with a capital letter
3. The text is centred for no apparent reason
4. There is barely any information about the product
5. Headings are in a plethora of bright colours
6. Huge chunks of text which are crying out for paragraphs
7. It just tries too hard
8. Huge fonts
9. Overuse of quotation marks for emphasis
10. Too many exclamation marks!!!
11. Testimonials from “John Smith” with no way of knowing who John Smith is or what he does
12. Copy just sounds like hype
13. It uses a design straight out of the 90s

Yaro Starak recently wrote a post reviewing an ebook. The post was good (as Yaro’s always are), the ebook sounded interesting so I figured I would check out the ebook’s website. It pretty much met all the criteria Skellie outlined. I scrolled down for ages and still could not see a clear “buy it now” button or a price. When I am looking at buying something, I need to know how much it costs. When I fancy something, an easy buy it now button, might make me buy it on impulse.

This type of scenario is a pet peeve of mine and something you should expect not to happen any more. Wordpress is free and there are thousands of templates available for free. It takes very little skill, and very little effort to install it and set up a modern, professional looking website. I am positive your sales will sky rocket when you have a website done properly. You can outsource the website to someone else if you are not able to create it yourself. The costs of outsourcing will probably be covered easily.

Now you have a great looking website, it is time to look at your content. Your copy should be concise, you should keep hype to a minimum and provide plenty of information about your product. Any testimonials need to be verifiable in some way. Where possible link to the person or business’ website. If your sales page is long, offer some form of navigation, let me skip straight to the features/testimonials/buy it now parts of the page. Do not make me have to hunt for these things.

Potential buyers need to know exactly how the sale process will go and what the price point is. The whole point of the exercise is to sell the product – so make it easy for someone to do that. Buy it now buttons need to be clearly visible.

The key to improving your revenue is testing different approaches to sales. There is argument that long sales pages are the most effective way of selling as Yaro pointed out. I believe that as times are changing, and more people are spending time on the web we are becoming overexposed to this type of sales pitch. For many online buyers there is a lot of anxiety involved when paying for things over the web. We need to help buyers feel more comfortable. It is similar to purchasing something from a bricks and mortar store vs a market stall. In which do you have more faith?

Separate product information using tabs for different characteristics, e.g. item description, dimensions, specifications, reviews, etc.

Do you buy things off these shady looking websites? How do people writing about making money online not appreciate the need for clean, professional looking websites?

Make Money Online: There is no easy path

The internet is full of people claiming to make you rich with six figure incomes from working 2 hours a day. It is something that is certainly possible. It is true that you do not need great technical abilities. It is true a number of people do only work 2 hours a day and make six figure income. Once it reaches that stage, it is easy. What they rarely mention, is that it takes a great deal of work to get to that stage. No one ever mentions the months and years of unrewarded work that went in to get to that stage. An internet business is like any other business, it needs constant attention and vast amounts of promotion. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid advertising for your website, but you need to drive traffic somehow.

A popular way of making money online is through affiliate sales. This involves performing internet marketing in order to achieve sales for someone else’s products in return for a commission. It can be very lucrative, but requires some knowledge and often a high spend on paid advertising. Scott Weaver has written an interesting article about Why People Fail At Affiliate Marketing. His article outlines some of the realities of this kind of business.

Most of the big online money makers have very established brand names. Although you may not have heard of many of them, within their niche they are well known and their peers will constantly refer to them. Building a brand is a long process. It requires you to have a name and image that is recognisable and easy to associate to your niche. Promotion and constant reinforcement is required to cement the association of your name to your industry. True success occurs when your name is synonymous with your product for example people saying “hoover” for a vacuum cleaner (Can you think of any more?). This level of success is rare. However I can list a number of global brands and everyone will know what they are or do; Google, Coca Cola, Amazon, Nike, Microsoft, etc. Companies spend millions on their brand and its strength is very closely linked to its abilities to generate revenue.

You should not be disheartened though. The internet has barely been around for ten years. There is a lot of innovation and opportunity yet to be taken advantage of. UK blogger Shawn Collins reported affiliate sales in the UK this last year grew 45% in 2007 accounting to over £3bn worth of sales. Read the rest of Shawn’s post for more information. With its low barriers to entry there is opportunity, you just have to spot it! There is plenty of information to be found on the internet if you take the time to search for it.

What are your views on Making Money Online? Are you living off your online income? Is this something your looking into?