It is human tendency to see an action as more appropriate or acceptable when they see others doing it

The idea of this herd behavior or social proof is very powerful and is often used in business and marketing. ‘Social proofing’ your campaigns can give the end user that little extra push to take action, hit the buy button, or fill out a form. It is very simple to incorporate this into your affiliate campaigns, and there are 2 primary ways of doing this: testimonials and taglines or sub headings.

Testimonials

Most people would agree, sprinkling your landing page with testimonials can only help your conversions. The idea of social proof is when someone is in a situation not knowing what to do, they look to others for guidance. Seeing and reading other people using the product and taking action makes them more comfortable.

Taglines and Sub Headings

Taglines are a great way to social proof your landing page. There have been many studies done that people really do read taglines and sub headings. The best places to put them are directly under your main heading or just under your call to action button or hero shot/main image. People will read them.
Here are some samples that I’m sure you have seen before on other people’s landers:

• Join 5,267 other members …
• Over 100,000 sold …
• Amaze your friends …
• Over 1 million downloads
• etc …

Don’t think this works? Take a look at the tagline below:

Ever wonder how some affiliate are able to dynamically insert the searched keywords on their landing pages? I remember for the longest time, I was always baffled by it, since I’m not much of a programmer or developer. Once I learned I felt kind of dumb since it is extremely simple with just a few lines of code added on your page. I’m sure there are a handful of ways to do this, but here’s how I do it:

Step 1

There is just 1 simple change on your destination URL’s in adwords. Just add
?kw={Keyword} to the end of your destination URL and you are done. For example if your destination URL is http://www.lander.com then the new URL would be http://www.lander.com/?kw={Keyword}

Step 2

Next at the top of your landing page insert this snippet of code

<?php
if(isset($_GET['kw']))
$key=$_GET['kw'];
else
$key=’Everything Else’;
?>

This picks up the value of the keyword being searched with an alternative text of “Everything Else”.

Step 3

Now every where you want your keyword to appear in your landing page just insert this piece of code
<?php echo $key;?> and your done! It is as simple as that.

Here are 3 examples:
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Whats up?
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Anyone Can Do This
http://www.ppcfool.com/keyword-insertion.php?kw=Sign-up for my RSS Now!

Why this is important?

Adding the searched keyword can help your conversions. Anything on your landing page that the searcher is familiar with boosts your credibility and relevancy. How many times have you searched for something, landed on a page and thought ‘this has nothing to do with want I’m looking for?’

Dynamic keyword insertion will give your page more relevancy which will help conversions

Want more landing page tips? Check out my 10 day series on landing pages!

Memorability and Impact

The first is obvious. The reader is more likely to remember and can have more of an impact at first glance. It makes it easier for the reader to process information, which is important. Here are 4 examples:
Don’t get mad get _____
The quicker picker upper

How about:
My life my card
Safe happens

While the first 2 slogans are a little outdated they are still more memorable, GLAD and BOUNTY. The bottom 2 are American Express and Volvo.

More Accurate

The next reason is that rhyming can appear to make the statement more accurate. Having a statement, slogan, or headline sound a little more accurate can be the difference between a sale and a lost customer. For example, which sounds more believable:


Caution and measure will bring you treasure
or
Caution and measure will bring you riches …


How about the famous quote for you OJ fans:
“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”


I wonder why he didn’t just say
“If the glove don’t fit, you must let him go free”,
it was clear he made that rhyme for a reason … interesting to say the least

* If graded Page loads slowly -> Quality Score = negatively affected.


* If graded No problems found -> Quality Score = not affected.


* If graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region -> Quality score maybe positively affected.

See that? If your site loads above average, you may get a quality score boost! You can find this info on your keyword analysis page, the magnifying glass next to your keyword. Here’s a screenshot of one of my quality scores with load time included:

Not Just Quality Score

Having a speedy load time can also help your conversions. Yes, you may be blazing along the internet with your T4 connection, but not everyone is like you. When someone lands on your site and has to wait more than a few seconds to load, I can guarantee you will lose some visitors. Even I do this. If your site takes too long to load, bam I’m outta there. You can see how load time is evaluated here.

What causes slow load time?

Multiple redirects, multi-second meta refreshes, and large images/animation are the main culprits. Get rid of any redirects you may have pointing to your lander as well as those meta refreshes.

New Tool on PPCfool

AS for the large images you can check out my new tool. It’s under the tab Toolbox called the Load Time Analyzer. Just enter the URL and it analyzes your site for speed and tells you how big your images are.

Take those large images and shrink the size down. There are a handful of image shrinkers out there, I’ve been using this one. Let me know what you guys think …

A heat map is simply an overlay of your website that shows where users are clicking through color-coded dots. The more the clicks the more the heat

Who provides this service?

There are a handful of companies that offer this, here are just three of them:

ClickDensity
Simple and straightforward for your basic heat map needs. The have a free trial as well as a starter package for just $5/month! Good for first timers. These are the guys I currently use. Here is the site – clickdensity

CrazyEgg
Very popular right now, as I see a lot of advertising for them. Offers a little more with their confetti feature, pretty nifty. They also have a free trial with their intro package at just $9/month. Here is their site – crazyegg

ClickTale
This company offers an interesting twist besides your basic heat map, they have actual recorded footage of each users mouse movements so you can track how the user moves and clicks. You can watch individual visitor sessions to really understand user behavior! Go and check them out … clicktale

So How do you use Heat Maps?

The information alone given by heat maps can help you optimize your site to give your user a better experience and hopefully increase conversions. Here are some of the more basic uses:

• Identify layout issues
• See which links are popular
• See where users aren’t clicking
• See where users shouldn’t be clicking
• Helps to split test landing pages

So I hope you can see how you can use heat maps to streamline your website. While this is the last day in our 10 Day Landing Page series, it is by no means exhaustive! I hope you enjoyed the series. Let me know what you think …

Be on the lookout, as I plan to post a nice little tool to help with your landing page quality score very soon!

When you’re asking your visitor to sign-up, opt-in, or especially make a purchase; you want the visitor to have no doubts that they can ‘trust’ your site before they do that. Some of the icons below are widely recognized but can do wonders to boost your conversions on your landing site. Take a look below:

You want your visitor to feel ’safe’ when making a transaction or submitting their information on your site. Data security is becoming more and more important for ecommerce.

I hope you can see how these logos will give your website more credibility. There are many more icons and logos you can use and choose from, these are just some of the more popular ones. Of course, you shouldn’t put it on there if the merchant or your product doesn’t offer this.

Next time will be the last day in this 10 Day series … so stay tuned. This may be the most important one just yet

(BTW, take a second to vote in my poll on the sidebar —-> )

True Story

Just a few weeks ago, I was researching a small niche by scoping out the competition’s sites. I opted-in to one of them to see their sales process and was reading along when all of a sudden the sales page started talking about something that happened back in 2004-2005. I stopped. I started to think if this was one of those ‘abandoned’ websites.

If you were a prospective buyer, you would immediately begin to think, is this content outdated? Maybe I should go buy something more up to date? No one wants to buy something outdated, everyone wants the new and improved product!

The concept here is to let your visitor know as soon as they land that what you have to offer product/service/information is up to date and current. This is just something else in their subconscious that they won’t have to worry about when its time to take action.

So what can you do?

There are basically 2 ways to get this effect: One is a simple script to include the current date. You can use the javascript below to capture this.

 <script LANGUAGE="Javascript"> <!--
var d=new Date()
var weekday=new Array(7)
weekday[0]="Sunday"
weekday[1]="Monday"
weekday[2]="Tuesday"
weekday[3]="Wednesday"
weekday[4]="Thursday"
weekday[5]="Friday"
weekday[6]="Saturday"
var monthNames = new Array( "January"
,"February","March","April","May","June",
"July","August","September","October",
"November","December");
var now = new Date();
document.write(weekday[d.getDay()] +
", " + monthNames[now.getMonth()] +
" " + now.getDate() + ", " + "2008");
// --></script>

This script will get you this –>




Another way is simply to include at the very top of your site, a small banner that says Updated June 2008 or New June 2008 and then at the first of every month you can just change the month to keep it current.

I’m sure there’s other ways like including current events or news items. Would love to hear other ways of doing this?

Ok, well this is day 8, just 2 more days and we’re done! On Monday I’m gonna write about how some simple images can really build your visitors trust, so don’t miss it! Have a good weekend …

About Us

An about us page is just a simple description of your website, its purpose, mission, how the company got started etc… It is basically a summary of your product or service and your intent of the website. All online businesses have this, so if a spider comes to your page and you don’t, they may wonder what’s up.

Privacy policy

This is another must-have link. Google even comes out and tells you in their quality score guidelines that if you request information, be sure to disclose how you will use that in a privacy policy. This is a big no-no not to have one. Here is a decent privacy policy generator

Contact

Again what legitimate online business doesn’t have a contact page? Dedicate a page at the very least for your contact email address. Ideally there should be an address and a phone number. Just make sure your email works on your landing pages, I’ve gotten some interesting emails …

Sitemap

Lastly in helps to include a sitemap. This will aid the spiders to crawl your whole site and get a better feel for what your site is about. You can generate a XML sitemap here.

Optional

To really expand your site, you can consider adding the following to help make your site solid.

• Blog
• Articles
• Resources
• Video

Adding these to your site and expanding on them, will really get you in good graces with the search engines. Even if its just updating your blog a few times a month. You will also begin to rank in the SE’s getting more visitors and more commissions

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the one thing that if you don’t do, can immediately get you the back button! So stay tuned…

What is masking links?

Masking links is just a simple way to hide your affiliate link and make the link look more natural in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. Take the Adwatcher banner up top for example, instead of displaying this link

http://www.adwatcher.com/affiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=615

I use a simple redirect and display my own link

http://www.ppcfool.com/advert/adwatcher.php

If you have your own product or service, there is really no need to do this, but if your an affiliate, most of the time the tracking links they give are long and ugly. It is very easy to do and takes little time, so I see it as only helping your landing page user-experience.

Redirecting Links

I prefer a simple redirect. Just go to your control panel and their should be a redirect icon, in cPanel it is under domains and says Redirects . Just click on the icon and fill out your link and the affiliate link and voila, your done! Simple and painless. For you bloggers out there, there is a nifty little plugin call Redirection that makes it easy to manage all your redirects and even gives you a log and count.

Javascript masking

Another way to do this is to use javascript to change the window bar status to what you want. The code is given below in javascript.

Meta Refresh

This is another way to redirect users to a given page after X number of seconds. Here is the code:

Just change the X to the number of seconds you want to wait before refreshing and change out the target.com to your desired destination.

Hope this helps in some way. I know I’m not the authority on this subject and programming is not my strength, so if any of you techie guys see something wrong just let me know

Love to hear your thoughts on this!

When their spiders come to your site, the check for content, relevancy, as well as outbound links. If you’re bidding on the keyword “flu symptoms” and link out to webMD, it lets the search engines know your site is what it talks about. If that site is linking to random directories, money-making sites, or whatever, red flags may start to rise and your quality score will most likely go down.

The concept here though is to have relevant outbound links that don’t affect your call to action and conversion. You don’t want people landing on your site, only to read a few sentences and then zoom off to an authority site on the subject never to come back.

One way, that I usually do this is to have the more wordy content below the fold that includes these outbound links. This keeps the links away from that precious real estate when the user lands on your site. There are actually many ways of doing this, some more sneaky than others. I don’t want to get into the different methods, just wanted to share the concept.

Where does one find the authority sites? Simple just search for your target keyword in Google more than likely the top ten results will have some big names come up. Think institutions, news sources, educational, etc… you know those pagerank 7 and up type sites.

Hope this helps, would love to hear what some of you think, as this can definitely be considered greyhat