What makes a good landing page?

Newbie needs help

[peggster]

I'm a total newbie to PPC, and I need some advice. I'm trying to drive affiliate marketing sales through PPC. I've found some great keywords at good prices, but I don't have much confidence in my landing page. Obviously, I want to send people to the merchant site quickly and with the intent to buy. I can't send them directly through my affiliate link, so I need a good landing page. Without giving away state secrets, can anyone offer me any advice?

Thanks in advance!

[engine]

Your best bet is to focus on giving the vistor what they want with the minimum of fuss. If they have to spend time searching for the "buy/next/whatever action you require" button you will lose visitors.

[wsm2006]

I've found that images and bullet lists play an important part in landing pages for traffic arbitrage. When I say images, I mean big images, one that will shift the viewers eyeballs to where you want them to click (the affiliate link). The fewer options you give an end-user the greater chance the chance exists that they will go where you lead them.

[MikaelTC]

I don't remember who said it first, but a quote that I like goes like this: "People don't want choices, they want what they want."

If your keyword is "bunny food" or whatever, make your landing page about bunny food. Now general keywords are a bit trickier, because you don't know what the customer was thinking when he or she clicked on "pet supplies," but you can still work with what you have. Give people enough choices to ensure that one of them is right but few enough that there's no confusion about the action. This might mean that you have a bunch of different landing pages, sometimes you can get away with only one.

As for the format of the page, that's really up to you, and it depends on the product offering. Some products do well with a sales letter, maybe 6 or 7 pages long with a couple pictures and testimonials to break up the design. Some products really move with a few bullets and a big picture.

Take a look at how your merchants are selling their products, they know their product better than anyone (one would hope!).