If you are a new affiliate or simply don’t have a website or blog, creating a landing page for your affiliate marketing campaign is essential.
While some affiliate programs allow you to use your links directly, a landing page is necessary to use most paid ads platforms, optimize your profits, and build a long term business.
As a new affiliate, it can feel like a lot to do before you can actually send traffic to your offers and start making money. But thanks to the many tools available nowadays, creating your affiliate landing page can be easy, pain-free and a huge difference in your earnings.
Why create an affiliate landing page?
Here are some of the main reason why your affiliate campaign needs a landing page and the benefits it will offer you:
1. Access to massive audiences
With over 2 billion users each, Facebook and Google are the biggest online platforms you can use to advertise and send traffic to your offers.
However, neither of them allow you to use affiliate links directly on your ads. This means that If you don’t use a landing page for your affiliate offer, you are missing out on a lot of traffic, opportunities, and money.
Additionally, once you create your landing page, you will have an advantage over other affiliates who haven’t done it yet and don’t have access to these platforms.
2. More conversions and profits
Did you know that it takes an average of 6 to 8 times after a customer “hears” from you before they are ready to make a purchase? This means that if you are using other paid ads to send people directly to your affiliate links you are basically wasting money.
People that click on your ads can be interested in the offer but won’t buy it the first time they see it. This is why by not collecting their contact information you are missing out on a lot of sales and dropping money on ads without the proper return on investment (ROI).
By using a landing page, you can collect their emails and follow up with them for free as many times as you want. Additionally, you can use a ‘pixel’, which is a small piece of code you place on your page, to be able to know who visits it and retarget them with your ads.
3. Long Terms Business
I hate to say this but if you are using ads to send people directly to your affiliate offers, you don’t have a long term business. Your social media or ad account could get banned any day and you’d be left with nothing.
In order to build a sustainable business that can overcome that type of challenges, you need to have your own assets. On the digital world that can mean your own platfrom as a website, blog or landing page, a Youtube channel or an email list (among others).
When you create a landing page for your affiliate offers, you are not only able to collect emails and follow up with your subscribers for that one product; you can send them other related offers for years.
Additionally, your email list future-proofs your business, social media account can get shut and platforms can change their algorithm reducing your reach but nobody can take your email list away from you.
4. Optimization
A crucial part of running a profitable campaign is being able to know track the results you are getting and improve the parts that are not working.
Without a landing page, you are sending traffic straigh to the merchants page where you don’t have any control. Of course, if the offer is not converting you will notice after a while and will stop promoting but not without having lost money on ads.
On the other hand, if you use a landing page you have full control over it and can a/b test the different elements to improve the conversions. In that case if the offer you are proting is not selling you can change to another one but already have an optimized page and contacts to send your new offer to.
Additionally, your landing page will help you “pre-frame” the customers and can improve the conversions of the affiliate offer.
How to create a landing page for your affiliate marketing campaigns?
Now that you know why a landing page is essential for your business, let’s explore how to create one in the most simple and efficient way.
1. Choose the type of landing page
A landing page is a general term to define a standalone web page where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link. But, landing pages can have different structures, functions and goals. Here are some of the main types of landing pages used for affiliate marketing.
Bridge Page
A bridge page can also be described as a ‘click-through’ page since its only function is to redirect people to the affiliate offer. Affiliates often use this type of page for Facebook or Google Ads where you are not allowed to use affiliate links directly.
In this case, your only goal is to get people to click on your button or affiliate link. For this reason, you want to make this page really simple and obvious to avoid distractions. You also want to make it look similar to the merchant’s page, this way so visitors don’t get confused and know they are in the right place.
Below is an example of a simple bridge page created for a Clickbank affiliate offer. I created this one in less than 5 minutes using Clickfunnels but you can use any landing page builder.
Note: this is just an example to show you how simple it can be to create a bridge page that can spark the curiosity of your visitors. But remember that it is your job as an affiliate to know your audience and test what works well for you.
Adittionaly, if you place your Facebook or Google Pixel in your bridge page, you can then retarget those who visited but didn’t purchase. Retarget ads have a higher rate of conversion since the audience is more targeted and they have already learned from your offer and shown interested.
If you are more of a visual learner, this is how your affiliate landing/bridge page would work in that case.
Opt-in Page
The second type of landing page you can use is an Opt-in Page, also known as Squeeze Page. If you are serious about your affiliate business and want to improve your sales and profits, this is the type of affiliate landing page I recommend.
Besides allowing you to use paid aids for your affiliate offer, the main goal of this page is to collect your visitor’s emails. This way you can follow up with those who didn’t buy and reap all the amazing benefits I mentioned above.
In order to motivate visitors to give you their emails, you’ll need to offer them a “lead magnet” or “freebie”. I’ll detail more on lead magnets on the next section but put simply, a lead magnet is a free item or service that you give away to your audience in exchange for their emails or other contact information.
Additionally, you will be building an email list of highly targeted subscribers for your niche to whom you can continue to send offers for a long time, assuming you also send them valuable information to keep them engaged and they don’t send you to their junk folder.
Below is the map of how your affiliate landing page would work in this case. As you can see, you have many more opportunities to sell your offer and to make a sale, in consequence. You can also use retargetting ads but since you have collected the emails, it makes more sense to use that to contact them for free.
Which bring us to other next step…
2. Create your lead magnet
(If you decide on using a bridge page without collecting emails, you can skip this section but I’d still advise you to read it since you might want to implement this in the future.)
If you have chosen to do an opt-in page, how do you choose and create a lead magnet?
Your lead magnet needs to be attractive enough so your audience is happy to give you their email. Naturally, it needs to be related to your final offer so you know the audience who opts-in will also be interested in your paid affiliate product.
Some examples of lead magnets are:
- Free pdf guide: This is probably the most common and also the easiest to create. While simple, it can still be very valuable for your audience if you know their needs and can create something that solves one of their problems.
For example, if the affiliate offer you are promoting is a weight loss program, you could create a pdf guide with “10 tips to lose 3 pounds in 1 week”. Naturally, people who are interested in your pdf guide will also be interested in the affiliate offer.
- E-book: ebooks are another lead magnet with great perceived value. They don’t need to be too long though, you can make an ebook of 10-15 pages, and, as longs as it delivers the promised solution, your audience will be satisfied.
Let’s say you are promoting an affiliate offer for a course on relationships, you could make a free ebook about “How To Use Dating Apps”. The goal is to make the affiliate offer a natural consequence or the next step to follow after getting the lead magnet.
- Quizzes: if you can create an interesting and fun test related to your offer, it can become a very attractive lead magnet. People are naturally self-centered and like to learn about themselves which is why quizzes from Buzzfeed and similar pages are so popular.
In this case, you can present the quiz and leave the opt-form form at the end. This way, when they are asked for their email, they’ll be more interested in knowing the results so the chances of them providing their emails are higher. - Case Study: If you are promoting a course you have taken yourself and that you have gotten great results with, creating a case study explaining how you achieved it, can be a very attractive lead magnet.
Let’s say for example you are promoting a course on Facebook Ads, you can create a case study on how you used Facebook Ads to generate 10X more revenue. Then you can make the connection and redirect your audience to the course where learned those strategies.
- Checklist: This type of freebie has proven to be one of the best converting ones. They are direct, concise, and give the user actionable steps to follow. Plus, they are easy and quick to create.
If for example, you are promoting a Travel Insurance offer, you can create a checklist on things to make sure you have packed for your next trip. You could even include the affiliate link for the travel insurance as part of the list as an extra way to promote it.
- Plan/Planner: If you are in the wellness or fitness niche, a planner can be a valuable lead magnet for your audience.
If you are promoting a fitness challenge or a diet program, you can create a 5-day meal plan for them to get started with their journey and don’t need to worry about what to eat every day.
- Spreadsheet: can be used to create all kinds of useful resources. Especially if you are in the personal finance niche, you could create a spreadsheet to help people organize their budgets, save and pay off their debts.
There are many debt relief offers that even pay up to $35 per lead so simply by collecting emails you could be making commissions.
Other lead magnet ideas include audiobooks, recipes, webinars, templates, workbooks, reports, and infographics, among others.
Your lead magnet is a key piece of your landing page and a big part of your conversion rate will depend on it. Some factors to consider to make sure you are in the right part with your lead magnet are:
- Promises one tangible solution: it should help them to solve one specific problem easily and quickly.
- Quick to digest: pdf guides, videos, and cheatsheets work the best since people perceive them as something they can understand and apply instantly.
- Perceived value: people know their emails are valuable so you want to present your lead magnet in a way that shows high value as well.
How to create your lead magnet?
If you don’t want to create your own lead magnet, you can use pages like The PLR Store and buy books and other types of digital content that you can use for your own business. You can also hire someone on Fiverr to create and brand a lead magnet for you.
3. Design your affiliate landing page
Once you have you lead magnet chosen, it’s time to finally create your affiliate landing page.
If you are no a designer nor a programmer, don’t worry, there are many ‘drag-and-drop’ builders that you can use to create your landing page in minutes without any prior experience.
My favorite option (and what I recommend to my clients) is Clickfunnels. !It’s a simple, drag-and-drop landing page builder that’s designed for beginners. PLUS, you get a 14 day FREE trial to test it out. Click here for a FREE 14 day trial of ClickFunnels!
But, the choice is up to you! There are lots of great alternatives out there.
That being said there are a few key elements to consider when designing your affiliate landing page:
a. The headline
When your visitors come to your page, you have about 8 seconds before they decide to stay or leave. Your headline is one of the first things they’ll see and in which they’ll base that decision you want to make very direct, simple and persuasive.
There is no need to overcomplicate it, your headline should communicate what benefit or solution they are going to get by getting your lead magnet. Here are some effective headline formulas you can use:
•How to [Result] in [Timeframe]Without [Thing You Hate Doing]
•[Number] Quick Tips to GettingEasy [Result]
•The Fastest Way to [DesiredOutcome]
•The [Number] Biggest MistakesYouCan Use When [Action]
•[Number] Hacks to [DesiredOutcome]
•How to 3x [Desired Outcome]With This Little Known Secret
•[Number] Easy Techniques to Become [Desired Outcome]
•[Number] Beginner Strategies to [Desired Outcome]
•[Number] Things That All[Specific Audience] Shouldn’t Do
•Discover How You Can [DesiredOutcome] in [Timeframe]
•The Ultimate [Type Of LeadMagnet] to [Desired Outcome]
•How to [Action Verb] A [DesiredOutcome]
Recommended: 147 Catchy Headlines To Claim Your Readers Attention
b. Opt-In And Call To Action
Probably the most important part of your landing page is the opt-in form. Make sure your is visible ‘above the fold’ (meaning people don’t need to scroll down to see it) and include a clear and concise “Call To Action” in the button. E.g. “Yes, Send Me The Free Guide Now”, “Click Here To Get Instant Access”, etc.
With Clickfunnels or any other drag-and-drop builder, you can insert an opt-in form and start collecting emails instantly with just a couple of clicks.
c. Lead Magnet Mockup
Including a mockup of your lead magnet gives it a higher perceived value and makes it more tangible for your audience. You can create one easily using Canva or you can hire someone from Fiverr to do it for you.
d. Testimonials
If you have any testimonials or success stories using on people getting good results using this lead magnet then this is a great opportunity to include them. They work as social proof and help your build trust with your audience.
This is not essential but if you don’t have any testimonials, you can also ask a colleague or friend to check your lead magnet and give you an honest opinion that you can use.
e. Benefits
In this section, tell your visitors what benefits they will get by downloading your free lead magnet, what problem are they going to solve, how is that going to impact their life or business directly, is it going to save them time? money? Are they going to feel better? etc.
Remember to keep it direct and concise, focus on one specific win they are going to get, and focus on how easy it will be to implement.
f. Introduce yourself
This part is not mandatory but it is a good idea to introduce yourself, tell them how you can help them and mention you will be sending them other tips and resources if they opt-in. This way they remember you next time you send them an email and are more likely to open it and to not makr it as spam.
It also serves to position yourself as an authority in the industry. If you are an expert in a field they are interested in, they are more likely to take your recommendations on this and other products you endorse.
g. Final CTA
Finally, you can include a summary of your lead magnet with a CTA button. It can have an extra opt-in form in this section or you can set up the button so it scrolls up to the opt-in form at the top.
This is an example of how your affiliate landing page can be structured. You can also download this template here if you have a Clickfunnels account or otherwise it’ll redirect you to create a free trial first.
4. Deliver your lead magnet
Once visitors opt into your landing page, it’s time to deliver the promised lead magnet!
Regardless of what landing page builder you are using, you can set it up so the lead magnet is delivered automatically to their emails once they subscribe.
If you are using Clickfunnels, you would go to the Automation Tab, click on “Add New Email” and in this case choose “Everyone” since that means everyone who opted in.
You can use the same email where you deliver the lead magnet to tell them about your affiliate product or you can create a separate email sequence for that purpose.
Additionally, you can choose “Add a New Action” and add them to your email list so you can follow up with them about this and future affiliate offers you promote.
5. Redirect to your affiliate offer
Besides sending the lead magnet, when someone opts-in to your landing page you also want to send them to your affiliate offer.
You can do this by:
a. Redirecting them to the page when they click the opt-in button
b. You can create a Thank You Page to confirm their subscription and use it to present the affiliate offer.
The second option required one extra step but it’s better since it gives you one more chance to present the offer and improve the chances of conversion.
If you decide to use a Thank You Page as it is recommended, here is what your visitors’ journey would look like.
6. Create your email sequence
Congratulations! You are now sending traffic to your landing page, collecting emails and making some sales. But it’s your email sequence what hold the power to multiply your conversions and profits.
As I mentioned, the majority of people won’t buy the first time they land on your page which means most of your sales will come from your email sequence.
I use Active Campaign for all my email automations and so far is the most complete email software I have tried and integrates seamlessly with Clickfunnels. You can get a free trial of Active Campaign here.
What should you write on your emails?
A good idea is to begin with a soap opera sequence which is a type of welcome email sequence that uses a story to capture your readers’ attention.
It helps you create a bond between you and your new subscribers that makes them more interested in what you are going to send them next.
A soap opera email sequence is a series of five emails sent on 5 consecutive days that go as follows:
- Email #1: Set the Stage
- Email #2: High Drama
- Email #3: Epiphany/Breakthrough: Product
- Email #4: Hidden Benefits
- Email #5: Urgent CTA
If you are familiar with the niche and products you are selling, you can easily write a story that your readers can relate too.
This is only one example you can use for your emails but there are many other email sequences marketers use. If you want to learn more about copywriting, templates, and email marketing then this book is the best you will find out there.
7. Test and Optimize
Last but not least, optimize your landing page to increase your sales and profits!
Even if you’re seeing some success with your landing pages, you can always improve them further with additional split-testing.
Software like Clickfunnels allow you to create a split test with one click so you can make changes one by one and see which version performs better.
You want to be continuously testing and optimizing your landing pages since that can be the difference between a non-profitable and a profitable campaign or a 15% vs a 30% profit margin. Once you start to scale your business, that can mean thousands of dollars lost (or won).
Landing Page for Affiliate Marketing FAQ
How do I create a landing page for affiliate marketing?
You can use Clickfunnels or other landing page builder to create your affiliate marketing landing page. Depending on your preferences, you can also choose between a simple bridge page that doesn’t collect emails and an opt-in page that does collect emails.
For a detailed guide follow the steps outlined above.
How do I use Clickfunnels for affiliate marketing?
You can use Clickfunnels to build your affiliate landing pages and at the same time if someone clicks on the Clickfunnels badge on your page and start using the software you get a commission for their membership.
Recommended: Clickfunnels Affiliate Program: Make Money And Win Your Dream Car
Can I use my Facebook page for affiliate marketing?
Yes, you can promote your affiliate products on your regular posts but you can not use affiliate links on Facebook ads. This is why it is important to create a landing page for your affiliate offers if you want to use Facebook Ads.
Recommended: How to do Affiliate marketing On Facebook
How do I create a landing page without a website?
Technically, a landing page is a stand-alone website and you don’t need another website to create a landing page. You also don’t need a hosting since most landing page software help you easily create and host landing pages without any design or coding experience.
Recommended: Top 10 Ways To Start Affiliate Marketing Without A Website
What is an affiliate landing page?
An affiliate landing page is a page you use to sell your affiliate products or send traffic to them.
How do I get a CPA landing page?
The difference between CPA and other affiliate products is that you get paid for action such as email submission or app download but the process for creating a landing page is the same than for other affiliate products.
Can I post ClickBank links on Facebook?
You can post Clickbank links on your personal or fan page but you can not use Clickbank links on Facebook ads. This is why it is important to create a landing page for your affiliate offers if you want to use Facebook Ads for your Clickbank affiliate offers.
Takeaway
A lot of affiliates want to create a landing page for their campaigns to be able to use paid ads. While that is a completely valid reason, a landing page can also help you build your email list and guarantee a long term sustainable business.
With the help of the steps described in this guide, you can create your landing page done in no time and be ready to start making money online!
