How much money did you lose today?

Plug the leak before it’s too late!

Are you still just plopping your affiliate link into your favourite traffic exchanges?  Well, you may have lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars today and not even realized it!  Stop losing money and plug the leak before it’s too late!

In my previous article, I discussed the only two ways to really promote in traffic exchanges.  The first method involved direct promotion of a program/product/service through the use of a “splash page”.  The second method of promotion was the indirect method of using a “squeeze page” to gather contact information – in short, building a list.  Today, I will discuss the first method – splash pages.

Let me first say (yet again!) that if you are doing direct promotion in the traffic exchanges, you NEED to be using a splash page.  If you are using the standard affiliate link that displays the main website, then you are totally wasting your time and/or money.  Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into what you need to be doing.

I will start at the very beginning.  A splash page is simply an advertisement for a program/product/service that you are trying to sell.  BUT, there are a lot of little things to consider when making a splash page that will be the difference between success and failure.  Before we get into the little things your splash page needs, you have to ask yourself two VERY important questions:

1. What am I trying to sell?
2. Who will want what I am trying to sell?

These two questions seem really simple but a lot of marketers fail to answer them and this could result in failure before you even get started.  The first question is really important because it gets you to focus on the absolute essence of what you are trying to sell – in other words, when you strip it right down, what is it? Knowing the answer to this will help you with the next question – “who is going to want this?”.

It is absolutely critical that you understand what you are trying to sell and the audience that would want it. If you try to market something to the wrong audience, then it won’t matter what your splash page looks like, it will fail.  Once again, this seems obvious and yet there are thousands upon thousands of people using traffic exchanges to promote things that will never sell because they are pitching to the wrong audience.

Now that we have determined that we are selling to the right audience, we need to decide how we are going to catch their attention in such a way that they can’t help but take action. Notice how I said “catch their attention” and not “sell them on the product”.  You see, in traffic exchanges you only have a few seconds which is not enough time to sell them on all the great benefits of your product, so starting in on a sales pitch is NOT the way to go.  And remember, you are just trying to get them over to your main website where you will do the selling.

So, what exactly should your splash page have on it?  As little as possible! What you are trying to do is catch their attention, so you need something that stands out and makes them spend a few extra seconds on your page.  You can accomplish this with a particular graphic, sound, or a few well chosen words.  If you are using words to grab their attention, then you need to keep it VERY SHORT!  Do not try to sell them on all the benefits, just catch their attention.

To sum it all up, your splash page should have very little words on it and should grab their attention is less than 3 seconds. In total, it shouldn’t take any more than about 5 seconds to “read” EVERYTHING on your splash page.  So all of you people out there that are building splash pages with these huge blocks of text, STOP IT!  Remember, you are just trying to grab their attention enough that they will click on your link.  As soon as they get to your website (where the product actually is), this is where you will really sell them on the benefits.

Here is a quick reference of the main things to consider when building your splash page.

1.) You have to grab their attention and make it so that they really don’t have any other option but to click on your link.  One of the best ways to do this is to be a little vague – curiosity is your best tool.

2.) Keep the number of words to a minimum. Huge blocks of text are a serious NO-NO.  I would say if your splash page has more than about 15 words in total, your effectiveness with go down considerably.

3.) Keep the graphical content to a minimum. Yes, I know I said that graphics can be good at catching attention, so they are definitely important, but you need to keep the size of this splash down so that it loads fast … which brings up the next point

4.) Your splash page needs to FULLY load in 2 or 3 seconds – max! If your splash page takes longer than this, then your visitor is likely already gone and they won’t see your page.  To ensure this, you should keep your splash page to UNDER 100k and preferably under 50k.

5.) Get straight to the point! You only have a couple seconds to get their attention, so get straight to it.  Do NOT fill up your splash page with a bunch of distractions, but rather keep it easy to read and NON-intimidating.

6.) Make your call to action obvious. Remember, your goal is to get the visitor to click on your link so that they are taken to another website where you can sell your product.  So, make it obvious what you want them to do – don’t send your visitor on a treasure hunt of your splash page for the “CLICK HERE” call to action.

7.) Your splash page needs to fit nicely on the page WITHOUT scrolling of any kind. I have seen lots of splash pages that are so loaded with nonsense that the visitor has to scroll down to see the whole page … and the call to action is at the bottom of the page totally out of sight!  YIKES!

8.) One thing per splash page only. Your job is to grab their attention and get them over to your main website, so stick to that ONLY!  This means you should NOT be trying to sell multiple things on your splash page, and NO banners either!

9.) Make sure your call to action (the “click here” button) opens the website in a new window and make sure you are tracking this link.

Well, that about takes care of the basic items you should be considering when building your splash pages.  As for how you actually go about building a splash page – well, if you don’t have any technical skills, then there are a number of programs out there that will allow you to build splash pages on their hosted platform.  These programs are usually fairly intuitive and allow a reasonable amount of customization.  I won’t go over any particular program here, but a quick search will pull them up.

Good luck with your splash page building.  I know it may seem a little daunting right now, but the time you invest into this will be paid back multiple times over.  It’s time to plug the leak and stop losing money!

Splash Pages DO make sense

Author:  Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

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