You have probably stumbled upon a landing page for domain redirect traffic long before you have ever heard about affiliate marketing. You were in a hurry or in a careless mood at that time and didn’t use bookmarks for your favorite pages. You typed hastily something like “facebok.com” or “yotube.com” into your web browser’s address bar. Or maybe you were looking into a general topic and tried to find it by typing simply “taxes.com” or “beautifulladies.com”, hoping for the best. Upon hitting the Enter button, you saw a web page that kind of looked like something you were searching for.
Think about that moment. Did that page make you click further? Did something catch your eye? Or did you realize that you had made a mistake and quickly went to the correct page? That few seconds when you were deciding if that landing page’s merit, is crucial for domain redirect traffic and from the perspective of a marketer that prepared it. The following article will be about making these seconds count.
A right landing page for the right audience
There are conflicting emotions inside a visitor that reached a parked domain and, corresponding with them, two schools of thought regarding the design of a landing page for domain traffic.
The first one states that a visitor feels positive emotions. They reached a page that, even if it isn’t exactly a page they were looking for, is still relevant to their quest. For example, “taxes.com” page may not be affiliated in any way with the Department of the Treasury as they hoped, but may still provide relevant content.
In this case, the design of a landing page must match their search, if not exactly, then at least to the spirit. A landing page for the “Facebok.com” domain must be a mixture of white and this very specific shade of blue that is expected from the original. However, the design of a landing page for the “ThatBigSportingEventIn2022.com” domain has to have a sporty feeling to it. So probably a lot of green that brings up images of a stadium lawn and some catchy headlines.
The second school of thought says that it’s better to be honest with a visitor. They may feel angry that they have been directed somewhere they didn’t want to go, so it may be more effective to say: “Yep, we’re an ad site, but hey, at least we have some interesting ads”.
In this scenario, you don’t try to mimic other pages. You offer ads, relevant ones, but clearly ads. So when you target sport-related domains, you are not trying to pretend that you are a sports news portal, but you advertise sports betting. Or performance-enhancing drugs. Or pictures of beautiful ladies, because, you know… guys.
With these two scenarios come different design patterns. The first one is toned-down and familiar, while the second is flashy and shouty. Which of these scenarios to choose, will largely depend on the type of your offer. Some offers work better when they fit a visitor’s expectations, while others do not need to.
Read The Ultimate Guide To Domain Redirect Advertising Here!
Technical stuff to remember about when setting up a lander for domain redirect traffic
Page loading speed
With the limited time you have to persuade a visitor to remain on your landing page, the page load speed is a crucial factor. Each second added to a load time increases the possibility that a visitor will spot their mistake and close the tab. It’s better to have them looking at your content, considering a purchase, rather than staring at a blank page, wondering what’s wrong.
Luckily, there are a lot of things you can do to increase your page load speed. There a number of small improvements here and there, that eventually add up to a robust and fast-loading web page.
These improvements can be divided into two categories: optimization of your landing page’s design and hosting.
Web design matters
The optimized design doesn’t have to equal minimalistic design. You can still have rich content, but you will have to have speed in mind when creating it. Here’s what you can do:
- Minimize HTTP requests. The more your landing page for domain traffic “asks” other web resources for images and videos, the slower it loads. Review these requests and delete unnecessary ones.
- Optimize your images. You don’t have to use 30MP images to make them look good. There are a lot of services that can reduce the size of an image without sacrificing quality.
- Use asynchronous loading for JS and CSS elements. Asynchronous loading means that you can load other elements simultaneously with your load-heavy scripts.
- Reduce the number of WP plugins. WordPress has a lot of plugins that may provide extra features, but they take valuable milliseconds. Review your plugins and decide which ones are worth keeping.
- Use file compression to compress your larger HTML, CSS or JavaScript files. Computers are faster than their internet connections, so they can decompress a file quicker than load an uncompressed one.
- Minimize redirects. If you want to use a tracker, consider using one that offers a non-redirect tracking method. They use small scripts that you implement on your landing page, which make a request with visit info instead of redirecting a visitor through a separate tracking domain.
The question of hosting
Apart from what a visitor’s computer loads, an equally important factor is where does it load from. Having your landing page for domain redirect traffic on a fast server is a must.
Generally speaking, you should be as close to your visitors as possible to increase page load speed. If you target multiple GEOs, or one big GEO, you need to be in several places at once. Combining that with the desire for fast server results with a notion that you should go for cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting for your landing page for domain traffic is easy to set up, it’s scalable, and it is in more places than your rented dedicated servers can ever be.
But apart from your landing page’s code, there are other things that load as well. If you use videos, they have to be hosted somewhere. Host them on a fast CDN network. Your images should also use CDN hosting.
Test your landing page’s speed
You should not settle with the assumption that your landing page should load faster. Measure it. Compare results. Improve. Additionally, monitor your landing page’s performance, so you can react quickly when any downtime occurs.
You can use free tools like gtmetrix.com to check your loading times.
Building a landing page that converts
We’ve learnt a little bit about design patterns and landing page load speed for redirect domain traffic, now it’s time to talk about content.
Motivation is key
The usual suggestion for an affiliate marketer is to write to increase visitor’s motivation, not the ease of taking action. If someone is motivated enough, they will find that CTA button no matter what.
This works for most affiliate scenarios, but the content for a landing page for domain traffic should undergo a different principle. The visitor’s motivation is high. They’ve proved it by making an effort to type in a domain name. You still need to convince them that your offer is a good fit, but also you need to persuade them that this offer is easy to take.
Showcase to them that their benefits are just one click away. Make your registration forms as easy to fill as possible and make them easily readable on mobile devices. Put your CTA buttons above the fold.
What is a fold in a digital world? This term, originally used to describe the part of a newspaper that is visible without unfolding it, refers to a part of a landing page that is visible on a computer screen without scrolling. You can put additional content below, but don’t force your visitors to scroll all the way down to get to your offer.
Earn trust
Ok, so you have a fast-loading landing page with a design that matches expectations and content that entices visitors to perform an action. What’s left? The most important part: trust.
Let’s be frank: when a visitor reaches your site, they are not in the place they wanted to be. On some level, the trust has been compromised. You need to regain that trust by having well formed content. So no grammatical errors, no messy punctuation. You need to position yourself as a reliable advertiser.
The perfect landing page for domain redirect advertising doesn’t exi…
With all the tips we talked about here, you should be ready to get out there and create a well performing landing page for domain redirect advertising.
Remember that this article aims at pinpointing the differences and characteristics of landing pages specifically designed for redirect domain traffic. All other design tricks you’ve heard of can still be applicable. As always in affiliate marketing, it takes a lot of testing and adjusting to make your landers great. But once you get through that, a combination of a quality traffic source and a well-made landing page will certainly bring you a lot of profits.