UNIT 8: LANDING PAGE TRAFFIC – HOW TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR OPT- IN LANDING PAGE
Building a landing page to promote an email opt-in form is one of the simplest and most effective ways to growing a mailing list. A landing page is a page that is completely dedicated to helping you promote your mailing list and that will have no other distractions or purpose. This page is purely here to inform your audience about your mailing list and to encourage them to be interested in signing up.
If you do this well, then a landing page for a mailing list can have a high conversion rate, meaning that you might expect 1-10% of every visitor to sign up.
This then means that the more people you can get to your landing page, the more rapidly you can grow your list and get more people to sign up so that you can build a relationship.
So how do you go about getting the maximum number of people to your landing page? And how do you ensure that the traffic you are sending there is the right kind of traffic that will be likely to sign up and that will actually read and engage with your emails once you start sending them?
In this report, we’ll take a look at some of the best strategies for doing this to help you build a massive and highly engaged list.
PPC
The first and easiest way to start generating traffic for any page is with PPC ads. PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’ and this will generally refer to two different platforms: Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.
Any form of Pay Per Click advertising essentially means that you are paying each time someone clicks on your advert in order to be taken to your website. This is a powerful feature because it means that you now know precisely how much each visitors costs you.
And if you have been keeping track of your conversion rate – so that you know what percentage of your visitors end up signing up and becoming subscribers – then you’ll be able to calculate roughly what your individual subscribers cost you.
In other words, if you pay 10 cents for each click and your conversion rate is 1%, then you need to spend $10 for each new subscriber. If your conversion rate is 10% then that cost goes down to $1.
The next bit of math you need to do, is to work out just how much each subscriber is worth to you. You’ll do this by looking at your CLV – Customer Lifetime Value. This can once again be easily calculated by looking at some specific numbers. In particular, you need to consider how often a subscriber buys from you and how much profit you make from each sale. So if each subscriber buys 10 things from you on average in their lifetime and you make an average of $30 per sale, then your customers are worth $300 to you. If you’re paying $10 for each subscriber, then that’s a lot of profit!
Remember though, most subscribers will go a long time without buying anything and some might not buy at all. They still need to be calculated in your average, so in reality it will probably be much lower – closer to $15 per subscriber. As long as you’re making profit though, this is a good strategy!
When using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your opt-in page, be sure your page complies with AdWords’ guidelines.
Targeting
So PPC is a great strategy because it is enabling you to very precisely calculate how much each subscriber is worth and how much they cost you versus how much they earn you. But at the same time, it also has the huge advantage of being highly targeted. Now if you’ve been doing your research, you’ll know that the quality of a mailing list is much more important than its size. In other words, a good mailing list is one that is filled with engaged readers that are interested in what you’re offering.
Using Facebook Ads, you can decide precisely who sees your advertisements and target on the basis of age, sex, marital status, income, location and even hobbies and interests.
So, if you have a mailing list about martial arts fitness, you can make sure that the people who see it are young to middle aged and that they have an interest in fitness and in martial arts. Suddenly, the conversion rate from those visitors will go up and so too will the open rate once you start delivering your messages.
Google AdWords works slightly differently because the ads aren’t placed on Facebook but are instead placed on Google on the basis of the search terms that people are looking for (called ‘keywords’). There is some targeting built-in, but really the main targeting will come from the fact that the viewers are searching for specific things.
You choose the keywords that you want your ads to appear on in other words, so if someone is searching for ‘martial arts workout’, you can rest assured that they’re probably interested in martial arts and in fitness.
This gives you less control over things like the gender of your viewers or their age, but what it does allow you to do is to aim adverts at people at the time that they’re looking for them. In other words, they are actively searching for something relevant to your mailing list at that point in time and so you’re not interrupting them at a point when they’re trying to chat with friends on Facebook or browse news.
This can help to make your landing pages convert more, but it is worth noting that these benefits mainly help paid products and free blogs. People don’t tend to actively look for mailing lists to sign up to. You can get around this to some extent if you offer a free ebook or report as an incentive, as this way you can then target search terms like ‘fitness book’.
On the whole though, Facebook Ads are probably slightly superior compared with Google.
Blogging
While PPC ads are highly effective, they unfortunately do come with one major downside: they are not free. Blogging on the other hand is a method that you can use entirely for free and the only cost is the time that you’ll need to put in in order to keep your blog filled with great and interesting posts.
This is what is referred to in the industry as content marketing. Content is a powerful tool for bringing more people to your website because it appeals both to your audience and to Google.
If you want to get your site to show up for specific search terms as you do with Google AdWords, then actually the best way to do this is simply to do good SEO and to get there ‘organically’. This means that you are adding lots of content to your site that is relevant to the search term and it means that you are going to build links pointing in toward your site. These two activities combined will give your site the attention it needs to grow on Google – but the content is what’s really key here because content is what most people are looking for when they search on Google.
What’s more is that content is what will keep people coming back to your site and help to build trust and interest in what you’re offering.
So, most people are going to find your site on Google because they’re searching for specific information or entertainment. They might look for the answer to a question for example and then if they enjoy what they read on your blog, they might decide that they’re going to look for more of your content again in future. The next time they have that same question, they might go directly to your blog.
Only by continually impressing them and giving them lots of reason to keep revisiting can you get them to the point where they think that it might be worth signing up to your mailing list and that way being the first to hear about your new posts and your new ideas.
All that’s left for you to do is to link to your landing page from your blog post, or to place a link in your sidebar. Either of these options will ensure that people who come to your site to check out your content see that there’s a mailing list and have the option to sign up.
And don’t be afraid to simply remind people to sign up to your mailing list within your blog posts, or to tell them what your blog is all about and why they should definitely consider getting involved. If you can do all this, then you should find that you start to get more and more readers consisting of people who want to hear more of your ideas and information.
Solo Ads and Ad Swaps
There are many more forms of advertising you can use with your list too and some of these are specifically designed in order to work highly effectively with mailing lists.
One example is a solo ad. A solo ad is an advert that will appear in someone else’s mailing list. This is essentially a form of influencer marketing then because the message will be spread by someone who has already done the work to build up a big list.
Solo ads can work well but only if you are careful about how you approach them. Always make sure that the email list you’re appearing in is one that has been built using the best methods and that is highly engaged and maintained. In other words, don’t pay to appear on a list filled with low quality contacts that never asked to be there. Try signing up to the list yourself first to check the quality of the messages and always ask to see metrics so that you have proof that the list is working.
Similar to solo ads are ad swaps. These are just like solo ads in that your ads will end up in the same place (on someone else’s mailing list) but they are different because you aren’t paying for them. Instead, you are swapping a shout-out for a shout-out and that means you need to share the message that you’re given with your audience in exchange for them doing the same. Again, do your research and look into the quality of the list before you agree to go ahead with this.
It’s also possible to pay for clicks from a number of sites. Good examples include Udimiand Traffic For Me. These sites provide you with a way to buy clicks that will take people to your landing page and the service is specifically designed to be used for email marketing as opposed to other forms of advertising.
One Thing Not to Do
This is a good strategy and it is much better than trying to pay for emails. In fact, the one strategy you should never use is to buy emails in bulk. When you do this, you are buying emails that have usually been captured through illicit means. In fact, some of these mailing lists will be resold – meaning that someone bought them simply in order to sell them on to you!
The problem with doing this is that the people now on your mailing list never agreed to be there in the first place and never showed any interest in your brand. This makes them essentially cold leads and that’s just the same as sending messages to emails that you made up out of thin air. Most of them will view your content as spam, many of them will simply bounce and this will badly hurt your sender reputation over time.
Always remember: the quality of your list is more important than how big it is. So if you are going to buy ads directly or indirectly, always make sure that they are going to be targeted and that they are people who really want to see your content.
The ideal situation is that you bring people to your site who actively searched for content like the content you’re offering and who join your mailing list because they enjoy what you have to offer so much!
Building a landing page to promote an email opt-in form is one of the simplest and most effective ways to growing a mailing list. A landing page is a page that is completely dedicated to helping you promote your mailing list and that will have no other distractions or purpose. This page is purely here to inform your audience about your mailing list and to encourage them to be interested in signing up.
If you do this well, then a landing page for a mailing list can have a high conversion rate, meaning that you might expect 1-10% of every visitor to sign up.
This then means that the more people you can get to your landing page, the more rapidly you can grow your list and get more people to sign up so that you can build a relationship.
So how do you go about getting the maximum number of people to your landing page? And how do you ensure that the traffic you are sending there is the right kind of traffic that will be likely to sign up and that will actually read and engage with your emails once you start sending them?
In this report, we’ll take a look at some of the best strategies for doing this to help you build a massive and highly engaged list.
PPC
The first and easiest way to start generating traffic for any page is with PPC ads. PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’ and this will generally refer to two different platforms: Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.
Any form of Pay Per Click advertising essentially means that you are paying each time someone clicks on your advert in order to be taken to your website. This is a powerful feature because it means that you now know precisely how much each visitors costs you.
And if you have been keeping track of your conversion rate – so that you know what percentage of your visitors end up signing up and becoming subscribers – then you’ll be able to calculate roughly what your individual subscribers cost you.
In other words, if you pay 10 cents for each click and your conversion rate is 1%, then you need to spend $10 for each new subscriber. If your conversion rate is 10% then that cost goes down to $1.
The next bit of math you need to do, is to work out just how much each subscriber is worth to you. You’ll do this by looking at your CLV – Customer Lifetime Value. This can once again be easily calculated by looking at some specific numbers. In particular, you need to consider how often a subscriber buys from you and how much profit you make from each sale. So if each subscriber buys 10 things from you on average in their lifetime and you make an average of $30 per sale, then your customers are worth $300 to you. If you’re paying $10 for each subscriber, then that’s a lot of profit!
Remember though, most subscribers will go a long time without buying anything and some might not buy at all. They still need to be calculated in your average, so in reality it will probably be much lower – closer to $15 per subscriber. As long as you’re making profit though, this is a good strategy!
When using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your opt-in page, be sure your page complies with AdWords’ guidelines.
Targeting
So PPC is a great strategy because it is enabling you to very precisely calculate how much each subscriber is worth and how much they cost you versus how much they earn you. But at the same time, it also has the huge advantage of being highly targeted. Now if you’ve been doing your research, you’ll know that the quality of a mailing list is much more important than its size. In other words, a good mailing list is one that is filled with engaged readers that are interested in what you’re offering.
Using Facebook Ads, you can decide precisely who sees your advertisements and target on the basis of age, sex, marital status, income, location and even hobbies and interests.
So, if you have a mailing list about martial arts fitness, you can make sure that the people who see it are young to middle aged and that they have an interest in fitness and in martial arts. Suddenly, the conversion rate from those visitors will go up and so too will the open rate once you start delivering your messages.
Google AdWords works slightly differently because the ads aren’t placed on Facebook but are instead placed on Google on the basis of the search terms that people are looking for (called ‘keywords’). There is some targeting built-in, but really the main targeting will come from the fact that the viewers are searching for specific things.
You choose the keywords that you want your ads to appear on in other words, so if someone is searching for ‘martial arts workout’, you can rest assured that they’re probably interested in martial arts and in fitness.
This gives you less control over things like the gender of your viewers or their age, but what it does allow you to do is to aim adverts at people at the time that they’re looking for them. In other words, they are actively searching for something relevant to your mailing list at that point in time and so you’re not interrupting them at a point when they’re trying to chat with friends on Facebook or browse news.
This can help to make your landing pages convert more, but it is worth noting that these benefits mainly help paid products and free blogs. People don’t tend to actively look for mailing lists to sign up to. You can get around this to some extent if you offer a free ebook or report as an incentive, as this way you can then target search terms like ‘fitness book’.
On the whole though, Facebook Ads are probably slightly superior compared with Google.
Blogging
While PPC ads are highly effective, they unfortunately do come with one major downside: they are not free. Blogging on the other hand is a method that you can use entirely for free and the only cost is the time that you’ll need to put in in order to keep your blog filled with great and interesting posts.
This is what is referred to in the industry as content marketing. Content is a powerful tool for bringing more people to your website because it appeals both to your audience and to Google.
If you want to get your site to show up for specific search terms as you do with Google AdWords, then actually the best way to do this is simply to do good SEO and to get there ‘organically’. This means that you are adding lots of content to your site that is relevant to the search term and it means that you are going to build links pointing in toward your site. These two activities combined will give your site the attention it needs to grow on Google – but the content is what’s really key here because content is what most people are looking for when they search on Google.
What’s more is that content is what will keep people coming back to your site and help to build trust and interest in what you’re offering.
So, most people are going to find your site on Google because they’re searching for specific information or entertainment. They might look for the answer to a question for example and then if they enjoy what they read on your blog, they might decide that they’re going to look for more of your content again in future. The next time they have that same question, they might go directly to your blog.
Only by continually impressing them and giving them lots of reason to keep revisiting can you get them to the point where they think that it might be worth signing up to your mailing list and that way being the first to hear about your new posts and your new ideas.
All that’s left for you to do is to link to your landing page from your blog post, or to place a link in your sidebar. Either of these options will ensure that people who come to your site to check out your content see that there’s a mailing list and have the option to sign up.
And don’t be afraid to simply remind people to sign up to your mailing list within your blog posts, or to tell them what your blog is all about and why they should definitely consider getting involved. If you can do all this, then you should find that you start to get more and more readers consisting of people who want to hear more of your ideas and information.
Solo Ads and Ad Swaps
There are many more forms of advertising you can use with your list too and some of these are specifically designed in order to work highly effectively with mailing lists.
One example is a solo ad. A solo ad is an advert that will appear in someone else’s mailing list. This is essentially a form of influencer marketing then because the message will be spread by someone who has already done the work to build up a big list.
Solo ads can work well but only if you are careful about how you approach them. Always make sure that the email list you’re appearing in is one that has been built using the best methods and that is highly engaged and maintained. In other words, don’t pay to appear on a list filled with low quality contacts that never asked to be there. Try signing up to the list yourself first to check the quality of the messages and always ask to see metrics so that you have proof that the list is working.
Similar to solo ads are ad swaps. These are just like solo ads in that your ads will end up in the same place (on someone else’s mailing list) but they are different because you aren’t paying for them. Instead, you are swapping a shout-out for a shout-out and that means you need to share the message that you’re given with your audience in exchange for them doing the same. Again, do your research and look into the quality of the list before you agree to go ahead with this.
It’s also possible to pay for clicks from a number of sites. Good examples include Udimiand Traffic For Me. These sites provide you with a way to buy clicks that will take people to your landing page and the service is specifically designed to be used for email marketing as opposed to other forms of advertising.
One Thing Not to Do
This is a good strategy and it is much better than trying to pay for emails. In fact, the one strategy you should never use is to buy emails in bulk. When you do this, you are buying emails that have usually been captured through illicit means. In fact, some of these mailing lists will be resold – meaning that someone bought them simply in order to sell them on to you!
The problem with doing this is that the people now on your mailing list never agreed to be there in the first place and never showed any interest in your brand. This makes them essentially cold leads and that’s just the same as sending messages to emails that you made up out of thin air. Most of them will view your content as spam, many of them will simply bounce and this will badly hurt your sender reputation over time.
Always remember: the quality of your list is more important than how big it is. So if you are going to buy ads directly or indirectly, always make sure that they are going to be targeted and that they are people who really want to see your content.
The ideal situation is that you bring people to your site who actively searched for content like the content you’re offering and who join your mailing list because they enjoy what you have to offer so much!
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