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Why get a landing page?

Before talking about where you can get a landing page from, let’s talk about their benefits. 

It may seem counterintuitive that putting an additional step between an ad and an offer – making it slightly harder for a visitor to reach the offer – could increase your conversion rate.

But in almost all cases it does, according to many studies.

As we mentioned before, a single ad is not enough to convince a visitor that he or she should spend some money. You need more space for text and images than a single banner or push ad has to offer. Use that space to:

Advertise your offer further. Provide more text and more images.

Address all visitor’s concerns regarding your offer.

Increase their sense of urgency. Messages such as “Only 10 pieces left” or “Low inventory” can really tip the balance toward a conversion.

Tell them about guarantees and your return policy.

Present testimonials, reviews and other forms of social proof.

Entice a visitor into taking an action.                  

Use CTA (Call-to action) buttons to clearly tell users what to do

Reassure them that they will get real benefits from this offer

Moreover, a landing page can also be used to present additional offers.

How to get a landing page?

Firstly, you can build one yourself. If you don’t have the coding skills to build one from scratch, you can use one of the many easy to use landing page builders. They allow anybody to design beautifully-themed pages with just a few clicks. Read our ranking of the 10 best landing page builders for affiliate marketing in 2021 to get to know different landing builders.  

As a general rule, we do not recommend using WordPress to create a landing page. It is rather slow and was not conceived with a high quantity of visitors in mind. 

Secondly, you can get a landing page from various repositories. They are often present on affiliate-related sites, such as forums. 

Thirdly, some offers come with ready landing pages, so the work is done for you.

If you are wondering if you can get away without a landing page, the short answer is: probably not. They increase conversions in 95% of cases. The only time affiliates decide not to use one is when a traffic source forbids to do so specifically. Which is very rare.

Landing page hosting

Apart from designing a landing page, you have to pay for its hosting. Use a hosting provider that offers a server that can handle a bigger number of visits.

The following are your hosting options:

Shared hosting

Virtual private server

Dedicated server

The second option is usually good enough for most use cases. To get the list of the best landing page hosting services, visit our blog.

The general procedure of selecting hosting looks the same:

You choose a plan according to the expected traffic or choose a type of hosting (shared hosting, virtual private server, dedicated server, cloud). Virtual private server is good for most, shared hosting is only for the beginners.

You upload a landing page that you have designed.

You set additional options, including a custom domain for your landing page.

More on domains below.

Domain name

When someone talks about custom domains in affiliate marketing, they may mean two things:

Custom tracking domains

Custom domains for landing pages

Let’s go over each of them and discuss what they are and if you really need one.

Custom tracking domain

Each Voluum account comes with a free domain dedicated for tracking purposes. It’s simply referred to as ‘dedicated domain’ and it is used to redirect a visitor through Voluum servers to a landing page or an offer.

This domain is unique for each user, which makes the user solely responsible for maintaining its reputation. If a Voluum user violates campaign guidelines and their campaign gets reported, they may end up with a blocked domain.

To protect their tracking domain, many users decide to purchase a custom domain separately from a domain provider and point its CNAME destination to Voluum dedicated domain. This way if their domain gets blocked, it would be their custom domain that can be easily replaced, and not the Voluum dedicated domain that is much harder to replace.

Getting a custom tracking domain makes sense in some scenarios, but the majority of users should not bother with it, if only they follow campaign guidelines.

Custom domain

When you set up hosting for a landing page, you get the link to this page from your hosting provider. The domain name in this link is in most cases selected at random. So, for example, your health-oriented landing page may get a domain name such as ‘miranut-delines.com’.

In some cases, having a domain name that is related to the brand or vertical adds credibility and increases conversion rates. Your landing page looks much better if its address in the web browser’s address bar starts with ‘health-benefits.com’.

We would recommend getting a custom domain for a landing page for most users. It doesn’t cost that much but it’s one of those things that helps your page stand out.

SSL

SSL is a widely-adopted security standard for Internet connections. Domains with the SSL certificate enabled are seen by web browsers as secure, and therefore, more trustworthy. Whenever you see HTTPS protocol visible in a web browser’s address bar, you know that a given website uses a secure connection.

There are two things you should know:

Most of the web shifts towards secure connections. Some web browsers mark web pages that don’t use SSL as ‘unsafe’ with a big warning, which deters visitors.

Mixing HTTP and HTTPS protocols in one campaign funnel is seen by modern browsers as conflict and may also result in blocking the connection or displaying a warning message.

To avoid such problems, enable SSL for your custom tracking domain (if you use one) and also for a domain (custom or not) of your landing page.

The Voluum dedicated domain already comes with a free and active SSL certificate.

Adding a landing page to a campaign funnel

Once you create your landing page and host it somewhere, you will have a URL to this web page.