Affiliate Marketing for Seniors
Your Lead Magnet's Landing Page
In the previous article Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create a Lead Magnet, I described how to create a lead magnet designed to persuade your visitors to give you their names and email addresses to add to your list and how to design an attractive cover for it.
Now we need to create a landing page that will do the persuading for us. It needs to illustrate and present the book attractively and provide a form to collect the visitor's name and email address, add them to our list and send them a welcome email.
All this is easy if you have the right toolset. Let's take a look at how it's done.
What Exactly Is a Landing Page?
This is a question that puzzles many internet marketers.
The problem is that many people over-think it. They believe that there's something special about the format or design of a landing page.
There's not.
By definition, it's a page that you want your visitors to land on (the clue's in the name, isn't it?) and take a desired action. The desired action could be to join your list or to buy the product you are promoting as an affiliate.
The landing page could take the form of a lead magnet with an opt-in form, as I'm going to describe here, but it could also be a review page for one or more related products with affiliate links attached to them. For example.
You will typically advertise your landing page to your prospective action takers. Advertising will typically take three forms:
- SEO. You create articles, usually in the form of blog posts, targeting keywords that your audience might be searching for and these articles contain links to your landing page. This is free in terms of money, but requires an expenditure of time.
- PPC. You create Pay Per Click advertisements. also targeting keywords that your audience might be searching for, on platforms such as Facebook, Google Ads and Bing ads. This requires minimal time but costs money.
- Social Media. You establish a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook groups, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others, with links to landing pages. This can require a high expenditure of time and you can also spend money to promote your presence.
One other thing about landing pages.
Some people remove all navigation from a landing page. No menus and no links elsewhere, other than to the desired action.
The belief is that presenting the visitor with only two options, take the desired action or leave, increases the chance that they will do the former. It's essentially a matter of removing distractions.
I don't know if it's true.
How Do I Build My Landing Page?
Create a New Page in My Website
For starters, I click on Pages in my website's WordPress back office and then on Add New Page.
I give the page an immediately relatable name, in this case Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Free Book, leaving no doubt as to what the page is all about.
I use The Thrive Suite to build all my pages, so I'm going to describe what I do using Thrive Architect, its built-in drag n drop editor, but there will be equivalents in the WordPress block editor.
First, I drag the Image element to the top of the page (underneath the title) and select the Affiliate Marketing for Seniors book cover from the media library. I resize it as appropriate and modify its parameters so that the following text will wrap around it as shown in the image above.
Then I drag and drop a text element and fill it in with the first few lines of each chapter, copied and pasted from the book itself. There are 10 chapters, so I'm providing a substantial amount of information to persuade the visitor that the book is worth getting and will help them achieve their goals.
How Do I Capture My Visitor's Name and Email Address?
Select the Form
Still using The Thrive Suite, I select the Opt-in Form element, choose one of the available templates and drag and drop it underneath the text element containing the book's chapter summaries.
I then select my autoresponder from a drop-down menu and choose the list that I want my visitor's details added to. This will then happen automatically.
There are just two more things I need to do in order to automate the entire process.
I specify the Download Page (see below) that the visitor will be sent to after they enter their name and a valid email address.
And I specify a Tag to be added to their details in my list. This tag will trigger a series of emails to be sent to them at specified intervals. The first one will be a welcome email sent immediately and the rest will be a mixture of free information and links to landing pages for related affiliate products.
How Do They Download the Product?
Earn Their Trust
This is pretty important.
They've just trusted you with their name and email address. They are now your subscriber and potential future customer. Trust is of the essence.
You must get the book they've requested into their hands with little or no delay.
This requires two things.
A download page that they are taken to immediately and the e-book itself in a folder on your website that it can be downloaded from.
It's also a good idea to include a link to the download page in the welcoming email, in case they missed it the first time.
Upload the E-Book to Your Website
I covered creating the e-book in Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create a Lead Magnet so you should have it as a PDF file in a folder on your local computer.
Now you need to have it in a folder on your website.
FileZilla is a free software package that allows you to transfer files between your local computer and your website with an intuitive drag n drop interface, similar to Windows File Explorer. Alternatively, your web host (such as SiteGround) will have a file upload option.
Using FileZilla or your web host, connect to your website and create a new sub-folder (I normally use the nice and obvious free-product to contain all my lead magnets for a given website). Then copy your lead magnet's PDF from your local computer's folder to the free-product folder in your website.
The product can now be downloaded using the link https://your-website/free-product/lead-magnet.pdf, substituting the appropriate names, of course.
Build Your Download Page
Let me just say one thing up front.
It's really important to make your download page no-index, so set that up as soon as you create it.
The only way anyone should be able to reach your download page is by giving you their name and email address in your landing page, so it's really important that it can't be found by a Google or other search engine keyword search.
You may recall from my article Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create a Lead Magnet that I described how to create your e-cover in three different sizes.
I use the Small size as the first thing the visitor sees in the download page. This is just to remind them of what they are about to download.
I know, this is allowing for a very short attention span. Just think of it as reinforcement 😁.
This is followed by a button with the text "Download the Book Now" so that when the subscriber clicks on it, it fetches the PDF from the free-product folder in your website and opens it in a new tab.
I always include words underneath the button to explain what will happen.
The PDF opens for immediate gratification, but they can save it to a folder of their choosing to read and/or print later.
If you're using Thrive Architect, this is just a matter of dragging and dropping the button element to where you want it to appear and adding the path to the PDF for download. You can also set button parameters for shape, size, color, text and so on.
Summary
I've covered elsewhere the importance of creating a Lead Magnet and using it to add visitors to your list for subsequent product promotion.
This article showed you how to implement that on your website by:
- Building a Landing Page
- Promoting Your Lead Magnet on Your Landing Page
- Capturing Your Visitor's Details on Your Landing Page
- Adding Their Details to Your List
- Triggering an Email Automation, Starting with the Welcome
- Uploading Your Lead Magnet to Your Website
- Providing a Download Facility
This is an advanced technique in affiliate marketing for seniors, but one well worth mastering.
See Also:
Is Affiliate Marketing the Ideal Side Hustle for Seniors?
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors Work Flow
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: How to Build a Website
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create Content
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create a Lead Magnet
Successful Affiliate Marketing for Seniors and Retirees in the USA
