This post will, I hope, be helpful to anyone new to affiliate marketing or to those who don’t feel they have the knowledge or confidence to create their own landing pages - there IS an easy way to have great looking and great converting landing pages, for free! I am assuming though, that you have at least a reasonable grasp of affiliate marketing, have already joined a proper CPA affiliate network like MediaTrust and are also capable of at least editing and altering a simple html web page and images. If not, you need to start learning right now!

Whether you can already design good landing pages or not, free CSS based templates are a great time saver on a variety of levels, you just download your chosen designs and insert your content/hack them around as you need, stick a few images in as needed (iStockphoto is good for royalty-free pics otherwise grab an image from the affiliate offer you’re promoting), insert calls to action* etc etc, upload to your web host and you’re good to go.

*If you really can’t make call to action buttons, examples aren’t hard to find - good article here, and a free psd pack of buttons here.

OK so lets get to the good bit, choosing the free page template you’re going to hack into a money maker! Below is a list of a few sites that give away free css based static html templates. There are loads more sites like these, but realistically you’re not going to need more to choose from, at least to start with.

Good Free CSS based static page template resources:

oswd.org (not updated often but decent selection)
free-css-templates.com (nice selection updated regularly)
free-css.com (good quality nice designs, regularly updated)
freecsstemplates.org (great selection, and new additions fairly regularly)

Personally I would look for something pretty simple and clean design wise - you’re really looking for a headstart on layout and maybe colours used, so you have a framework to start with. Less is more, and simple design and layout will generally work well - you don’t need a four column layout for a lander, 1-2 will do nicely! A good example is something like this - simple, clean, and real easy to hack about to get it just how you want - a great starting point!

For the slightly more advanced/capable, you can do the same for your Wordpress based site/lander - but for ‘thin’ single page stuff, I’m more a fan of having single static html pages - if you’re running anything other than adwords to it, you don’t have to worry about shitty quality score issues and you can concentrate on making a lightweight, fast loading page that doesn’t make your hosting die if you start running volume to it.

Now obviously I can’t tell you which template or theme is ‘best’ - this is entirely subjective according to the demographic you’re targeting, and the offer you’re promoting! But, free templates and themes like the ones you’ll find on the sites above give you a GREAT headstart - it’s pretty easy to browse through them and find something that you think matches the offer and suits the demo best. You can always make 2-3 landing page versions using different templates and then split-test them anyway to find the best one.

One thing I will say, and this is pretty much based on my own experience, so the same may not be true for you, is that simple/ugly sells. It works. Kinda breaks my design-appreciating heart, but the best performing landing pages you’ll make in all likelihood will be simple almost to the point of being ugly and looking like they came from 1998. Disclaimer: this depends on demo, offer and your methods of promotion, so test test test!

Also try and test your page in as many browser versions as you can to ensure it displays ok and everything is how it should be. As a minimum, you should include Firefox, IE and Safari to test your page in.

It goes without saying that you should test ALL your affiliate links before you start running any traffic to the page, especially if you’re paying for it!

There’s also other time-saving aspects to creating your own landing pages as well, apart from the fact you’re not having to wait for someone to design you something and send it to you, make alterations etc - you can even hack up your own great looking set of banners by re-using images from your shiny new LP!

Simply take a screen grab of the finished LP while viewing it in your browser, paste into an image editor like Fireworks or Photoshop and start cutting/resizing/pasting images from the lander into your blank banner ad - this will give you a good degree of design consistency as well which doesn’t hurt. As with your landing page templates, don’t worry about making banner ads that are going to win design awards - simple (ugly!) banners often work very very well!

Et voila! About 1-2 hours later, you’ve got a landing page and a set of banner ads ready to go at a total cost of zero - and you’ve also learned enough along the way to be able to make alterations and different versions of each to split test with, and to do the whole thing quicker next time, without having to pay anyone else.

Now you’ll be needing some traffic to run at your page, right? Check out my mammoth useful list of advertising networks for a whole bunch of paid traffic sources!

Enjoy!

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