Pre-landing page or pre-sell page. What is it and why are new affiliates so scared of it?

The most simple explanation is that: pre-landing page is a bridge between the traffic source you are using and the offer’s landing page where you are sending this (cold) traffic. Newbies in affiliate business are so scared of landing pages because usually, they don’t know how to develop them.

With this article, we will cover how to build successful Pre-landing pages and as a bonus a few good tools which will help you to do this.

Using emotional triggers

Successful Pre-landers press the emotional trigger in your visitor’s brain and help encourage them to convert.

Usually, these types of pre-sell pages contain a lot of information about the product or the service you promote and creates a desire for that type of product. You should add its benefits in an attention-grabbing way.

As a result, your visitor will be “warmed up”, now knowing what to expect from the offer, he is curious how your offer will change his life.

Some examples of emotional triggers in landing pages

This is a fake “news” pre-landing page. From the headline we have the greed emotion – everyone wants a new iPhone for only 1 euro, right.

You still don’t believe us? Ok, here is another example:

This is a fake advertorial casino landing page that is usually used with native or push traffic sources. Again we have invoked greed from the headline – how to make millions without work only for 9 days – that is a dream!

If we continue we will see pictures of a girl who is playing in the casino and then is partying at a pool. She is happy, she is smiling, she is rich  – this is what you think now, right. I bet you're a little jealous too. You want money and happiness also. This brings us to another powerful emotion you can use in your pre-sale pages: jealousy! Below we have some keywords like “free winning tip” (greed again) and “Don’t want you to know” (curiosity)

Last example of how to trigger visitor’s emotions:

This is a part of a skincare pre-landing page. We have curiosity (new skin treatment method) and a sense of safety (it can be used without a prescription, so it’s safe) in the headline. After that, we have greed again (Old grandmother saves $13.437).

Let’s pretend we are a 60-year-old lady who read this at the moment. What else you will feel? Maybe you be angry because the other woman doesn’t pay for cosmetic surgery anymore, but you still do. Yes, you are right – envy!

Think you are already convinced, emotions are a very important part of your affiliate journey.

But only emotions are not enough to have a good landing page.

Invoking trust in your visitors

When a visitor arrives on your pre-landing page, he generally has around 5 seconds to decide what he will do – continue to read it and interact or quit. So, your landing page must create trust within 2-3 seconds of their arrival. Fortunately, there are several ways to add trust to your landing pages:

Ways to add trust to your landing pages

First, you need to add an SSL certificate to the domain where your pre-landing pages are.

SSL certificates are what enable websites to move from HTTP to HTTPS, which is more secure. SSL certificates make SSL / TLS encryption possible, and they contain the website's public key and the website's identity, along with related information.

You can add a FREE SSL certificate via cloudflare.com or via your tracker.  Most trackers offer this service for free – just read the tracker’s manual or ask their support for help.

A basic thing you can do is to use a top-level domain like .com, .org, or .net.

Another good idea is also to put some testimonials on the pre-sell page.

Here is an example of a testimonial that builds trust on the landing page.

This is the testimonial section from the fake “news” landing page and as you can see this part imitates Facebook comments from happy users who just received their new iPhone.

If you decide to use this approach, please be careful because some traffic sources like Facebook and Google don’t allow fake testimonials!

This is another way to add a testimonial to your landing page. Its often used for beauty and weight-loss landing pages.

Whatever method you will choose please use it wisely and do not overdo it!

Great ideas on how to increase your landing page conversion rate

1. You can use some antivirus or security badges. But do not forget you need to have the legal rights to do it.

2. You can put the user’s country flag on your landing page. If you are targeting users from the United Kingdom put their flag, if you are targeting Thailand, put the Thailand national flag, and so on. Our advice is to always target only one country per campaign – it’s easier to track it.

3. Another good option is to add some urgency in your landing pages. You can do this by adding countdown times in your landing page like “You have only 15 minutes to register for free” or “this discount will end next 30 minutes”. You also can put urgency in your ad copy: “Warning! Limited Time offer!” or “Last 5 items on this price! ”

4. Other interesting tricks to increase your pre-sell open rate are:

• use a vibration (only for mobile landing pages and offers);
• intro pop-up or JavaScript alert which is shown before landing page loads;
• remove all distractions from the landing page like Facebook’s “like” button or Tweeter’s share button or any other social media buttons;
• make your landing page loads fast – if you can achieve a loading time under 1 second it will be perfect;
• redirect the visitors from your landing page to the offer page after xx seconds, even if the users don’t click on the CTA button.

And this leads us to another very important part from the pre-landing page – the CTA button

Call-to-action (CTA) buttons are those big (usually) buttons you use on your pre-landing page to forward the visitors to the offer’s page where they will do a particular action – buy a product, register to a dating site, or something else.

Tips to an effective CTA

1. Use a clear message: if you promote a dating site, don’t use words like “Continue”! Instead, you can put “Want my dream girl”. If you sell a weight-loss product, you can use “Lost 15 kg NOW”, not the usual “BUY IT”.

2. Colors are important! Please use contrast colors for your Call-to-action buttons. For example: if your main color is green, you can use a purple CTA button. You can check this article in CrazyEgg’s Blog if you want to know more about colors and landing pages!

3. Use a first-person tone: “Download My Free Book” or “Find My Date”

4. Remember the sense of urgency? You can use it in your CTA buttons too: “Want My Discount Today” or “Meet Her Today”

Follow this simple, but important tips you will have more conversions for sure. Guaranteed!

Recommended page builders

If you are new to the media buying and affiliate world and you don’t have any coding skills I know what you are thinking at the moment: “WTF, I’m not a developer, I can’t code landing pages, what I will do then”

Luckily for you, there are some code-free solutions out there. Here are some of our favorites

1. NicePage – Nice Page is a free website and landing page builder. You can download it for free from their site. It’s available for OSX and Windows OS and you don’t need any coding skills to use it – just drag and drop the elements to make the landing page you want or use their templates and edit them according to your needs.
2. LanderBolt – Lander Bolt is a premium online site builder for affiliates and media buyers. They offer not only great landing page templates for the most famous verticals but also a hosting plan with free domain unlimited traffic to your landing pages and integration with some trackers.  Unfortunately, there is no free trial, and the monthly subscription starts from $49.
3. Unbounce – Unbounce is another premium online tool for designing and creating websites and landing pages. Prices here start from 80$/month, but they offer a 14 days free trial to test their service.
4. PureLander – PureLander is a very good service for new affiliates. First, this tool is made by affiliates for affiliates. Second, it has a very affordable price – only 25$ for a six months subscription. The creator @tyouseff is a media buyer too, so he knows perfectly what you need. In PureLander you will find templates of the most used landing pages - you can edit them with a built-in drag and drop editor, download and then upload them to your server.