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Running my landing page/creative store for affiliate marketers has been a lot of fun, but I end up selling a lot of stuff to people that want into the industry, but have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. No HTML knowledge, no real idea of what a landing page is and have no idea how to upload it to a server (if they even have one that is). You’d be surprised, actually, by some of the emails I’ve received. Something along the lines of, “I downloaded it, now how do I put it on Facebook?”

*Facepalm*

Alright, so we all started off somewhere and not all of us have the same knowledge on computers, servers, domains, and tracking. This post should help you get started. This post will require some Googling, for your own good, and to allow me to cover only things that should be important for most of the landing pages I offer in my store. There is plenty of other sources of similar information out there like this, so learning how to do research will be good for you now and the rest of your internet marketing career.

For those of you that have been affiliate marketing for more than a few weeks, you probably don’t need to read this as it is about as basic as it gets.

Much of my store items deal with PPV, so that’s how I’ll be setting up this quick tutorial.

Tools We’ll Need

• Hosting (preferably a VPS to start off with)
• A Domain Name
• Tracking202/Prosper202
• WYSIWYG/Text HTML editor
• A Landing Page (Free Download!)
• An FTP Tool

Hosting Options

You’ve got a plethora of choices with hosting. Number 1 thing to stay away from is shared hosting though. Unless you like long load times, lots of down time where you won’t be able to connect to your site, and don’t mind all of that cutting into your ROI, STAY AWAY (especially with PPV traffic)! I won’t get into the details of why you shouldn’t use shared hosting with PPV traffic, but all I will say is you will lose more money with it than you will save by using a cheap host.

At the very least, go with a VPS. I always recommend Wiredtree. They’ve got fantastic support, so even if you are total technical noob on the server side of things, they’ll help walk you through anything, and I mean anything. When I first started with them, I probably sent them 5 different tickets a day and they were all answered within 10 minutes. The price for a low end VPS (which is all you need for now) is around 50 -60 bucks a month, which is really nothing when you can easily make that all back within a day.

Once you start making big money, move over to a dedicated server or two.

Buy a Domain

For most of my PPV landing pages, I just buy a few different general domains that can be used for anything. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy. I could use something like JDsGreatDeals.com or something like that. Don’t worry too much about it. I buy my domains from Namecheap.

Anyways, you need to point the domain to your server. If you don’t know how to do that, ask your hosting provider. Wiredtree has a great setup document they give to all their customers. Read it and you will learn a lot!

Tracking202/Prosper202

Again, I’m not going to go into all of this. Tracking202 has some fantastic documents to help you set things up. All you need to do is pick your self-hosted version (Prosper202) or use Tracking202 off their server. I recommend Prosper all the way. Faster, editable and more secure.

Landing Page

You can download that free lander here, or buy more from my store (or subscribe to my forums which include a crap ton of downloads available the moment you subscribe (currently over 60 and growing daily!))

Setting up the LP

To set up the landing page, you’ll want to open up the index.html file in your favorite text or WYSIWYG editor. I’m using Dreamweaver, just because it allows me to visually see changes when I alter the HTML a bit. Dreamweaver has a free trial, and I highly recommend you purchase it as soon as you can (pricey, but 100% worth it).

So here’s what that looks like:

It’s a confusing massive wall of text, right? Read up on some HTML to get the jist of what it all means. Google is your friend.

The first thing you’ll want to take a look at is the <title> tag in the header (underlined in the image above). This is what is shown at the top of the browser. It is VERY important for PPV, as this is the first thing loaded and what any user will see when they get a pop-up. I’ve seen lots of people set this as “Test Landing Page 1″. That’s just dumb. Sure, its a little bit easier to keep track of when you are opening it up yourself, but it can be a serious deterrent which means they might just close out before the whole landing page loads. I’ll be pretending this is a weight loss offer I’ll be promoting, so I’ll set it as “Want to Lose Weight, Fatty? | LOSE 10 POUNDS IN 1 HOUR WOW!” It’s stupid and unrealistic, but it gets your attention, and that is what it is there to do.

Rather than edit the code, there is a small text box on the menu bar at the top you can use to easily change this.

You can save the file, and click the file again to open it in your browser to see the change you just made.

Now, you’ll want to change the header and bullet information. This is fairly simple in Dreamweaver. You can just highlight the area in the Design preview window pane, and it will highlight area in the HTML pane, as well. Then just type in whatever you want. See the above image to understand what I’m saying here.

You can do the same for each bullet point.

Then you’ll want to send users to the offer page when they click the button. This is a rollover button, so it has some tricky code added in, but it still isn’t hard to add in your link. Click the button and it will highlight the button code in the coding panel. On the bottom is the properties toolbar. You’ll see an area called link. Simply enter in your affiliate link that you grabbed from Tracking202 (You’ll figure that part out with the documents and help available on Tracking202).

When you’ve done all this, make sure you add the landing page code (From Tracking202) before the end body (</body>) in the code panel.

And you’ve finished editing you landing page. Not too hard, right? Right. Moving on, we’ve got to set it up on our server.

FTP Software

I use SmartFTP. It’s fast, remembers all my domains and passwords for me (I always forget), and does a whole ton of other more advanced stuff. You can try FileZilla or CuteFTP if you need something free.

Anyways, connect to the domain on your server. If you still haven’t linked your domain to your server, you should probably figure that out first. Ask your host’s support on how to do that if they don’t provide documents on how to do that (Wiredtree does).

Alright, moving on. Connect to your domain on the server. It should look like the above. I’m just connecting to justindupre.com here. I’ve got a bunch of folders and stuff set up here, but you probably won’t have many except for maybe a private folder and a public/www folder. Just open the public/www folder. The other stuff isn’t important.

You will want to make a separate folder if you plan on using this domain for multiple  landing page. Just right click on the pane on the right and make a new folder, just like in Windows. I’ll make a sample here and rename it 111. So this sets me up the whole URL of http://justindupre.com/111

From there, all I do is drag and drop my files (grap the index.html and the whole img folder) from Windows browser explorer into that folder. Then I press the play button and it automatically transfers everything to my server!

Check out your work!

All that is left is for you to start buying traffic!

And that is all there is to it. Now, I know I didn’t go too far in depth, but that is because there are so many posts on this subject, that it  is hard for me to just not copy them all and paste it here. Again, Google, Google, Google. We hate it, but we love it. Learn how to use it!

Now go out there and start making money.

Looking for case studies and more in-depth walk-throughs that show you how to take that landing page and start making money with it? Join the forums!