BANS Landing Pages

A recent thread on the Build a Niche Store user forum was discussing how to setup landing pages on your BANS sites. This is something I’ve been doing on all of my BANS sites ever since I got started, so I’d like to share my method with you.

What is a Landing Page?

First things first… what is a landing page? (If you already know the answer, you can skip ahead to the next section.) A landing page is a term used quite frequently in online marketing. In a nutshell, it’s the page you want a visitor to “land on” when they click on a link somewhere else. It’s basically the first page you want them to come to when they click on a specific link to your web site.

This is important when you’re dealing with online marketing efforts. Let’s say you have a BANS store selling Nintendo products. Now you write an article at HubPages about how great the Nintendo Wii console is, and provide a link back to your site. If you just link to your main site, someone specifically interested in the Nintendo Wii is going to get a site that’s generic to Nintendo (including the DS, GameBoy, games, accessories, etc). When you’re trying to get a visitor to buy something from your site, you don’t want to lose their focus like that.

So instead, you would create a page on your BANS site that just lists auctions for the Nintendo Wii console specifically. Then you would link directly to that page from that article you wrote, making your Nintendo Wii page the “landing page” for your article.

Landing pages are important for all sorts of marketing efforts: articles, pay per click (PPC), online classified ads, and so on.

Creating a Landing Page in BANS

Okay so now that you know what a landing page is, how do you set one up in BANS. There are probably many ways to do this, but here is my method:

1. I determine how many landing pages I want to setup, and for which products. 

   Other niches will have too many products to make this practical. In those niches you will want to setup landing pages for your most popular products, and/or individual products you’re targeting through marketing efforts (e.g. PPC, articles).
    

   There are some niches where it might make sense to make a landing page for every product in the niche. For example, in the Nintendo niche you might setup a landing page for “wii consoles,” “wii remotes,” “wii numchucks,”etc.

2. I check to see if eBay already has a sub-category for the product.Sometimes an individual product is so popular, it will already have it’s own sub-category in eBay. Other times the product has it’s own category, but you can break it down further by model number.

   An example of this would be the TomTom GPS navigation system. It has it’s own sub-category in eBay, but you could create separate landing pages for the “TomTom GO 720,” “TomTom GO 920,” “TomTom ONE XL,” and so on.

   Just be sure to do your research so you’re only setting up landing pages for individual products that have a high sell-through volume on eBay.
    

3. Create a BANS store page for your landing page.
   
   Once I have identified what landing pages I want to create, I go into the BANS admin area and create a new store page for each landing page. I fill out all of the information on the page so that it looks nice (title, meta info, etc.). Make sure to give it an H1 title in the content area. Enter in the category number from eBay that your product appears inside of, and then enter in your product name in the search query field.An example search query would be: (tomtom,tom tom) 920 -(antenna,screen protector,charger,mount)

   This sample query will pull up any product listing from eBay that has either “tomtom” or “tom tom” in the title, has “920″ in the title, but does not have any of the words “antenna,” “screen protector,” “charger,” or “mount.” So the query would pull up a listing titled “Brand New TomTom GO 920 GPS Navigator,” but it would not pull up “TomTom 920 Car Mount.”
    

4. Test that the landing page works in BANS.
   
   The next step I take is saving the page and viewing it in my BANS site. I’m looking to make sure it’s pulling up only the individual products I want. If any wrong products appear, I modify the store page’s search query until I have it right. I also make sure the title of the web page and the content I added before the product listings all look okay.
    
5. Add more to the page to increase you conversion rates.This step is optional. Once you have completed steps 1-4 you have a good enough landing page that you can be confident if someone clicks through directly to that page, looking for that product, they’ll find what they came to find.

   However I like to add more value to the visitor and increase my chance to make a conversion. What I do is head over to Commission Junction to see if there is an advertiser selling the same product, to possibly add an affiliate to them within the content area of the page.

   Or I frequently go to Amazon and see if they have the product listed there. If they do, I’ll add a link in the content area of the landing page (above the auction listings) that says something like “Amazon’s Retail Price: $295.” This does two things…

   First, it gives the visitor an option to buy from Amazon, and if they do I’ll earn a commission from Amazon.

   Second, it gives the visitor options and information. Think about how you shop for products… you compare prices! How does your visitor know they’re getting a good deal buying an auction from eBay if you don’t show it to them? A lot of people get cynical about the prices at eBay (especially around Christmas… Nintendo Wii prices ring a bell?), so I like to show them what a great deal they’re getting in the hopes they won’t click off my site and go somewhere else to find that information.

   Here’s a real story from one of my BANS sites: I setup a landing page for a product that sells on Amazon for around $325. You can get the same product on eBay for a little over $200. I put a link at the top of the page with my affiliate information (of course) that said “Amazon Price: $325.” Now I setup a PPC marketing campaign for this product at Google, and did really well making my eBay commissions. Wouldn’t you know it, though, that I got a few sales over at Amazon too!

   Here’s the real kicker… my average commission for this product at eBay was like around $3.50 for each one sold through my site. Amazon, on the other hand, gave me 4% of the $325 as a commission for each sale there. That’s a $13 commission for each one sold at Amazon.

   So by adding the Amazon link to my landing page, not only did I give my visitors more options and buying confidence that they were getting a great price, but I actually converted some of them through Amazon for even higher commissions than I get from eBay!

   Now like I said this step is optional, and it is labor intensive. You have to go to Amazon or CJ, find the product, build your affiliate link to it, and then put that link in the content section of the landing page and make sure it’s all formatted properly. However for really popular products or products I’m specifically targeting through marketing efforts, I find that this step pays off in the end.

Well there you have it. Those are the steps I use to build landing pages on my BANS sites. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment.

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