The Profitmart Experiment

I was messing around with some ideas last night and I came up with some interesting techniques that might work for this project. I’ll be talking about those over the next couple of days. Today I want to take a look at the tools we have to work with on our Profitmart page and explore some landing page objectives.

Before I get started I’d like to take a moment to blog some general thoughts about this project. It’s hard to believe but this is the first blog I’ve ever started that I actually did some regular posting in. Setting a public deadline is a really good way to get your ass in gear.

Am I going to be successful at making affilate income on my Profitmart site? I honestly don’t know. Will this project be a waste of time if I don’t make it? Absolutely not. I’ve already learned new stuff and I’m guessing you have as well if you watched the link in yesterday’s post. I have no doubt that I could make this work eventually, but any internet marketing venture takes trial and error to see if the niche is going to make money for you. Failure is an integral part of the process and you have to be prepared to fail a good portion of the time. I saw a great movie last week called “Meet The Robinsons”. I thought it was going to be another cookie cutter “try to be hip” animated film but I really enjoyed it. One of the driving forces in it was a quote from Walt Disney which seems appropriate here.

“Keep moving forward”.

It really is amazing what you can accomplish if you keep chipping away at something. It’s even better if you have a deadline. OK - enough inspirational gobbledygook. Let’s get back to making my Profitmart site profitable.

I experimented with a couple of things last night. I tried a number of different ways to reconfigure the site through the admin panel. The Profitmart page layout is pretty standard. Header, footer, main body in the middle, left panel and right panel. There are some limitations to how far you can customize it. You can do pretty much anything you want in the header, footer and main body. This could include adding images, scripts and customizing text as much as you want. Great. You start to run into limitations with the side panels. You don’t have direct access to the html (underlying code) in the side panels so you are limited to what they provide. You can control what shows up in the side panels through the Enable Zones panel.

The highlighted areas in this image are the sum total of the control you have over the side panels.

The side panels are a common and logical place to put links and ads so it makes sense for them to set it up this way. Unfortunately we can’t mess with colors, text or any background images in those panels. If I don’t turn anything on in the side panels they do get skinny which provides more room for the center panel. The center panel allows you to show your own content as well as adsense, clickbank and/or ebay feeds.

Now given these parameters, what is the best layout option for our site?

We need to keep a couple of important things in mind:

1. Expectation. What is our traffic expecting to see when they arrive? It’s crucial that we deliver on their expectations as soon as they hit the page or we will lose them.
2. Presentation. We don’t want to overwhelm our visitor with clutter. It’s better to have the one thing on the page that they were looking for than a bunch of clutter. Don’t make them work too hard or they will leave.
3. Content. What kind of content are we presenting here? Is this a blog, sales page, review site, resource site? A combination? Let’s decide on a focus and stick to it. We could always expand later.

Let’s take a look at expectation first. We will be pulling in traffic from a number of sources. These could include natural search engine listings, banner ads, classified ads, pay per click advertising, etc. I’m not planning to venture into the sketchy land of safelists and traffic exchanges. When someone responds to a search or an ad they will be expecting to see something very specific. If we go with the dog training niche then about the broadest thing we will be advertising will be “dog training ebooks”. The person clicking on our ad will expect to see “dog training ebooks” and we better deliver on that expectation. On the more specific side we might target a particular ebook like SitStayFetch. In either case it has to be immediately obvious that they have come to the right place and that there is quality content here.

Presentation is equally important. If they show up to a page that’s a cluttered mess of dog training ebooks, banners, random bits of text and ebay feeds they will just be overwhelmed and go somewhere else. The page should be visually inviting with a central focus. It’s OK to have some ads and links on the sides but they are secondary to the main content. They didn’t come to your site to see a bunch of ads. Would you watch television if it was all commercials?

What kind of content will our site be focusing on? Here are some likely possiblities:

• Review site - compare and review several products in our niche.
• Sales page - we could decide just to promote one product and build everything around it
• Resource site - Useful information in the form of articles, reviews, recommended products, etc.

The biggest obstacle here is that we are stuck with the domain name we picked when we signed up with Profitmart. Ideally you would want a domain that matches your niche. For example my domain name is workathomejobs4me.com. It seemed like a good idea at the time but it doesn’t make much sense for a “dog training” site. Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.

Thats it for today. Tomorrow I’m going to look at a technique for embedding someone else’s sales page in your Profitmart site.

If you find this useful and happen to be in the Profitmart forum please mention my blog.

See you tomorrow.

mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under profitmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.