IMM1 Part 6 – Building Your Main Money Page

Every site should have one or more “main” pages. These are the places where you want to make your money/commissions or place your promotional material. Whether it's a page that promotes some products relevant to your niche, a landing page for you to build your email list so you can market to them later, or some other goal, it's always best to centralize it.

“Main” pages go by many names. Neil Patel calls them “hero” pages, others have called them “pillar articles” and the community where I learned Internet Marketing calls them “theme pages”. I like to keep it simple, so let's just call them “money” pages ;).

Different Forms Of Money Page

There are various different types of money pages. There are landing pages, pages that try to get subscribers, or general sales pages.

The most common page in affiliate marketing is the review page. This is where you choose a product that is going to be helpful to your audience, write a review of the product, and showcase why it will benefit your audience. Of course you can have multiple products on one page, depending on the topic.

As long as you're honest and ethical, people will trust your opinion and might well make purchases based on this review, and you'll get commissions from being an affiliate. There's a lot more info on the basics of affiliate marketing here.

Genevieve's first money page is going to be a “Best (Insert Niche Here) Products” type of page. I told her to write 1,000 words if possible, because I want this page to really stand out in Google. When you create your money pages, you really want them to be the best possible pages out there related to that topic, so that they'll get their own rankings.

You'll be sending traffic to them from all your other blog posts as well though. Here's a diagram of how you “centralize” your money pages. The arrows indicate where you will want to be linking to your centralized page from, and how traffic should flow to it.

money-pages

Of course, search traffic also goes to blog posts, and blog posts can link to other blog posts as well as central pages, but this is a simplified version to help you picture the structure.

I also like to use what's known as the “skyscraper technique”. If there are other pages out there that give information similar to your page, you want to make sure yours is better than all of them. Make it the tallest skyscraper. There's more information on this technique in an article from Brian Dean of backlinko.com.

When you are doing a review of a product you have to try to make it personal and something that your audience can relate to, so as well as outdoing your competition, you'll also need to “keep it real”.

Why Centralize Your Offers?

There are a few reasons why you want to centralize your offers/promotions onto their own dedicated pages.

– Firstly, you don't have to keep writing out the same “why buy this product” blurb every time you mention it.

– By having one centralized page and linking to it from a lot of your other posts, it will slowly have increased importance in Google's eyes, and thus better rankings.

– You can keep track of things and see how your article checks out. If you are sending a lot of traffic to one page and not getting any sales, you can think about re-writing it or trying a different product.

– You don't always want to be “selling” to your audience. You want to build trust and demonstrate authority with your main posts, and as people trust you more, they'll follow your links to your sales pitches. More on this concept here.

– Having affiliate links all over your site looks kind of spammy to Google. Keep it clean.

– Finally, dedicated review pages usually convert higher than random “check out this product” lines in posts (although these can still work).

Genevieve's First Attempt

After having her warm up by writing 4 regular blog posts, it was time for Genevieve to write her first money page. Her topic was “Best (niche not yet revealed) DVDs”. I told her to write about 1,000 words, along with the above mentioned advice.

She came back with an excellent question regarding images, and whether or not she could use the product images on Amazon. When it comes to Amazon, you CAN use the product images, as long as you are promoting the actual product on Amazon and not somewhere else, which makes sense.

If you're promoting other products, it really depends on the product. Most affiliate programs will let you know which images you can and can't use. Never just download something from Google Images and upload it without checking it is OK first.

Genevieve hasn't actually joined Amazon's affiliate program yet. It's next on the to do list. Honestly when your site is so new and young, you don't need to worry about affiliate links. You're not going to be getting much traffic, and your site will look less spammy if it is affiliate link free.

As for the content of her article? Well the practice she's had over the last two weeks has clearly been paying off, another excellent article! It came in at about 1,100 words too.

Next week we will reveal the site and you'll be able to check it out for yourself. Subscribe to not miss out!

As usual, it's time for Genevieve's thoughts on the week.

The following is written by her:

Next Task: Writing 2 more articles

For my next task, I had to write 2 more articles. One of the articles was for the main keyword and I had to try to write 1,000 words. Bryon said I should really try to imagine that I wanted to make it the best article for that keyword.

He also told me I should do my usual Google research, and really work hard on it. So far so good, I didn't get stuck!

Bryon suggested I should try to time myself this time. I should try to finish the other article (with the standard 400-500 words) in 2 hours if possible – 1 hour for research and 1 hour for writing. Even if it took me 3 hours, that meant I would have had some practice for writing quickly.

I took about half an hour for the research and about 2 1/2 hours for the writing, that included the tweaking, editing and adding (breaks and interruptions not included). With the other article (main), it took me about 1/2 hour or 1 hour longer (in total) than the first one. Hopefully I can improve as I go along.

Additionally, he wanted me to write my articles within WordPress rather than on Word. He wanted me to get more practice using the WP editor, etc. I just had to make sure to hit the “save draft” button from time to time. I think writing within WordPress is not too bad, it's almost like using Word.

I think that's about it. Exciting (and nervous) time ahead!​

Back to Bryon.

Regarding the WordPress thing, Genevieve had been writing her previous articles in Word and emailing them to me. I realized that going forward, I wouldn't always be there to help her upload and tweak her articles, so I needed to be training her more on the ins and outs of WordPress. Luckily she seems to have picked it up rather easily.

I guess that is why WP is so popular as a blogging platform!

Onto Next Week

There are still some tasks to do before we present this site to the real world. Firstly we've got to tidy up the site and make sure everything is looking good. This includes the sidebar, the navigation menus and the footers. Additionally, we'll need to make sure her site has good internal and external linking. Finally, we'll need to install Google Analytics and set up Webmaster Tools and Google Authorship.

It's all a bit tedious but something that a lot of people overlook or put off until later. Never underestimate the importance of getting things looking spic ‘n span!

See you next week! We WILL be showing the site at last.

6 thoughts on “IMM1 Part 6 – Building Your Main Money Page”

  1. Another fantastic update – Great work Genevieve!

    Out of interest are you disabling Google index at the moment within the WP settings? I wasn’t sure whether it’s worth disabling indexing until you have a 5+ post site, or whether just go from the start and let Google crawl your progress.

    What do you think?

    1. I used to go with the “disable” index thing, but I find it’s not really necessary. Firstly, Google isn’t going to stumble upon a site that is under construction anytime soon, and if they do, it will be a while before they re-visit. My main concern is people forgetting to enable the crawl again later.

      I would rather Google visits your site and goes “meh”, than you forget to enable the crawl again. Which is potentially worse?

      What I do instead is delay adding the site to WMT until it’s ready. Once the final preparations are done (5-10 pages of content, internal linking, external linking, sidebar etc), then I’ll have Genevieve add the site to WMT and GA, and let Google crawl on our terms.

  2. Very informative! I have taken some notes from this 🙂 Genevieve is lucky to have you there to train her and I for one cannot wait for the site to be revealed!

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