A CBengine member and Clickbank publisher asked me to review her sales page for the blog. First, I need to say how impressed I am with this publisher asking for feedback and having the courage to let me post the review on the blog. It’s refreshing when publishers want to work to improve their sites. So give a big round of applause.

Creating effective landing pages is good for all of us (affiliates and vendors) for the simple reason that a quality landing page will produce more sales.

On to the review... The site is Health Obesity.

First of all, the biggest problem I see is that the website is trying to be a publisher site and an affiliate site. You’ll notice the publisher has Commission Junction affiliate links running down the right hand column. This is a big no-no and will kill a publisher site for the reason that Clickbank affiliates are not going to spend time and money sending traffic to a site with outgoing affiliate links. We don’t want to help you sell OTHER products you’re affiliating. Also, it will hurt sales because all these link choices will distract prospective buyers. If a potential buyer is given too many directions to go, i.e. presented with a pageful of links, they often don’t go anywhere. They’re paralyzed with confusion and usually click the X on their browser and go elsewhere. Keep your site simple. One sales page and an order button at the bottom, maybe a few order buttons sprinkled throughout the copy. Give the buyer one choice, buy or don’t buy. That’s it.

So, in conclusion, pick one kind of website, publisher or affiliate, and don’t add confusion by straddling the fence.

Second, Health Obesity has multiple ways to order, Clickbank and PayPal. If you want Clickbank affiliates to promote your site you should only offer payment through Clickbank. No pay by mail or phone or through another payment processor. Those sales can not be properly tracked and affiliates will lose commissions. Most affiliates check to see if publisher is only offering payment through Clickbank before promoting the product, so you’ll likely turn away 90% of prospective affiliates from promoting your site just with this one mistake. And it’s redundant to offer payment through PayPal anyway as Clickbank already accepts PayPal through their system.

Next issue: Sales page offers the affiliate program too conspicuously. It’s right below the order button. This can lead to prospective buyers coming to the site and seeing they can save money on products by signing up for the affiliate program and purchasing it through their own id therefore bypassing the affiliate who sent them to the site in the first place. It’s okay to advertise an affiliate program, but it should be buried way down in the footer where seasoned affiliates know to look.

If you’re going to take the time to create an affiliate page, make a full page with content: banner ads, keywords, articles and some explanation of WHY affiliates should promote this product. Health Obesity only has a link to the hoplink generator which doesn’t appear to be working correctly.

Lastly, while the page copy is well-written, I think it’s too scientific and needs to have more emotional hooks built in to increase sales. Some rough examples of emotional hooks… Have more energy… Feel better about yourself… Attract the opposite sex with your new figure… Improve your health… your self-esteem… feel vibrant again. Etc. etc.

I would take an overall more emotional approach to the entire site.

Also, in the copy there is talk about ‘kids and obesity’… I can’t tell if this product is targeted toward kids or adults? So the focus of the copy has problems. If this is a program for kids then I would focus my approach on that, making my target, obviously, the parents of children. I might even change the name of the site to something like WeightLossForKids.com.

And one last thing, I would make a killer attention grabbing title at the top of the site and add a few testimonials from satisfied clients.

Here are several effective sales pages to study:

http://www.cbengine.com/cbe/web.cfm?hop=panicaway

http://www.cbengine.com/cbe/web.cfm?hop=burnthefat

http://www.cbengine.com/cbe/web.cfm?hop=turbulence

Again, congrats to this publisher for trying to make her site better and if she takes my advice I will post another blog showing the improvements she’s made.