» How to Get Your Sales Letter to Rank Well in the Search Engines

I’ve had a few people come to me with a mini-site asking for advice on how to optimize it for the search engines. As you probably already know, most mini-sites are just one page sales letters. They’re great for getting a sale, but they don’t work so well for ranking high in the search engines.

So how should you optimize your sales letter or mini-site for the search engines?

My reply is simple…

DON’T!!!!

Now, I’m sure you’re probably wondering why I’ve even brought this up if that’s all I have to say. But, like I said it’s simple. Absolutely, never optimize your sales letter for anyone or anything other than prospective customers.

Now, I can hear what you’re saying, “How will I get anyone to look at my sales letter if I don’t rank well in the search engines?” … “I can’t afford to pay $4.67 for every stink’in click.”

No worries, you won’t have to. Here’s what you do instead.

Build a second site that is optimized for the search engines and then put ads for your mini-site product (or service) on it. Before you fly off the handle with all the extra time and money this will cost you, hang on a second…

If you want to be an internet marketer, you’re going to have to be comfortable using the internet. This also includes putting up sites. You can definitely outsource this, but it’s really not that hard to buy a domain name (BTW these are about $8.95/year so this isn’t much of a cost) and then just put up a wordpress blog. You don’t need to know HTML, PHP, or any other coding language if you don’t want (honestly though, using Dreamweaver is about as easy as Microsoft Word once you give it a try - but I understand if you don’t want to).

You can even use a reseller hosting account if you want to keep things simple. Put both the mini-site and the SEO site on the same account and pay less than $25 a month. Reseller accounts usually come with CPanel which allows you to install wordpress or a few other content management systems with a couple of mouse clicks. All of these free CMS’s have free templates that you can change with just a few clicks of your mouse. There are so many free templates with wordpress that I don’t think anyone knows what or where they all are.

So if nothing else, set up your SEO site with a wordpress blog. Wordpress works great for SEO anyway. Then use Wordtracker to get some low competition/high key phrases and optimize the site for them. Write several posts using these key phrases and start a link building campaign. If you do this right, you’ll get free search engine traffic to your new site within a few weeks. This trickle can grow to a flood of traffic — funnel all of it over to your sales letter.

If you have an opt-in list (which you should) then send people over to a page set-up just to get people to opt-in (a namesqueeze page). Give them a teaser on your SEO site (or even let them sign up right there). Test different advertisements for your product and get people over to your sales letter.

With a little work, you’ll have a highly optimized site for the search engines that serves to send potential customers over to your highly converting sales letter. Now you have the best of both worlds!

An added benefit to this way of doing things is that this particular income stream is not dependent on just one site. If something happens to one of them, you still have the other. You can easily sell your product from the SEO site if you have to. And you can still send traffic to your sales letter site from paid advertising if the other one gets bumped from the search engines.

Anytime you can add in a “safety feature” like that to your business, it’s worth a little extra work!

Technorati Tags: link building, SEO, blog, advertising, content management systems, Wordpress, Wordtracker, namesqueeze