Create a Landing Page in WordPress (Free)
If you’d like to be successful in affiliate marketing as a beginner (an maximize your earning potential), you must create a landing page linked to your WordPress site and collect email addresses. Collecting email addresses would allow you to follow up the initial interest with a sequence of emails, build up a rapport with your subscribers, see what they are interested in and ultimately, you’ll be able to offer them a product that they will more likely buy into.
Create a Landing Page in WordPress For Free
Instead of sending people straight to the website of the product you promote through an affiliate link, you need a landing page.
A landing page is where you can collect email addresses in exchange for information you will share through your emails, a free product, an ebook, a cheat-sheet, whatever.
Creating a landing page in WordPress is a really simple thing to do. By the time you finish reading this post, you’ll be confident in creating landing pages in WordPress yourself, so keep reading, make notes, and make sure you try everything out: it is much easier done than you could imagine.
In fact, if you’d like to start affiliate marketing in the quickest possible way, a landing page is the minimum requirement to do so. Having said that, I don’t recommend jumping straight into ‘picking a product from ClickBank, setting up a Landing Page and off you go‘ type of make-quick-buck affiliate marketing, but even then, you must master the art of making a high converting landing page / opt-in form.
If you’d like to learn how to start affiliate marketing, how to pick a product / affiliate program, how to approach the campaign, how to get inside the head of your audience I recommend the very training I completed myself.
It is free to sign-up, a 10 lesson -long step-by-step course introduces you into affiliate marketing and website-building.
You can have two free websites to play with, so it is really a no-brainer if you’d like to start affiliate marketing
It does not really matter if this landing page is on a free domain or on a domain you own, however it looks much more professional if you keep your landing page on your own website. (more professional –> more people will opt in)
So if you have not got a website, get yourself one, it is completely free and does not take five minutes to set it up. You can have a look at the complete tutorial on how to create a website in WordPress in this post I wrote: How To Create A Website For Free From Scratch
Collect Emails
Before we jump in, you’ll also need an email auto-responder. This will not only automate the follow-up email sequence, but most auto-responders have an opt-in form builder (we not going to use that one in this example)
I would use sender.net as my autoresponder for this task because it has the best cost/value: it does everything all the ‘big names’ do, yet it is much more sensible in pricing (completely free up to 2,500 subscribers).
If you have not got an autoresponder yet, I recommend sender.net, but you can use anything else (GetResponse, MailChimp, Aweber, Convertkit etc.) however I think these would be a bit of an overkill for the purposes of setting up a quick landing page.
If you have already signed up for an autoresponder, you can create your opt-in form using those. Most also have a dedicated landing page builder too.
Creating the Opt-in Form
So first, we create the opt-in form. If you have no idea how it should look like, just copy one you like from any website.
An opt-in form should have;
- a Catchy title that grabs people’s interest
- Some brief info of what people get in exchange of their email address
- Email (and Name) box(es)
- For GDPR compliance a statement about what you will send emails about and that they can unsubscribe at any time
- A Call-to-Action button
- A ‘Thank You’ page confirming that they have subscribed
Keeping all these in mind, let’s crack on:
Step 1 – Log in to Sender.net and select Forms from the menu on the left.
Step 2 – Create a new form, give it a name and select the email list you’d like to collect the emails to.
You can see real-time how your opt-in form looks like. Now select the ‘Style’ tab above the opt-in form, because the first thing we must determine is that how big our opt-in form should be.
The default size is more like an opt-in form that you can add to the sidebar of your WordPress website, or keep it embedded within your article. It can work with a Landing Page too, but then you would need tables to keep everything tidy on the Landing Page.
So I prefer to set the width to 600 px or so, and have a picture above the opt-in form (same width).
All the rest is pretty much straightforward: you can pick colors, font types, border width, border line styling etc.
Step 3 – Select the ‘Fields’ tab, and pick the fields you need. I always use First Name and Email – without First Name it would be very difficult to send somewhat ‘personal’ emails to my subscribers.
Step 4 – Go to ‘Content’ and use the editor to write your opt-in text. Don’t over-complicate it! People won’t really read it anyways, and you want them to quickly just sign up before they change their mind!
Step 5 – When you finished, click ‘Save’. You’ll see the script code of the opt-in form. Leave it as it is, we will need to insert this into our Landing Page that we are about to create..
Adding a Landing Page in WordPress
So we need our WordPress dashboard now. Hopefully you are familiar now with the dashboard. If you need a walk-through of what’s what and how to properly set up you WordPress site, how to add Pages and Posts then I recommend this training (registration needed, but it’s Free). It explains how and why WordPress is the easiest and best way to start a new website and that how you can find your way around the plethora of functions in WordPress.
In order to set up a Landing Page we need to create a New Page.
Create a New Page in WordPress
Step 1 – You can either use the menu on the left (Pages –> Add New) or the + New button on the top (+ New –> Post)
You are probably best if you use the Classic Editor for this task.
Step 2 – Add a title – e.g. SIGN UP.
Step 3 – You don’t need to but you can add an image. I think it makes the Landing Page look a bit less depressing if there is a picture. I always align it to the center, but it is completely up to you how you make it look neat and tidy.
Step 4 – Then select ‘Text’ in the editor, this is where we’ll add the code for the opt-in form.
Insert Your Autoresponder Script to the Landing Page
Step 1 – Go back to Sender.net and copy the ‘Script’ across to the WordPress editor. Insert the code as the last line in the ‘text’ editor.
If you clicked back to the ‘Visual’ editor, you would only saw a little icon for the embedded object. Click ‘Preview’ to check that it looks alright in the browser.
Final Touches on the Landing Page
Lastly, a few settings to make sure the Landing Page looks as it should.
In Document Settings find ‘Post Attributes’ –> Template –> and change ‘Default’ to ‘Full-width Layout’.
This will make sure that there’s as little distraction as possible.
Making Changes to the Landing Page
If you need to change the opt-in form in Sender.net, you must always copy and paste the code again into the WordPress Landing Page. The code changes every time you modify the opt-in form.
If you need more control over how the opt-in form looks like (and you are not afraid of a bit of ‘coding’) you can copy the ‘HTML’ code across from Sender.net, instead of the ‘script’ code.
This will give you all the access you need to change font-types, colors, layout, anything.
Tips
Tip #1 Save the final Landing Page as a template, and whenever you create a new landing page, use a copy of the template.
Tip #2 If you need a ‘hook’ or a free give-away etc as a reward for signing up, have a look at this post to get some ideas where you can get freebies from: How to Find Free Giveaways for Your Blog (To Get Email Leads)
Now, you are all set up and ready to collect email addresses. 🙂
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