Hello guys, I'm new to affiliate marketing and still learning about all these things come together. I understand that one way to do affiliate marketing is by having a landing page to drive traffic to the advertiser.
In the Step by Step Guide Part 3, caurmen suggests signing up a VPS to host the landing page.
I would like to know what are the drawbacks of using online landing page creators such as lander.com, instapage.com, etc?
For the most part these services are all the same... a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface and dozens of pretty generic templates that all seem to want to collect leads i.e. email signups. They offer integrations with an array of other services (e.g. MailChimp, Wufoo, Facebook, Aweber, etc) that we are not going to use. They are decent if you want to whip up a landing page for getting email submits but most of the time we don't want this.
To give my opinion, I wouldn't use these services because:
1. I don't like not having direct control over page code. The pages generated by these services are often far too heavy. What if I want to place tracking codes, pixels, javacsript etc. - not all services make this simple.
2. I want to know where the servers my pages are loading from are located.
3. What about PHP content? Are the pages hosted on a CDN? Or just static content? If they load everything from a CDN then dynamic content is screwed.
4. What about tracking? If I need on-page PHP tracking then the servers are ideally running the tracking system and the landers. But I can't run tracking on their servers. That's detrimental to speed.
You're free to use these services but I wouldn't recommend them to start. There are situations where they are useful but for the most part you can ignore their existence.
Everything Zeno says is right on the money.
There's one additional point to note: a lot of these services are slooooooow to load, particularly for non-US visitors. That's absolute death for an affiliate campaign.
I'm honoured to have 2 experts replying to my question. Thank you so much for your detailed answer!
No worries - it's what we're here for!