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GEN8: Creating Your Lander Site (35)

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This will be a short post.

As much as I would love to provide a detailed guide on how to build websites, there are simply too many variables involved - seeing as this is a general FB guide that covers a wide variety of businesses/verticals.

So I'll do my best to point you in a general direction in this post. Then, in the "Biz-Model Modules", I'll go into details on what kinds of websites to create for each business model.



Deciding What the Site Will Look Like

First of all, you need to decide what kind of site to build.

But if you've already chosen what to promote and conducted your research, you should have already compiled a list of relevant FB Pages and the websites they're linked to, that you can model your site after.

Having a legitimate-looking website may delay FB's banhammer, so make sure that by the time you're done, it doesn't look like a "thin" affiliate site.

I'm probably repeating myself here: When you're doing your spying, it's important that you choose FB pages and websites that have are associated with longevity in running ads, so you can model yours after them for the best chances of making your ad account last longer.

There are a few other considerations that are worth mentioning:

-Make sure your site has SSL installed. This has become a standard these days, and is so easy to implement, there's no reason NOT to.

Most people use chrome these days and you don't want users to get the "Your connection is not private" warning. Plus you want FB users and possibly the FB bot or human reviewer to see your site as secure and trustworthy.

-Mind landing page loading speed. Although page load speed for FB ads may not be as important as it is for pop ads, we should still aim for a reasonably fast-loading page/site. A slow-loading site will affect bounce rate and therefore conversion rate. Here's a graph of site load time vs. bounce rate shown in this article by pingdom:



The general advice would be to keep loading times under 3s, although of course the faster the better.

And there are lots of ways to optimize a site for speed - using a CDN for example. Please see this post for tips on loading speed optimization.

-Show contact information such as email, phone number, physical address (even if virtual). We've covered this in the lesson on FB Page. This info should be on the "contact us" page, or better yet, be displayed on every page (e.g. site-wide header/footer). Ideally it should be on the landing page you're sending traffic to so the FB bot/reviewer will see it without having to click around.

-Optional: If you've had an ad account or FB page banned in the past, it would be best not to host the new website on the same IP as the website that was connected to the banned account/page. Ask your hosting provider to add a new IP (usually for a fee) or get a new hosting account.



FB's Policies Regarding Landing Pages / Websites

I would also suggest to read over the following links, which contain some of FB's policies that are relevant to landing pages / destination websites:

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads

https://www.facebook.com/business/le...-landing-pages

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ad...l_landing_page

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ad...ve_experiences

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1767120243598011

Also: Remember that, when setting up your FB Page, you were asked to specify your privacy policy page url? Be sure to have this page on your landing page site! FB likes for users to be informed, and for our businesses to be transparent.

To see examples of privacy policies: Again, check out some of the competitor sites you're modeling after. Alternatively, google "privacy policy templates" to find a template and customize it for your purpose.



Creating the Site

No matter what type of site you're building, you'll need to register a domain name. For your reference, this post has a step-by-step on how to register a domain on namecheap.

As for actually creating and hosting the site, below are some common options.


Shopify

-@caurmen's guide on how to set up a Shopify store is still relevant, although the shopify interface has changed since that post was written.

-Shopify will provide an SSL certificate for your domain/store. Make sure it's turned on (although it should be by default).

-Add store policies as appropriate. Be sure these links are on every page you'll be sending FB traffic to (e.g. site-wide footer would be good).

-No need to worry about CDNs as Shopify is already using one (i.e. Fastly).


Other Website Creation Platforms

-There are lots of other platforms that allow non-coders to create websites easily, and most will host the sites for you as well. Examples are Wix, Clickfunnels, and Leadpages.

-No matter which platform you build your website with, make sure that a)you're using your own custom domain and not the platform's domain (e.g. http://whatever.clickfunnels.com/), b)SSL is installed and turned on, and c)the site has a privacy policy page as a minimum (if also has contact us, terms of service, etc., even better).

-Optionally, integrate your website with a CDN such as Cloudfront/Cloudflare if the platform isn't using one already.


Wordpress

-I'm talking about wordpress.org, where you download + install + build + host yourself, and not wordpress.com (although you can use the latter as well; in that case please ensure to connect your own custom domain).

-You'd need to get your own hosting for this. Please do your own research as to which webhost is good.

I personally have a dedicated server at LiquidWeb which I've been using for many years and can vouch for their quality and service, but you definitely won't need a dedicated server for hosting one / a few small sites. Here are the basic hosting requirements for your reference.

-The biggest tips I can give on minimizing loading speed for wordpress sites are: 1)Use a fast theme, 2)minimize the number of plugins, 3)use a CDN (optional; there are plugins available to do this).

There are also speed optimization plugins like W3 Total Cache you can explore (optional).

-Again, be sure to have an SSL certificate installed! You can get free ones here. These are valid for 90 days at a time so you'd need to put a reminder in your calendar to remind yourself to renew).

And if you're willing to pay a few bucks, there are lots of other places where you can buy ones that last a year, for example at any domain registrar (e.g. Namecheap).

For installing the SSL, this plugin will do the job.

-Be sure to include policies pages - a privacy policy page at a minimum. There are plugins you can use to help with this, for example this one.

-There are other CRMs or wordpress alternatives like Joomla, Drupal and others. Same suggestions as for wordpress apply to these as well.


HTML/PHP

-Lastly, you can code the site from scratch, or rip and modify e.g. using httrack (please be mindful about copyright laws; disclaimer: I/STM cannot be held responsible for any repercussions that may result).

-Again, be sure to implement SSL, include a privacy policy page, and optimize for speed as appropriate.


Outsourcing

-If you don't have the time or the know-how to develop the site yourself, you can always outsource it on freelancing sites such as Upwork or Fiverr.

-As for site content, I've used a number of content provider services in the past, but have never found one that could provide top-notch articles at reasonable prices. If you want top-quality stuff, I would suggest going to a freelancing site like Upwork, going through some of the freelancers' portfolios, and inviting a few to write one page of content for you each, then assigning the rest of the content to the best writer.



A Few Last Things

1)If you haven't yet, remember to insert your website url and privacy policy url into your FB Page.

2)Check the loading speed of your site (or at least the landing page), using pingdom or other website speed testers I described in this post.

3)Check your website url and landing page url using the following links to check for errors, and to make sure they're not blocked by FB or google:

https://transparencyreport.google.co...rowsing/search

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Obviously, if there are any errors shown, resolve them before running traffic.

If your site is brand new it shouldn't be a problem, but if (knock on wood) anything gets banned, you can quickly check ALL the links in your funnel using these two tools, including any tracker links, affiliate links, and offer site links (final destination of aff links) - doing so may give you an idea of what may have caused the ban.




Amy

FB Beginner Tutorial: Index

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Hey Amy - Appreciate you making this post. LPs have been a point of pain for me. I've never been able to rip a lander, edit it and get it on hosting.
I know how to rip landing pages using HTTrack and designing using LP software (leadpages, webflow, etc.).

But how do you rip an LP and then edit the code and upload to hosting? This has been a hang up for me in AM for the longest time (the process goes over my head).

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Eeks! Why have you waited so long to ask?

Please go through the following lessons in the 40-day tutorial:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Landing-Pages

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-Up-Landers

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...osting-and-CDN

Then ask any questions you may still have afterwards!



Amy

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Thank you - I will go through those modules on LPs.

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Hey Amy - The first link links to codeacademy courses. They might take me a few weeks to complete.

Is there a way to get up and running quicker with landers? I’m trying to do the minimal right now to rip LPs, change code, and upload to hosting. I want to be conscious of moving forward in AM without getting too caught up with coding.

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The first two courses requires 9 + 15 = 24hours. You do not even need to do them entirely. In a weekend studing these courses, you can get a level decent enough to start. They do not require a few weeks to complete.

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In case you don't want to learn how to code, rip&clean landers yourself, you might start with the ones we have here on the forum: https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...age-Depository

Alternatively, you can purchase plenty of pre-cleaned LPs from adplexity for just $1 : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ity-for-1-only

However, in order to really get anywhere in AM, you need to either learn how to rip and MODIFY the LPs yourself, or find someone who can do this for you.

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If Wordpress is how you decide to build your site, I would suggest SiteGround as a host, Wordpress with Elementor Pro plugin where you can visually edit your site (as well as use pre made template kits) and easily create custom landing pages.

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@matuloo - That's what I'll do for now. Rip and clean landers.
@affiliatecase - I'd like to use wordpress going forward. I downloaded a few templates off of Themeforest - now it's a matter of updating the code and uploading to hosting. Need to figure out how to do so.

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Absolutely agree with @jeremie and @matuloo on the need to learn some basic coding. Even if you decide to outsource this task in the future, it would be easier to have some experience so you know what changes are possible so you can delegate.

As for wordpress - it's a good platform, but the BIGGEST drawback is the loading time. If you're running pop traffic where people are basically interrupted from their browsing and are frustrated when the ad pops up, you can't afford slow loading speeds because nobody would wait for the ad to load. 1s loading time or less (of course the less the better) is pretty much the industry standard, at most not exceeding 2s.

If however you're running targeted traffic where the visitor has intention in finding out what you have to offer, wordpress MAY be viable, because you'd have some leeway on speed as visitors have shown interest by clicking your ad and are obviously eager to see what the deal is. So these people will wait a little bit for the page to load. Of course, in spite of this, people still have short attention spans and will still bail if the loading time is exceedingly long.

So in summary: Absolutely don't use WP for pop. If you can help it don't use WP even for FB/Google or other targeted traffic, but you can get away with it if you do.

The biggest tips I can offer for speeding up WP sites: 1)Use as few plugins as possible, and 2)use a fast-loading theme. You can find 100 more optimization tips by googling, and many of them help, but I've found the two factors above to be the biggest ones contributing to loading time.

Hope that helps!


Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Hey Amy - Yes, this is very helpful. I'm using themeforest for themes and WP for my site. I'll work with those for now (feeling a little overwhelmed with all of the different ways to get LPs up and running). Want to make sure there's minimal brain damage at least for the first few campaigns. Need to just pick something at the moment and make progress. Codeacademy is on the backburner for now.

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Definitely do not use Wordpress landing pages for pop or push. Low volume Facebook or Native and fast hosting should be enough. I would really suggest getting yourself Elementor Pro plugin instead of buying separate themes from Themeforest. Not only can you design your theme to be anything you like, but also have flexibility of creating landing pages, popup windows, integrating with mail service providers to collect leads etc.

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Got it. Buying Elementor Pro right now. Will report back.

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It's still a WP website builder though. Really man, if you plan to run POP traffic or any other loading speed sensitive type, DO NOT use WP for landers.

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Hey Matuloo - I don't plan to run Pop, just basic E-Com offer. With that being said, what should I be using outside of WP?

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Basically, what is the most optimal way to build landers? If i start by ripping and replacing and then move to bespoke methods, what should I be doing?
I have a Webflow account, WP subscription for a year, Namecheap domain, HTTrack, and Themeforest templates.

As you guys can probably tell, pretty scattered with my efforts - I need a little more direction.

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If you're running ecom, then wordpress would be OK.

In that case, no need to rip anything using httrack.

There are lots of ecommerce plugins for wordpress, the most popular being WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Or, just set up a site on Shopify - that would be even easier.



Amy

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Are you promoting somebody else's offer or is it your own product that you are trying to sell?

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Promoting someone else's offers for now.

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Ok, then you don't need WooCommerce or Shopify. Just Wordpress and Elementor. And maybe an Email Marketing Platform to collect leads and monetize on the back end.

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Really quick question off of this: I will get Elementor but I've already bought 2 Themeforest themes (in HTML) and I'd like to upload atleast one to hosting. I've tried upload using File Manager on cPanel, but for some reason i only see the text for the site (even though I've uploaded index.html and css, js files).

Do you know how to resolve this? Something tells me its a quick fix.

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Not sure what the situation is...

Did you upload the theme files to the right place?

Did you activate the theme? Check here to make sure your chosen theme says "Activate", if not, click on "Activate" for that theme:



If you don't even see that theme listed, try to upload it again within wordpress:



And then activate it as described above.

Good luck!



Amy

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Hey Amy - when I downloaded the theme from Themeforest and clicked on the index.html, it would take me to the generic site with full color/formatting/text. But when I upload the theme to cPanel for bluehost, it shows just the text from the site.

All good though, switching to Elementor with WP per affiliatecase’s suggestion.

Thanks

P.S. if anyone here knows someone that would be willing to walk me through an over-the-shoulder campaign setup (of course, paid for), I’d really appreciate. Feel like I’m 100% fumbling the basics and spending a ton of time “learning” versus starting/executing

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By all means start a thread to make that request - I'm sure lots of people would be willing to help!

If not - you can always start a follow-along or ask questions when you're stuck.

The more time you spend learning and "fumbling", the deeper the learning will be. So it's not all bad.



Amy

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Is it possible to use Amazon S3 + Cloudfront?

Thanks

R.

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Yes, see here for guidelines if needed:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...osting-and-CDN

(should you have any questions, please ask them in the thread i mentioned, so that we keep all S3/CloudFront questions together)

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You can use any hosting you like - loading speed isn't as critical of a factor as for pop traffic (within reason).

Hosting is the easy part. The important thing is how to make your landing page look legitimate to FB bots and human reviewer.


Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Thank you jeremie, I'll do it

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-No matter which platform you build your website with, make sure that a)you're using your own custom domain and not the platform's domain (e.g. http://whatever.clickfunnels.com/),

May i ask why we should not use the platform domain?

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Some people reported having their FB accounts banned while using a subdomain of clickfunnels.

See #9
https://www.clickfunnels.com/blog/ti...iant-facebook/

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As @jeremie said.

Generally speaking, linking from FB ads directly to a root domain that is used by a lot of other people can potentially put you at risk by association. Meaning if any of those other people that are sending / have sent traffic from FB to that domain, did anything to displease FB and got their account banned, FB may "blacklist" the domain or associate it with undesired activity. Wherever possible, using your own / new domain is advised.



Amy

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Hi @vortex thank you so much for this tutorial!

My final milestone in learning AM is mastering landing pages. I'm going to run FB traffic to affiliate offers. I have a couple of questions:

1. I plan to host my site on wix/clickfunnels/lead pages.

I'm planning to use Wix for the website and go thru the links you mentioned to learn to code and edit landers. Is Wix a good option in terms of loading speed etc over CF and Leadpages?

Also noob question but the links you mentioned also explain how to integrate the new designed landers on my wix site and domain, right?

2. As an affiliate, we'll eventually be testing tons of offers in different verticals. So do you create a separate relevant FB page and website for each vertical - eg one for nutra and one for insurance? Or like a general news site? (would love if you have examples or ideas for this it's a bit confusing for me).

Thank you!

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Hi @projectzero! It was nice seeing you on zoom the other day. Hope you got lots done!

First of all, I have next to zero experience with the page builders you listed. But here's what I know:

-These types of page builders tend to be slower than if you were to code them directly. This is because a lot of redundant coding needs to be included in order to allow the user to use a WYSIWYG user interface to build the webpage using elements. I have no idea which page builder is faster/slower than the others though.

-I don't believe any of the technical setup information in my tutorial would apply to these page builders. Basically your pages would be hosted with Wix/CF/LP and all you need to do is point your domain to the respective service. E.g. Instructions for Wix:
https://support.wix.com/en/article/c...ointing-method

-If you're running on FB, then loading speed is not remotely as critical as for lower-intent traffic like pop, or push. Lots of people running campaigns on FB use the page builders you listed.

-There ARE ways to speed up pages built with these builders - google to find out how. For example by using fewer apps on wix, your page can load faster.

-As for whether to use one website or multiple for different verticals: For running affiliate campaigns on FB I would suggest to not only have a different domain per vertical, but to get new domains for every new campaign you run. This is because FB tends not to favor affiliate offers, so it may be to your advantage to "start on a clean slate" as much as possible, especially if you've gotten a campaign rejected or an account banned while running traffic through a domain - you really wouldn't want this "bad history" to follow you into the next campaign.

Not everyone will agree with me on this being a necessity - I may just be paranoid, so take this with a grain of salt. It's just that domains are so cheap to register, it's a no brainer.

Hope that helps!



Amy

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It was really fun working with you too - we should do these more often!

Okay, that makes sense. Based on what you said I think I'll use httrack to code the websites instead.

As for the multiple websites, I think I'll go your way. Once I have the first one built it really shouldn't take long to build out duplicate ones with new domains.

Thanks for your help!

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We should lol! These 'study groups' have potential to become so much more in the future, but we're starting small.

If you're not comfortable with coding, page builders can be a great way to start. If you're running social traffic, page load speed isn't AS critical (although of course faster is always better).



Amy

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