(Newbie) Which offers/landing pages for automotive content site?

[Seascape]

Hello! I'm still new at this, and yet to put up my first offer/landing-page/campaign.

I've taken a bunch of content I've written over the years and assembled it into an automotive-related website (Detroit history, muscle cars, Nascar/Sportscar racing etc).

Now I would like to hang some single-offer auto-related landing pages off of the root directory. (That's whats usually done, right?)

What would anyone suggest?

For example, I'm attracted to the JC Whitney catalog, having been a customer from years back. Is that the sort of thing in which I find a single product in the catalog and build a landing page for it? (and then repeat for other products?)

What else automotive related is easier for a newbie to put together?

 

[Linda Buquet]

JC Whitney is one I was going to mention.

"Now I would like to hang some single-offer auto-related landing pages off of the root directory. (That's whats usually done, right?)"

Hmmm, the way you say that makes me think of PPC. Are you planning to do PPC? That's normally when people talk single offer landing page.

Typically with a big store like JC Whitney and affiliate would put do one of three things or a combo of all 3.

1) Put up a datafeed. Essentially build your own auto parts store on your site, using thousands of JCW's products

2) Link to category pages. You could have a bank of links in the sidebar to the most popular categories at JCW that you think your visitors would be interested in.

3) Use intext links when you talk about a type of product or category of product. If you mention XYZ part link to it at JCW right in the article. Or if you are talking more generally about cool hub caps then you link directly to their hub cap category page.

Now if there were specific products you knew were hot - you could build a full page, but it would be labor intensive to do that for many products. Even if you were doing PPC it's sometimes better with retail products like this to feature 3 products to show a small array of options.

Make sense?

 

[Seascape]

Linda, thanks!

Yes, I was thinking about PPC (adwords/adcenter/ysm) to get traffic to the landing pages.

I guess the trouble with the landing page approach with JCW might be that each page would either be all about one product, or a mini catalog page with multi products?

I understand suggestions #2 & 3, but for #3 could you (or anyone else) suggest a website with some good info about data feeds as it relates specifically to this? (I've already read through a few I found on Google)

 

[Linda Buquet]

Here are a couple older articles I've written about datafeeds. Info is still true though.

Datafeed Affiliate Programs - Datafeeds 101 a Beginners Primer

Double Affiliate Conversion Rates with a Datafeed | WebProNews

 

[Linda Buquet]

Just checked for you and JCW is on Popshops, so that's the easy way to do datafeeds with 0 programming.

In fact it's so easy the 3 year old in this video just built an affiliate bulldozer store.
Check it out!

More info about Popshops.

 

[Seascape]

Thanks Linda, that's a lot to digest.

I guess my problem is that I'm still trying to get over that "first campaign" hump. I've been going through your blog,and the the 1/25/08 entry was helpful.

I guess w JC Whitney, I need to go even deeper into a niche than just "auto parts"... I probably need to make a landing page specializing in ONE type of auto part, like say a specific brand of spark-plugs? Or a specific brand of fuel-injector cleaner? Does that make sense?

 

[Linda Buquet]

For the offers you are doing PPC to yes, very targeted however I'm guessing there is not enough profit in spark plugs to be worth doing PPC. You need to estimate avg click cost then guestimate average conversion to get to number of sales X the commish you'll make.

For the blog however I would think feature 3 or so categories or so and link to the main category page for each. I'm not a car person so you'd guess better than I can, but it seems like your market would be interested in jazzier stuff like leather steering wheel covers and hot hub caps or high performance equipment of some kind. So pretend you are your average visitor and pick 3 product categories you think they'd be interested in.

That's just to start, you could expand on that later if you think it makes sense. Down the road you could even use popshops to build your own little category specific stores and put the products right on your site.

 

[Seascape]

Thanks Linda - I've been reading through the niche sub-forum, and that's been helpful.

I'm honestly only interested for now in doing PPC/Landing pages.