I’ve spent plenty of time messing with all types of landing pages attacking various angles from numerous approaches using a plethora of elements. Yet regardless of what I included in my landers, one thing always remained paramount: speed. In an age where instant response is guaranteed and expected in nearly all facets of life, user’s have become impatient and will quickly become either annoyed by long load times or distracted by something else, causing you to lose in the process. If you’ve got a stellar landing page consisting of a killer angle, it means little to nothing if your target doesn’t actually see your masterpiece. So I wanted to provide a few simple techniques which you can use to speed up your landing pages.

The first technique, explained in the video below, utilizes Dreamweaver’s Hotspot feature. Hotspot allows you to seamlessly create an image map for images in your landing page. Using this technique we can take all of the elements and images we would want in a landing page and combine them all into one large image, thus decreasing the amount of images the browser would have to load, ultimately making our landing pages faster.

Check out the video below to find out how you can boost the speed of your landing page using hotspots!

When looking for new ideas regarding landing pages, one thing comes to a lot of people’s mind: scrape and copy. I’m not and advocate of scraping, but some individuals simply have no idea where to start with a new angle or niche offer and I understand that. Taking a look at what someone else has created in order to get an idea of what may and may not work isn’t harmful. We all had to start somewhere.

Plain copy-pasting of another person’s idea without any sort of personal tweak should be highly discouraged. I say this not merely from a standpoint of integrity, but because I know how much of a bummer it is when a really profitable angle and layout gets stolen. If you haven’t taken the time to at least make an effort to safeguard your landing pages against scraping, then you have no one else to blame for your loss.

Here are a few ways to combat this.

1). Regularly Switch Domains

Once your landing pages have been out there for a while, some scrapers may begin to notice a trend and actually seek out your domain name to find other landers that appear. Switching out your domain keeps you ahead of the game and decreases the likelihood that anyone will catch on to your landers (unless you have a very typical style of lander, in which case I urge you to try out new styles).

The more traffic you get, the more frequently you should change out your domain name. For people using T202 or CPVLab whose domain hosts their tracking, however, this may come as an obstacle. For that, you can create CName in your DNS directory to create a domain alias for your landing page. This process can be a little tricky, so make sure you contact your host before messing with this too much to ensure that you don’t create erroneous directories.

2). Remove any “Right Click” Options

Aside from trying to keep people off your trail by switching domain names, you can also remove the ability to right-click any images or other elements of your landing pages with an easy-to-use script provided by one of the great people at Dynamic Drive. Simply place

to the header of your lander and suddenly your images cannot be simply copied or saved from a browser. This will stop a lot of novice individuals from outright scraping your images. Obviously, print screen is always available.

3). Remove Unwanted Visitors

You can ensure that only the people who’re designated to see your landers see them using a couple of methods. One method you can use to keep things like spy tools from seeing your landing pages is with .htaccess and adding unwanted or flagged IP’s from viewing your landing page.

Doing this requires a little bit of digging on your part, but it doesn’t take much. For Cpanel, just find out which IP’s appear multiple times with no profitable action and block that IP from your server through the IP deny manager under the security section.

Another way to keep out unfruitful visitors is by redirecting bots like bo.lt from viewing and ripping your landing page. This can be done with a redirect script like so:

4). Encrypt Your Code

A big reason for why people rip/scrape landing pages is not only because they can’t come up with any fresh ideas themselves, but because they’re not familiar with code. I can sympathize with the latter, being not an incredible expert in web pages myself, but once I’ve taken the time to create something really awesome, I would like some time to reap the benefits of my labor before someone instantly copies and pastes my hard work.

So to jumble up some work for the not-so-advanced scraper, you can use this nice HTML Encrypter and paste in your lander to create a coding mess so annoying, most people will not take the time to figure out what’s going on!

These are some of the tools and methods you can use to keep your landers out of the hands of the masses for a little bit longer. I should stress that taking these precautionary measures won’t completely ensure that your landers won’t get scraped eventually.

There are other ways you can keep your landers close, but at a certain point, you need to ask yourself when it’s no longer cost-effective to take every measure to secure a landing page. This marketing space is ever changing; which means that you have to change your methods and approach ever as much.

Gathering the proper tools to create a successful campaign can seem a little expensive to the novice marketer. Take into consideration the cost of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, advertising/design/html books, forum subscription, plus tracking. Combine that with the minimum you should reserve for testing ($1,000) and you could be spending over $1,800 before you’re even into your marketing career with no guarantee of success. While I truly believe that in order to be a big player in this field, one needs to spare no expense when it comes to utilizing the array of premium tools and resources available, I understand that not everyone is willing to dive in head first into the uncertainty of marketing. That’s why I wanted to take some time to compile a list of free tools and resources available at your disposal. Continue reading to see if you can start your campaigns sooner than later while on a budget.

Creative/Banner Creation

Photoshop is an incredible piece of software which allows really no explanation. But if you’re on a budget, the price tag may be a little hard to swallow. If that’s the case, I urge you to check out Gimp, Pixlr, or Bannersnack. These image editors (while they admittedly pale in comparison to Photoshop) give you the basic tools you would need to create simple banners and small ads which is all you really need when first creating campaigns. You may not be able to utilize batch processing or create animated GIFs with these image editors. But at the very least, you can create banners of various sizes, backgrounds for your landers, and even buttons and eye-catching CTA’s for your landers.

Landing Page Design

If you’ve taken a look at any of our previous posts on landing pages, you may have noticed that all of the tutorials were mostly provided using Dreamweaver. I could rant all day about how great an asset Dreamweaver has been to my landing page creation process, but I figure it mostly goes without saying that due to the lack of any computer tech background, designing a landing page without Dreamweaver would have taken forever to learn. However, with its $145 price tag, you may be wondering if there are cheaper alternatives out there. For that, I would direct you to the WYSIWYG Web Builder which provides many of the same features as Dreamweaver at a fraction of the cost. Although WYSIWYG isn’t as popular as Dreamweaver among other advanced marketers, WYSIWYG still has features which allow you to easily create landing pages for your campaign. Features like creating simple forms with various button types, inserting navigation elements, advanced elements like Quicktime, Real Player, Flash, and a few other elements that you can use to make a successful landing page.

If you’re not sure about spending the $44 on the WYSIWYG Web Builder, there are even more financially-conservative routes like Notepad++ and Bo.lt. Bolt is an online web page editor which allows you to copy any web page, edit its content by deleting current images and uploading new images, then save and download the newly edit page. Not only is bolt a great way to mimic offer pages for your landers, it’s a great way to create new and unique landers right you’re your browser. Notepad++ is simply a more user-friendly web page editor than your typical notepad. It does require a more extensive amount of knowledge of HTML than if you were using Dreamweaver or WYSIWYG but, when combined with the use of bolt, becomes a slightly more manageable and useful tool for the novice marketer.

Books and Forum Subscriptions

One thing that needs to be abundantly clear is that without some community support or books on how to effectively advertise a product, your chances of success drop dramatically. This is why forums like STM, AffPlaybook, and IMGrind are so popular. These forums and a few others were created by successful people in the marketing space and provide some of the most useful tips and tutorials an internet marketer could ever ask for. However, subscribing to these forums can cost you a couple hundred dollars a month. So while I believe there’s truly no substitute for the aforementioned forums, there are free alternatives like Marketing Scoop, Wickedfire, and Warrior Forum. These are less-reputable forums and may be frustrating at times, but they’re much better than nothing at all. Combined with some affordable literature which can be crucial in the development of your campaign I would suggest investing a few dollars in the widely popular Ca$hvertising, Scientific Advertising, and Web Copy That Sells. These books can be incredibly helpful in your campaign process and while they hardly act as a substitute for the paid forums previously mentioned, the information you can find in these books along with what you may find in the free forums can be a less expensive alternative.

Tracking

Due to the numerous posts we’ve created regarding campaign creation and rotation scripts, it should be apparent that I use T202 a lot. I use T202 for only one reason: it’s all I’ve ever really used. This is because it’s free and it works perfectly. The alternative however, is CPVLab. Although it is free and allows me to accomplish all of my tracking needs, the downside to T202 is that when you need assistance on any issues with T202, you’re left at the mercy of other users who post on the help forum. With CPVLab, there is greater probability to getting questions answered in a timelier manner.

As I state throughout this post, the alternatives for the myriad of premium tools and resources I mentioned should not be considered permanent replacements. These are merely less expensive routes which are available to people just getting into internet marketing. Once a greater foothold has been established, I highly suggest further investing in your marketing efforts.
In terms of priority, I believe the paid forums should be at the top of everyone’s list. You’ll find that the paid forums are chalk full of great conversations, tutorials, and case studies which cannot be found anywhere else, providing value to even the most experienced marketer. After that, what you decide to invest in next should be what suits you best; just make sure you’ve reserved enough money for testing.