Should I Put My Product Landing Page Inside My Blog Or On A New Domain?

Daniel

questions and answersThis post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Vijay asks:

How to build a product landing page to sell our own products through our blog? Should we develop a page on the same domain, or should we put it on another domain?

In reality there are two questions there: the first one is about how to create landing pages, and the second one is whether you should place that landing page inside your blog or create a dedicated domain just for it. I will answer the latter question today, and the other one will be covered next Friday.

As usual, the answer depends. If the product you are talking about is connected or related with your blog, for example an ebook on the same topic you blog about, then I would recommend creating the landing page inside your own domain.

The advantage of this approach is that your regular visitors, who will certainly be interested in your product, will be more likely to make a purchase if they feel that your product is an extension of your blog. They are already used to your brand and design, they trust it, so clicking on a “Buy now!” button inside your existing domain would be easier. If instead you send them away to a new domain, with a different brand and design, some of these visitors might raise a barrier (because there is no more trust there) and end up not purchasing the product.

The disadvantage of creating a landing page inside your own domain is that you’ll need to work around the design elements already in place on your blog, and they might not be optimal for a landing page that has the goal of selling something. For example, you might need to keep your navigation bar and sidebar links there. This is not optimal because these links represent “exit points.” Ideally your landing page should have only one link, the “Buy now!” one. The more exit points you have the smaller your conversion rate will be.

That is why many bloggers and online marketers opt to create a new domain and design for their products. If you believe your product has potential to stand on its own (i.e. generate enough revenues to justify the effort of building a new website for it), and if the product is not completely connected with your blog, then going with this approach could work better. This is what I used for my Online Profits training program, for example.

The drawback here is that you’ll need to develop a second brand, separate from the one of your blog. The advantage is that you can completely customize the design on the new domain, and develop a brand that is more appropriate to sell the product or service in question.

Finally, you can also try a hybrid approach. You could create a landing page inside your own blog just for your readers, and then a second landing page on its own domain where you would send other sources of traffic, including PPC and media buys. Overtime you would be able to determine the best performing page, and you could abandon the other one.

Browse all articles on the Q & A category

27 Responses to “Should I Put My Product Landing Page Inside My Blog Or On A New Domain?”

  • Teasastips

    This is a good jump off point for me; today I am designing my first landing page and I am going to go for the new domain name with an extension. Thanks for the insightful post that has caused me to rethink my strategy.

  • Rex Dixon

    The landing page should always be on it’s own page for success.

  • Money With Clickbank

    Is it necessary to create landing pages from my blog? So far I never made landing pages from my blog but I only made landing pages for my ads in PPC.

    Please advice! Thanks

  • Paul Cunningham

    I’m a fan of the hybrid model. On-site for your engaged followers and fans. Then a mini-site dedicated to the product for things like affiliate traffic.

    The main reason being, different sales copy will work best on each site (ie you sell differently to a trusting follower than you do to a first time visitor).

  • Russell

    Thanks Daniel, a great ‘it depends’ answer which is spot on.

    If it makes business sense to put the sales letter on the blog then there is really no technical reason not to.

    With a good choice of blogging software such as WordPress and Thesis theme and the Widget Logic plugin then it is easy to hide distracting content in the sidebars as well as the navigation menu, and create a sales page on your blog that has the colors and style of your blog but without any unnecessary clutter.

    If the product is congruent with the topic of the blog, then the rest of the blog gives much better SEO support to the sales page and PPC works better too. Google is becoming less keen on single page sales letters

    Also the domain name of the blog needs to works well with the pretty URL of the sales page. (permalinks with the %postname% are a must)

    For example, (please don’t click below they are not real pages – yet)
    http://www.wordpresswise.com/making-money-with-wordpress looks credible but http://www.wordpresswise.com/how-to-guarantee-your-marketing-success just looks much less compelling

    I tend to use Single Page Sales letters sites when a) I don’t have a relevant blog and b) I have an email marketing, a video marketing or a linkbait funnel to send trafic to the site.

    I only use a new domain where the product is unrelated to the blog

  • NetMarketing4u

    Excellent review!

    What I would do and I do as well is that I have a unique domain for each product or affiliate program I support.
    If you follow any major Internet Marketing “gurus” they all have unique domains in which they sell unique products.

    Buying a domain name should not be an issue since you’re in business a $10 investment per year is well worth it.

    Tip: get a catchy domain name that relates to the Niche in Perspective.

  • Rinaldi Syahran

    i like your idea at hybrid approach. i think the hybrid have the benefit from the last two approach that you said before.

  • Eric

    I like the last idea you mention here. This way you can do both and then later determine which works out better thus eliminating the problem of using just one and having it possibly completely fail on its own.

  • Laurent JOUVIN

    Creating both would be my first approach. I don’t think there’s any harm in doing so. Thanks for raising the question and starting a discussion.

  • GoBusiness101

    I always wonder how is Landing pages are properly done. Thanks for the post!

    Helps alot!

  • file69

    i should go with register a new domain 🙂 It will gain more visitor because they think your website are professional 🙂 Just my idea

  • Chester

    I think the subfolder approach will work for me. Simple and much easier to do.

  • R Kumar

    Excellent topic for discussion and a nice article.
    As rightly said by you, the decision will totally depend on the product you are promoting. If you product is independent of your blog and requires independent promotion, I would recommend that it be put on a completely new domain name that has a keyword related to the product in its name. But if the product is something that you have been writing about and does not require too much of promotion, it can conveniently be hosted on the same domain as your blog.
    If your blog is on WordPress, then creating a sales page on the blog is not that difficult. All that is required is creating a new page template for your blog and select that template when you create the new page.

  • Agent Deepak

    This is one of the doubts I had for months. Though I never released any product but I wanted to know.

  • Vivek @ InfoEduTech

    Well this is always being a debatable question every one has his own views in it. well according to me putting a product on homepage or a sidebar of it because when anyone comes to your blog he will not jsut see that article but also turns couple of articles on your blog. and in turn it benefits you,

  • Clive @ Blog Briefing Tutorials

    I do like the idea of the product download page ( free or paid) appearing inside my site. Although I hide the page from the general navigation by excluding in the header php code.

    Ditto with an Aweber sign up for offering say, a free video, the sign up is re-directed by Aweber to the hidden page within the site to view the video.

    The benefit of that, as I see it, is that if they enjoy the video they are already in the site to further explore other content.

  • Web Marketing Tips

    Well many bloggers are creating landing pages on their domain. John Chow is one of them.

  • Steve

    I created a page from a post that I liked and directed ppc traffic to it. I made the page noindex,nofollow to make sure I wasn’t penalized by the search engines for having duplicate content.

  • scheng1

    I prefer the method of keeping them separate. At the very least, the blog can provide backlinks to the domain.

  • Vijay

    Hi Daniel,
    Thanks for answering my question in post.
    The Idea of creating a landing page on same domain in sub-folder or sub-domain is nice. This way we can have a required design on landing page.

    I have one more question – where to find the template designs for creating such landing pages (mostly landing pages without sidebars). Any idea?

    Thanks and regards,
    Vijay

  • Dana @ Blogging Update

    But, how is about the third choice: use sub domain for it? I think it is the middle way between inside our blog and self domain. You can create great landing page but still in your domain name.

  • Omer Greenwald

    To build a really effective landing page you really must follow strict usability rules and perform A/B testing as described in this enlighting post http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1525-writing-decisions-headline-tests-on-the-highrise-signup-page/

    Therefore, it can be really difficult to integrate the the landing page in your existing blog without drastically changing the page layout.

    The disadvantage you described here makes sense of course and that’s why I think the hybrid approach is really the best solution.

  • Vishal Sanjay

    Both works just fine, a new domain isn’t very expensive, but i feel that it would take some time for seo of the new domain instead I can go with a well ranked existing domain.

  • Robert Bravery

    Daniel, Great post.

    I would definately go for the same domain. THere are so many different ways to achieve this. You also do not have to be limited by your website and or blogs design or navigtaional structure.

    THe easiest way is to have a subfolder. as in http://www.somedomain.com/somefolder. In fact you could put a whole website in there, without fearing it will interfere with your main site. I would also recogment that the landing page has some familiarity in design with the main website. Branding and all.

    A subdomain is a second option as in subdomainname.maindomain.com
    With this apoach you can also create a full webste without any interference or interfereing with the main site.

    Both options can still have their own SEO process and drive. THe beauty of this is that you can the extra benefit of Googles domain ranking. Ih, and you do not have to pay any domain registration fees.

    The main problem is two fold.
    Free blogging serives have very little in the way of customising for this.
    Many bloggers have very little knowledge as to how to host and manage their own site. The only way they interact with it is through the blog software.

    If you can get around these two hurdles, the sky is the limit, really.

  • Dexter Ford

    There’s no reason of course why you can’t create a page with all the same design elements, hosted in a sub folder on your blog’s domain.

    This page would look exactly like your blog minus all the usual “exit points” leading to other posts etc.

    So if you blog is http://www.myblog.com, your sales page is http://www.myblog.com/salespage.

    You would need to consider the impact a sales page hosted on your blog will have on your analytics – you’ll forever need to deduct the figures for your sales page from your global total hits, for example.

  • AnastasiaCarroll

    And I installed another copy of WordPress in one of my folders of the blog. Thus it has it’s own design and is inside my blog.

  • Andrew @ Blogging Guide

    I tend to have all my own products on their own domains. That way they can have their own SEO set-up.

    Then I link to them via my blog with banners and text links.

    Andrew

Comments are closed.