Modeling your landing pages vs Copying landing pages

September 8th, 2009 2 Comments By Ryan Buke Affiliate Marketing, Media Buys, PPC, Tech

Modeling vs. Copying

It is extremely important to point out that you shouldn’t mistake “modeling” after your competition with “copying” your competition. The difference is huge, and most newbs find out the hard way. Not only is copying a competitor’s campaign looked down upon and straight up unethical, but it’s also absolutely retarded in the sense that you do not stand a chance. Your competitors already have an established CTR and account history which will make their CPC substantially lower than anything you could come close to starting off with.

With this being said, it would be very hard off the bat for your ad variation to be ranked higher than that of the person you are copying from and if they are listed above you, why would a user click on your ad variation as opposed to the competitor’s? They won’t and if they go to you AFTER they went to your competitor’s landing page, what exactly is it about yours that would make them buy from you? Moral of the story: DONT COPY!

Now “modeling” off your competition on the other hand is completely different. When you model after your competition, you are looking at HOW they are promoting their offer(s) and analyzing the best ways to promote that niche (ex: Review Page, Flogs, Direct Linking). Based on this, you develop your OWN landing page using similar tactics, but work to IMPROVE what you feel you can. This can be as simple as a better color scheme, better pictures, more attractive banners and so on.

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Comments

2 Comments Jump down to add your comment now

Hello.

I like your site and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links.

Thanks in advance

Ben Waugh
September 8th, 2009
4:27 pm

Hey Ryan,

You’re right about the copycats. One of the problems that’s happened in marketing on the Net is that everything is so transparent that the newbies first idea is to copy. The people advertising “I made a jillion dollars and you can too by copying my blueprint” is an absolute crock.

It’s also a reason why so many people fail at MLM’s on the net. They give every distributor a cookie cutter clone site that’ll never see the light of day on a search engine. They then do PPC and lose their shirt because 6,000 other reps are buying the same keywords to the same site they have. Most people are better off sitting down at a single zero roulette wheel and putting it all on red..

Nick Bentley
April 7th, 2010
3:36 pm

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