In my first post on building high converting landing pages, I am going to focus on a flog, or a fake blog from a person’s point of view. You have all seen these if you are not familiar with the term. These type of landing pages tell you a story as if it was from an actual person on the success that they have had with a certain product.

Again, I have said it before, but I will again. I will NOT out landing pages and show examples of what I mean. This is a simple method that anyone can run pretty quickly with no programming experience. All you need to do is have your own somewhat targeted domain and be able to install Wordpress and that is it. For this guide, we will set up a simple muscle building/male weight loss flog since that is a hot niche right now.

1. Buy a Domain

So simple, right? Well, yes it is, but the domain is actually important when running flogs via PPC or anywhere you have to show a display URL. The most important thing is to buy a .com. Don’t cheap out and buy a .info or anything like that. People who are buying these rebills trust a .com the most, so using a .info will result in lower conversion rates. Trust me. I have tested it.

What type of name should you pick? For flogs, I like to use a personalized name, such as bryansjourney.com or something cheesy like that. Use a name, not a keyword, as it will be much more personal to the consumer and seem much more legit this way.

Oh, and use Name.com to register your name. You get free private registration on all domain purchases and for a flog, you will want to have this protection in place. Sure, it is easy to get your name and info if you file a complaint, but most people do not understand this and it will make it much harder for them to find you.

2. Install WordPress

Another simple but important step. Oh, an while we are at it, I guess you need good shared hosting provider and I always love to use Hostgator since their first month is just a penny and they offer decent service for shared solutions. Also, Hostgator includes Fantastico, which offers easy installation of WordPress if you are technologically-impaired.

When you are installing your WordPress theme, make sure you first change the permalinks structure to just /%postname% to help with your basic site structure and even quality scores. Next, install the Thesis theme and start customizing it to your liking. It is a little pricey, but trust me, it is more then worth it. You can use other ones that are free but do not provide the SEO benefits and style that the Thesis one does.

Install a few plugins to your liking, such as Google XML Sitemaps. The Thesis theme is kickass for SEO, so you really don’t need an SEO plugin like All-in-one SEO. You don’t need to go overboard, because Thesis again offers so much.

3. Setting up Your Content

Then, Google “before/after muscle pics” and pic a picture to your liking. Not hard to find an image in here at all, trust me. However, the thing to it is to find not only a before/after pic, but a normal after pic as well. This is key, as you will want to put that normal after pic in the top right of your flog. Save the other picture until later for in your flog.

Now, for the meat of your site. Start off with an introduction of yourself and why you are writing this blog. Don’t get all spammy, just simply mention that you were overweight, out of shape or something along those lines and you were writing to simply explain how you got ripped.

Next, get into the portion of what made you want to lose weight. Girlfriend left you, health problems, whatever the reason. Make it real so that any person who is overweight and out of shape might be able to relate to you and their barriers will start to break down as this happens.

Now that you told them the reason, start to tell them how you did it. Of course mention your affiliate product that you are promoting (I suggest Acai Ripped at MediaTrust!) in a subtle but selling way. Then go to mention about a diet, a training program and stuff like that, but keep coming back to the weight product as well.

Once you have done that, make up a cheap looking chart or something that shows your weight loss and how you graphed it out. Do it in MS Excel so it looks like a normal person doing this and insert the graph into your sales page. Show it weekly over like 4 months with high points and low points, meaning don’t make it all positive. Even showing that you didn’t gain muscle mass one week isn’t going to kill you. It will make you look human and not an ad.

Finally, finish up by saying how great you are now and you have a new girlfriend, job and life is good. Add your contact information at the bottom and let people know that you free to be contacted. Then, in the comment section, write a bunch of fake comments but again, try to make them look human. Also, make sure not to include the dates on the comments, as that can throw you off big time.

4. The Upsell

Between your content and comment section, I usually include some sort of upsell. On this offer that I am currently running, I actually run two upsells. The first one converts at about 33% and the second one gets about 20% on each conversion of the main product, which I think is great. And, I sell all three about 10% to 12% of the time, which results is over $120 worth of sales. Much better then $40, right?

Want some tips on what to upsell on an offer like this? The first one is obvious that I use. I use a colon cleanser from MediaTrust on this one. However, the next offer goes along perfect with this niche but I have never seen it used on any other upsells. And this is the one that gets me an additional sale 1 out of every 5 times!

So what is my magic product? Enzyte, the natural male enhancement pill. Yeah, it is cheesy, but this name is branded in the mainstream media and they have a rebill. Perfect. So, include it in your upsell about how it helped your love life and blah blah blah and start seeing the money roll in. Also, with your whole diet, I love including it in the sidebar as well. Show your entire “formula for success” in the right sidebar to reinforce the idea. Find the Enzyte offer on MotiveInteractive for a new approach on the upsell.

5. Little Details

Make sure to add certain things to your Pages section of the flog, such as a Contact page, Privacy page, About me page and a Sitemap link as well. These little things will help with Google and their quality score. Also, one thing that I like to do when setting up a flog is to buy a bunch of articles, like 10, that are all original, and set them up on my domain. I then place a small link in the right corner where most people won’t look. What this does is help make your site a bit more legit to the PPC platform but by hiding it, it still keeps your site looking personal to customers.

Alright, I think that is all I can think up right now. I am sure I missed something in here so if anyone has a question on how to set up a flog the right way, hit me up in the comments or at bryan@ahaze.com. Now get to work!!