The Pros and Cons of Hosting Your Article Landing Page or Using An External Site Such As Squidoo…

July 22, 2008

A landing page is the page that your website visitors are sent to after clicking on a link to your site, in this case the link in your article resource box. A landing page may be hosted on your own site or on an external site such as Squidoo, Hubpages or even Myspace.

There are pros and cons to directing readers to an externally hosted free landing page at Squidoo or Hubpages. So which is the best option - a landing page on your own site or an external landing page?

Let’s take a look at the advantages of using Squidoo as a landing page (these points also pertain to other free site or page hosting services, not just Squidoo):

1. Google likes Squidoo and tends to rank their pages high. This gives your landing page an immediate boost in the search results rather than waiting months for a new page on your website to achaive decent search engine rankings.
2. Squidoo is easy to set up. You can literally have a Squidoo page set up in a matter of minutes.
3. Squidoo is free. There are no hosting or domain name fees to pay.
4. You can create unlimited pages. Since you aren’t paying for domains or hosting there are no prohibitive costs to having multiple landing pages.

The above advantages are worth bearing in mind if you are new to affiliate marketing and do not have much cash to spend, but let’s also take a look at the advantages of using a landing page hosted on your own website:

1. It looks more professional - having your own domain name always looks good.
2. You retain complete control over the design, development and have server access in case you want any customized features.
3. There are no restrictions whatsoever. Squidoo may restrict some forms of content or may even delete your page without notice.

Which Landing Page Do You Choose?

Whilst there are positives for both methods of landing pages, you can not argue with having total control of your own domain name and website, rather than using an external website over which you have no control. On the other hand, a Squidoo page might get better rankings in the search engines. There is no reason why you can’t simply create two landing pages - one at Squidoo and one on your own website and then split test them to see which produces the best results.

Posted in Article Marketing