We have all seen sites that are basically one-page sales letters with design as ugly as can be. They lack any elements a normal site is suposed to have, like proper navigation, they are incredibly long and can take many scrolls to get to the bottom of the page (and to the point/price/whatever it is that people should get to). Yet these are the sites of the people who make nice money online by selling their stuff through these sales pages. Check any site selling stuff through Clickbank and about 90% of them are that type of sites, ugly long pages with no intelligent design. You might have wondered, this couldn’t be accidental, right?
Talk all you wish about poor design relating to more clicks on AdSense sites, but this one is slightly different. Here, clicks are not the same factor as with Adsense sites. In this particular case, people only have to click once but pay for it – so it takes them more than just wanting to navigate away from the ugly page. The reason for poor design is psychological here. Site owners trying to talk people into buying their fantastic software that will help you make thousands on the web fast need to get as many people as possible clicking and paying. So people with little web design skills look at those sites and think, ah that must be easy, see he only made one page and here he is selling his software and making good moeny – so I will be able to do that as well won’t I? People with more skills think, if this eejit who made this ugly page can make money on the Internet I will surely be able to do the same or even better – and they buy it!
Design is not something you have or haven’t time for – it’s something that should serve its purpose. Just doing things because somebody else said so won’t cut it – think of who YOUR visitors will be and what suits you best. (Sounds so whitehat, I know, but still true 😉 )
I wrote a little about site like these here http://www.jiploo.com/blog/2005/12/8-mile-sites.html
I’d lobe to know what kind of money these sites make.
Ian – I guess it depends on the kind of stuff the site sells, among other things. As you might have seen, they vary from dog training courses to blog promotion software with everything else in between. Also, many of them have affiliate programs in place as part of their marketing model.