Affiliate Business Tips
// February 23rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
If you're not preselling, you're losing money
If you want to make more money as an affiliate, you must presell.
First, what is preselling? There are two components to it - art & science. The goal is to get your reader prepped to make a purchase. Then sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. When done correctly, your reader will not even notice.
The gist is that you give your reader some useful information. And give them a link to the product you're preselling. In just a minute, I'll explain exactly how to presell. Before we get into that, you should understand what's in it for you. Just a few of the reasons you want to presell.
- It helps your reader trust you - Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. And the more traffic you can send to the sale page, the more commissions you'll earn.
- It takes your reader out of defense mode - Nobody likes to be sold something. By not doing that to them, your reader is less defensive. Unguarded reading means they're not filtering what you say. So your message gets across.
- It puts them in a buying mood - Now they trust you and feel open to your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. Like the info on product sales page you've linked to. Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
- It increases your sales - Now your reader arrives at the sales page in a buying mood. Open to the sales message and feeling safe. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
- Your customers are happier - Your referral now feels like they decided to buy. Instead of feeling pressured or "sold". And this leads to greater satisfaction with the product.
- Your profits go up - Satisfied customers are less like to refund. Less refunds means more affiliate money stays in your pocket.
Obviously, it's important to presell. You make more money. And increase your customer satisfaction. Everybody wins!
Now, here's how preselling works:
You've learned the importance of preselling. And I hope you're resolved to being preselling, too. You're ready to learn how to do it properly. As I mentioned earlier, it's both an art and a science.
The art of preselling
The first step is in getting your readers to trust you and open up. This can only be accomplished by providing actual value in the information you’re presenting. Now, providing enough info to be useful, but still making them want more - that's the art of it. The idea is that they want more and the sales page you send them to gives them more. And because you've gained trust, they’re more receptive to the sales message and more likely to buy.
Part 2 - the Science
There are also several key elements that need to be included.
The first is how you present the information. You have to have your end in mind. In the end, you want to sell a specific product. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. The first method is to provide enough info to get them started, but not enough to finish. The other method is to explain all the details and expose how difficult it is to do what you're explaining. Whichever method, you send them to a product website that solves the problem you just created.
You also have to link to the product you're promoting discretely. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. That's because nobody likes to click on affiliate links. But how are you going to get credit for the sale, if you don’t include your affiliate link? There's a trick to make this work... You "pre-cookie" your reader before sending them to the sales page.
Next, you want to make sure you're linking on related words and phrases. Hyperlinked words are clicked more than anything else. And when the words are in context like this, it makes perfect sense for your reader to click them.
What you have now is a super powerful system for affiliate marketing success.
Now for the bad news...
Doing all of this right is really hard! Let's talk about everything required to put this plan into action: Awesome content. The entire process depends on your being able to provide useful information to your readers. To do that you have to have enough information to be valuable and be able to present it in a useful way. Writing to presell. Yes, you must providing useful content. But, you also need to know how to present the information in a way that give value to the reader. And somehow also make them want to learn more. Or provide so much information that they see how hard it will be to implement.
Product selection. You also need to determine what products you'll be preselling. Even if you can pull off writing and great article. All your efforts are wasted if you send your reader to the wrong sales letter.
Technical skills. One of the keys to this system is using "covert cookies" for the tracking. This is pretty easy – you just make a 1 pixel X 1 pixel image with no border and make the “source” of the image your affiliate link. (But if you mess it up, your referrals won't be tracked.)
In closing:
Now you know exactly how to presell effectively. And doing this increases your affiliate commissions by over 500%! The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Take action now. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.
