Affiliate Business Tips
Preselling for profit
If you want to make more money as an affiliate, you must presell.
Before we start, let’s talk about what preselling actually is. Preselling is both an art and a science. The goal is to get your reader prepped to make a purchase. Then you send them to the site that sells what you’ve prepared them for. And if it’s done properly, the process is completely sub-conscious.
The gist is that you give your reader some useful information. And then refer them to the product website. We’ll get into how to do it correctly in a minute. Before we get into that, you should understand what’s in it for you. Some major benefits of this process:
- It builds trust – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
- Preselling is disarming – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. Unguarded reading means they’re not filtering what you say. So your message gets across.
- It puts them in a buying mood – Your readers are now receiving your message. So they become more receptive to other messages. Like the info on product sales page you’ve linked to. And being open to the information there means they are much more likely to buy.
- Your commissions go up – You’ve prepped them and referred them in the right state of mind. Open to the sales message and feeling safe. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
- It increases customer satisfaction – Your referral now feels like they decided to buy. Instead of being manipulated into buying. And this leads to greater satisfaction with the product.
- It boosts your profits – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. Which means you keep more of your affiliate commissions.
Obviously, it’s important to presell. You increase your profits. And increase your customer satisfaction. That’s a clear win-win.
Now, here’s how preselling works:
You’ve learned the importance of preselling. And hopefully you’re convinced you need to start doing it. You’re ready to learn how to do it properly. As I mentioned earlier, it’s both an art and a science.
Becoming an artist
Effective preselling requires gaining your readers trust in order for them to let down their guard. This can only be accomplished by providing actual value in the information you’re presenting. But you can’t give them so much that they think they have everything they could need, and that’s what makes it an art. That is, they have to be wanting more when you refer them to the product sales page for the product you’re trying to sell. And since they’re more open, they are more likely to make a purchase.
The science component
You also have to include some very specific things.
The first is how you present the information. You have to have your end in mind. Your end goal is to make a sale of the product you’re preselling. How can providing information accomplish this goal? First, you can provide useful but incomplete information. The second way is to provide all the information and let your reader discover how hard it is to actually implement it. Either way, the product sales page solves the problem.
You also have to link to the product you’re promoting discretely. You have directly to the home page of the product. When you do this, you’re click-throughs go way up. But how are you going to get credit for the sale, if you don’t include your affiliate link? Well, that’s part of the science of this whole process. 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 if the words you hyperlink relate, your reader will naturally click them for more information.
Putting all of this together creates a powerful affiliate marketing formula for success.
Now for the bad news…
This process is not easy – at all! Think about everything that goes into crafting an effective preselling article: 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. First, you have to give good information. But, you also need to know how to present the information in a way that give value to the reader. While at the same time making them want more. Or provide so much information that they see how hard it will be to implement.
Picking products. You also need to determine what products you’ll be preselling. Even if you get the article written. Your efforts are completely wasted if you don’t pick a winning product.
Technical skills. And finally, you need the technical know-how to embed your image tag and make sure you get credit for the sale. This is actually pretty simple – just embed a 1 pixel X 1 pixel image and set your affiliate link as the “source” of the image. (But if you do it wrong, you won’t get paid for the traffic you send.)
Summary:
Now you know what it takes to be a Presell Pro. And doing this increases your affiliate commissions by over 500%! It’s absolutely critical to do this every time – and to do it correctly. Take action now. The effort it takes is well worth the benefits…
