DPR Affiliate Marketing Blog

It’s not what you think, this one is a little bit different so read on…

One major problem that people face as an affiliate marketer is that not enough online merchants know how to sell a product. You know what I mean right?

It’s easy to drive traffic to a merchant’s page, but once they get there, there’s not a lot we can do to secure the sale. If the merchant can’t close the deal properly for us, it’s bye bye ROI.

Some of them suck at it badly, particularly online stores. The product page has a list of a supplements ingredients, it’s intended user, a small blurb written by a low rate salesperson at the company and finally a button saying ADD TO CART (what’s wrong with saying BUY NOW!). What about a quality headline to catch attention? What about calling out the users by introducing an problem that will be solved by the product? What about benefits, reasons to buy, testimonials, special offers?

Too often a well searched, lowly competitive product has it’s potential for profit ruined by a crappy marketing team.

Anyway, rant over with.

What I was recently reminded of is the ability we have as affiliate marketers to use our own content to do what this crappy product description page cannot, that is, properly convince this person that they should buy a product!

Of course pre-selling is not a new concept, but let me put a little twist on what you might know about it.

The concept of pre-selling is gently describing the product, providing neutral information in a positive way before passing a lead on to a proper sales page to be completely sold. This is great when you’re promoting a product that has a proper sales page and CAN close a customer that has been presold – but what if your merchant’s product doesn’t have that?

One of the reason’s why it’s better to use a landing page for affiliate promotion’s is that you can use your own page to do a better job of selling the person on the product, and in doing so increase your conversion rates and ROI – in the above situation it was by pre-selling but in the case of the petty online store, you don’t have to just pre-sell, you have to SELL SELL.

What do I mean?

I’m talking about using the content on your site, the article you have about XYZ product, to SELL it.

I don’t mean write a sales letter for it but I do mean putting in the selling triggers that the merchant doesn’t have in a way that is also informative and article like.

The content on your site can’t be penalized for being too salesy like it can in an article directory. You can lose respect from a viewer by seeming to promote a product too blatantly but you can get more sales from the visitors by disclosing the benefits, and reasons why people should buy the product.

For example, there is no reason why you couldn’t include a sentence or two like the following in your product name article:

“As customers of product XYZ who have had positive experience would tell you, product XYZ has shown to be:

(List Benefit)
(List Benefit)
(List Benefit)

Furthermore, if you’re the kind of person who has XYZ problem, you’d know how frustrating it can be blah blah (highlight their pain) and you’re probably always looking for a solution to the problem. It seems that so far, many people such as yourself have found product XYZ to be the solution.

I even notice in the sales material (impartial tone) that certain customers have said product XYZ has given them

(Reason to Buy)
(Reason to Buy)

etc., etc.

See how you can sell by being informative but WITHOUT being a salesman.

I guarantee that articles like this will get you greater CTR’s and great conversion rates on the clicks that you do receive.

Of course you do have to gauge the appropriateness of a technique like this on the merchant you’re promoting for. If they have a great or even decent sales letter of course it’s not necessary but if you’re driving plenty of traffic through to them with no result it might be worth a shot.

Source: advertising