Affiliate Business Tips

Why you must presell

The most important thing you can do to increase your affiliate commissions is to presell properly.

Before we begin, we need to first define what preselling is. Preselling is both an art and a science. And it’s function is to prepare your reader to buy something. 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.

In a nutshell, you provide value. And then refer them to the product website. 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. Here are a few benefits of preselling:

• It builds trust – Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
• Preselling is disarming – 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 – Your readers are now receiving your message. And in turn, they’re open to other messages, as well. 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.
• It increases your sales – You’ve prepped them and referred them in the right state of mind. With a feeling of trust and openness. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
• Your customers are happier – Plus, they feel they’ve made the buying decision on their own. Versus being pitched or convinced. And this makes them feel better about the product they purchased.
• Your profits go up – Satisfied customers are less like to refund. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Clearly preselling makes sense. You make more money. Your customers are happier. Everybody wins!

How does it work?

OK, now you understand why it’s so important. And I hope you’re resolved to being preselling, too. So, let’s talk about how to make it work. Like we talked about before, it’s an art. And it’s a science.

The art of preselling

First, you have to gain the trust of your reader, so they let their guard down. Honestly, the only way to do this is to provide real value in you content. 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 since they’re more open, they are more likely to make a purchase.

It’s also a science

You also have to include some very specific things.

The first is how you present the information. You’ve got to map out your strategy before you start writing. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. There are two ways to accomplish this with great content. The first method is to provide enough info to get them started, but not enough to finish. Or you can give them so much information that it feels overwhelming to do what you’re talking about. In either case, the product you’re referring them to solves the problem for them.

But you can’t link to your affiliate link. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. This increases your clicks. 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.

The next trick is to hyperlink specific words and phrases inside the content of the article you’re providing. Hyperlinked words are clicked more than anything else. Plus, if you link on relevant words, it only makes sense to click on there.

Using this system, you’re virtually guaranteed to increase your affiliate business success.

OK, here’s the not-so-good news:

It’s extremely difficult to do this correctly. Think about everything that goes into crafting an effective preselling article: Good content. First and foremost, you have to be able to write a great article that provides valuable information. Which means you need to be both knowledgable on the subject and capable of writing a high-quality article. Preselling skills. 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 still leave them wanting more. Or make the information so overwhelming they realize they can’t do it on their own.

Picking products. After that you have to figure out which products you want to promote. If you can manage to get the article written well. All your efforts are wasted if you send your reader to the wrong sales letter.

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 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 do it wrong, you won’t get paid for the traffic you send.)

Summary:

Now you know exactly how to presell effectively. Preselling properly will boost your affiliate profits up to 500%! The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Please don’t be lazy. The effort it takes is well worth the benefits…

Tags: affiliate, affiliate business, affiliate commissions, business, Business Tips, information, Internet Marketing, money, Nutshell, Openness, Preselling, profits, Science, trust