Long title…
One major problem that I 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 alot we can do to secure the sale. If the merchant can’t close the deal properly for us, it’s bye bye ROI…
And some of them suck at it so 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 don’t got that?
One of the reason’s why it’s better to use a landing page for affiliate promotion 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 preselling 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 the thing.
I don’t mean write a sales letter for it but I do mean putting in there the selling triggers that the merchant hasn’t – just 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’s no reason why you couldn’t include a sentence or two like the following in your product name articles:
“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”
You see how you can sell while being informative but WITHOUT being a salesman.
I guarantee that articles like this will get you greater CTRs and great conversion rates on the clicks you do receive.
Of course you do have to guage 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.
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Good points Andrew – I’m a huge fan of pre-selling. It’s really important. I can’t see how those online stores make any sales with all the non-existent sales triggers. Unless they have it the cheapest on the net and the customers are pre-sold on the product already. Anyway, good advice – keep it up – as always!
Stuart Stirling
Stu,
Dead right mate, and I’ve seen it first hand.
I’ve promoted products from online stores when there’s been a TV ad campaign running for the product in the states… so the people who search it online are almost already sold… the TV campaign gave them more than just a gentle presell, then they came online just to order!
Unfortunately the majority of those products don’t enjoy the same fortune
Good article, Andrew. I find this especially true for physical products like golf clubs, exercise equipment, furniture, etc. A lot of these types of physical goods don’t have much of a sales page at all. A lot of merchants in niches like this have nothing more than a product description so doing a little more selling in your article can work wonders.
Gregg
Gregg,
Totally mate, products like those are perfect examples.
If you happen to test it out, make sure to let me know your results
Great post Andrew.
My number one converting page is a balanced review of an affiliate program.
“Here’s what I like about it. Here’s what it does. Here’s what I don’t like about it. Here’s how it benefits you…”
Works pretty dang well.
You know, people just want to know a reason why to buy something. If you could just give one good reason before they get to that affiliate page instead of “It’s the best EVAR!” then you could make a sale.
See ya,
Jason
Hi Andrew,
That’s great advice! You can get even better results if your use your articles to send them to your own sale page on your website and then use a product like Stealth Affiliate at http://www.stealthaffiliate.com to send them directly to the merchant’s order/payment page. This way you can completely skip the merchant’s sales page and you can also use this method with your pay-per-click landing pages.
Don,
Yikes mate, that is cool! I’m gonna check it out and perhaps a recommendation on this blog is in order
Talk soon,
Andrew
Pretty cool, Don. Here’s a really good one specifically for Clickbank so you can bypass poor sales letters. http://www.clickbankbypass.com/ That’s a direct link. It’s not an affiliate link or my product. It’s just good.
Gregg
Hi Andrew,
When many affiliates sell a particular product using the same content provided by the seller of that product, will it also not result in Duplicate Content? Hence from this perspective also is it not better for the Affiliate Marketers to have their own content? What do you say?
Thanks.
That stealthaffiliate thing does sound pretty cool. Thanks for the heads up.
Nice article Andrew – I find alot of relatively new marketers don’t realise the value of preselling – even some NMOCers seem to have difficulty with it. I guess it’s one of the main reasons that PPC direct linking doesn’t work so well anymore.
Everybody wants to read a review before buying something, although I think people are getting more wary these days as they are starting to realise that some marketers will post a great review just to get a sale – even if the product is crap.
Bypassing Clickbank sales pages works really well for me because I have very little competition from other affiliate marketers who dismissed the product because of its crappy sales page.
I use Derrick Van Dyke’s Covert Affiliate Links http://www.covertaffiliatelinks.com (not aff) and I think it works in pretty much the same ways as Stealth Affiliate. Very simple to install and use.