Affiliate Business Tips

Preselling for profit

The number one strategy to increase your affiliate sales is preselling.

First, what is preselling? Well, it is an art. And it’s also a science. It’s a process of taking your reader and getting them ready to buy. Then sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. And when it’s done correctly, they don’t know it’s happening.

Basically, you give them some content. Then send them to the sales page. In a second we’ll talk about how to do actually it. But before we do, you need to know why it’s so important. Here are a few benefits of preselling:

  • Preselling creates trust – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
  • It disarms your reader – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. And in turn they read to understand what you’re saying. And your intention is conveyed more easily.
  • It preps them to buy – Now they’re open to hearing what you’re telling them. So they become more receptive to other messages. This includes the sales website you send them to! Being open to a sales message is what it means being in a buying mood.
  • It increases your sales – They arrive at the product website prepped to buy. Open to the sales message and feeling safe. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
  • Your customers are happier – People like to make their own buying decisions. Instead of feeling pressured or “sold”. And this makes them feel better about the product they purchased.
  • Your profits go up – A satisfied customer doesn’t ask for a refund. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Clearly preselling makes sense. You earn more commissions. And produce happier customers. It’s a win-win-win!

How does it work?

You’ve learned the importance of preselling. So, hopefully you’ve decided to start preselling. 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. And the only method of doing this is to give exceptional value to your readers. 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

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 end goal is to make a sale of the product you’re preselling. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. 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. Instead you link directly to the product sales page. 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? There’s a trick to make this work… You use the “covert cookie” strategy.

The next trick is to hyperlink specific words and phrases inside the content of the article you’re providing. It’s habitual to click on words and phrases that are hyperlinked. 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.

OK, here’s the not-so-good news:

This process is not easy – at all! Let’s look at the skills required to pull it off: Great content. First and foremost, you have to be able to write a great article that provides valuable information. To do that you have to have enough information to be valuable and be able to present it in a useful way. Preselling skills. 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. And somehow also make them want to learn more. Or provide so much information that they see how hard it will be to implement.

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.

Techy stuff. 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.)

Wrapping it up:

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. Please don’t be lazy. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.