The importance of preselling

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 sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. If you do it well, it’s completely invisible.

Basically, you give them some content. And give them a link to the product you’re preselling. In just a minute, I’ll explain exactly how to presell. But before we do, you need to know why it’s so important. Some major benefits of this process:

• It builds trust – Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. And the more traffic you can send to the sale page, the more commissions you’ll earn.
• Preselling is disarming – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. This means they are more open to what you’re saying. 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.
• It increases your sales – Now your reader arrives at the sales page in a buying mood. With a feeling of trust and openness. The only thing that can result is increased sales!
• It boosts customer loyalty – 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.
• Preselling increases your bottom line – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. Less refunds means more affiliate money stays in your pocket.

The need to presell is clear. You make more money. And increase your customer satisfaction. It’s a win-win-win!

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. Remember, there are two components – art and science.

Part 1 – The art of it

Effective preselling requires gaining your readers trust in order for them to let down their guard. 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. So you send them to the product website with a hunger for more of what the product provides. And since they’re more open, they are more likely to make a purchase.

The science component

There’s also a specific formula you need to follow.

One of these key elements is the presentation of the information. You’ve got to map out your strategy before you start writing. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. 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.

Next, you have to use “convert linking” methods. You have directly to the home page of the product. When you do this, you’re click-throughs go way up. But, without your affiliate link, how do you get credit? 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. People are used to clicking on hyperlinked words to get information they’re looking for. 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.

Unfortunately…

Doing all of this right is really hard! Let’s talk about everything required to put this plan into action: 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. 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 somehow also make them want to learn more. The other approach is to reveal a self-evident problem through the information.

Picking products. Next, you’ve got to pick the right product to presell. Even if you can pull off writing and great article. You’ve wasted all your effort if the product doesn’t sell well.

The technical know-how To be most effective you have to use the “covert cookie” method. 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 mess it up, your referrals won’t be tracked.)

Summary:

Now you know exactly how to presell effectively. Preselling properly will boost your affiliate profits up to 500%! So, start now and develop preselling content for all your affiliate promotions. Take action now. Make the extra effort required to propel your affiliate business to the next level.

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. The most crucial aspect of this process is getting the visitors to your site.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Article Websites
• Video Marketing

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

By web 2.0 we mean any site where the users actually create the content. The exciting thing about Web 2.0 sites is that you get to add your own content and it becomes part of these sites. The other interesting thing about these sites is that all the search engines (including Google) treat them as “authority sites”. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Article Marketing

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. This is because article websites are really web 2.0 site. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

• Do your keyword research
• Tailor the content of your article for the keywords
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video Marketing

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. So, just like article marketing, video marketing enables you to add content to authority sites. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Sign up for YouTube
• When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Add at least one video to your profile
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

Summary:

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.