Thursday, March 09, 2006
More on Monetizing Your Business With Affiliate Programs
Last night I talked about how doing nothing but sticking affiliate banners on your site is a sure way to fail with affiliate marketing. I suggested instead that you write articles about the problems that people want solved and then mention those affiliate products as helpful solutions.
But there's a problem related to the stick-up-a-bunch-of-banners approach that I want to focus on today. It's a mistake that many new affiliate marketers make. It's the problem of trying to promote too many affiliate products.
The temptation is great to sign up for any and every affiliate program you can find, pepper your site with affiliate promotions, and assume that the more promotions people see, the better chance you have of SOMEBODY clicking on SOMETHING. It seems logical, but the opposite is actually true. The more you focus on a smaller number of affiliate products, the better chance of success you have.
Think back to the situation I described yesterday: you come to a site that is covered with affiliate banners. Do you even look at them? No.
You barely notice the banners. Your visitors react the same way. But the problem is more serious than simply one of them ignoring your promotions.
An overabundance of banners on a page can hurt the credibility you're trying to build with them. If they perceive your mindset as, "Buy from me! Buy from me! Buy from me!" they'll give less credence to anything you recommend.
But again, if you give them content that helps them solve their problems, they're more likely to respect any specific recommendations that relate directly to their problem. Limit the products you promote on any given page to just those that directly help with the problems you're solving. By doing so, you actually increase the possibility that they'll click on your link and buy it.
This approach of weaving recommendations into content is totally different from the way most people think of promoting a product. Most copywriting resources focus on how to write a sales page that stands alone and makes the sale. In affiliate marketing, you're trying to drive people TO that sales page, and let the sales page do the actual selling.
In other words, you need to put readers in a favorable mindset so they want to visit those sales pages and consider those products. But that kind of writing is a skill that most copywriting ebooks or courses completely overlook.
That's where I've found Make Your Content PREsell! to be so valuable. It was written primarily to help affiliate marketers create that kind of mindset in their readers and increase their affiliate commissions. It helps you to write in a way that breaks down your readers' natural skepticism and warms them up to considering your specific recommendations.
Naturally, when you're doing this, you can't bring out a long list of products. The key is to focus your readers on one or two products that can help them with the specific problem you're writing about.
It comes down to this: do you want your pages to focus on guiding your visitors' to specific affiliate sales pages with a positive impression of the product already in mind? Or do you want your pages to present them with a confusing and contradictory array of competing products and trust to luck?
Jeff
Last night I talked about how doing nothing but sticking affiliate banners on your site is a sure way to fail with affiliate marketing. I suggested instead that you write articles about the problems that people want solved and then mention those affiliate products as helpful solutions.
But there's a problem related to the stick-up-a-bunch-of-banners approach that I want to focus on today. It's a mistake that many new affiliate marketers make. It's the problem of trying to promote too many affiliate products.
The temptation is great to sign up for any and every affiliate program you can find, pepper your site with affiliate promotions, and assume that the more promotions people see, the better chance you have of SOMEBODY clicking on SOMETHING. It seems logical, but the opposite is actually true. The more you focus on a smaller number of affiliate products, the better chance of success you have.
Think back to the situation I described yesterday: you come to a site that is covered with affiliate banners. Do you even look at them? No.
You barely notice the banners. Your visitors react the same way. But the problem is more serious than simply one of them ignoring your promotions.
An overabundance of banners on a page can hurt the credibility you're trying to build with them. If they perceive your mindset as, "Buy from me! Buy from me! Buy from me!" they'll give less credence to anything you recommend.
But again, if you give them content that helps them solve their problems, they're more likely to respect any specific recommendations that relate directly to their problem. Limit the products you promote on any given page to just those that directly help with the problems you're solving. By doing so, you actually increase the possibility that they'll click on your link and buy it.
This approach of weaving recommendations into content is totally different from the way most people think of promoting a product. Most copywriting resources focus on how to write a sales page that stands alone and makes the sale. In affiliate marketing, you're trying to drive people TO that sales page, and let the sales page do the actual selling.
In other words, you need to put readers in a favorable mindset so they want to visit those sales pages and consider those products. But that kind of writing is a skill that most copywriting ebooks or courses completely overlook.
That's where I've found Make Your Content PREsell! to be so valuable. It was written primarily to help affiliate marketers create that kind of mindset in their readers and increase their affiliate commissions. It helps you to write in a way that breaks down your readers' natural skepticism and warms them up to considering your specific recommendations.
Naturally, when you're doing this, you can't bring out a long list of products. The key is to focus your readers on one or two products that can help them with the specific problem you're writing about.
It comes down to this: do you want your pages to focus on guiding your visitors' to specific affiliate sales pages with a positive impression of the product already in mind? Or do you want your pages to present them with a confusing and contradictory array of competing products and trust to luck?
Jeff
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