Preselling Your Affiliate Website

You had decided to go into affiliate marketing and you set up your site. It is well-designed, rich in content, and is a magnet for search engine traffic. Yet, your site is lagging compared with the others, not making much money and there is not much traffic either. An expert finally told you the cause – you need preselling.

If you are doing internet selling, especially if you are an affiliate, you need to convince people that buying through your website is the way to go. What you need is a set of good content, and the following tested advice. In short, you need to do some preselling.

Authority

Most people have no problems with authority. People respond to them well. Policemen, doctors, firemen, teachers, and judges are some of the people in authority who can get others to follow them based on their authority status.

To make people do what you want of them, be sure to come off as an authority figure on the subject you are discussing. This is the subtle way of assuming authority.

Contrast

When people look for information on a specific product or service, they are looking for reasons why they should or should not buy one product over the other.

Say, for instance, a gamer is looking into two game consoles, and cannot make up his mind which of the two he wants. Give him a review where the two products are thoroughly compared.

Avoid being overly critical. A balanced review is more believable than a lop-sided one.

Experience

A review of a product where the reviewer used his personal experiences is far more interesting (and powerful) than a “general one.”

In your review you talk about your own personal experience. It comes out having more heart than the general polite review. Personal experience is a very good selling point.
People will readily believe your recommendations later.

Relate

It is a fact that people are more willing to buy from someone they know than from a complete stranger. In your site, the more you make your readers identify with you and relate to you, the more comfortable they will feel buying from you.

If you are talking to single mothers and your site is all about teaching single mothers how to work from home, you can talk about dealing with kids, laundry, lunch with the girls, finding babysitters for the night and many more.

Once the single moms can relate to you, they will accept the solution you offer them without much resistance.

Reason

Too many times, marketers simply slap down a review on their site with their affiliate link in it, and that will be the end of the story.

Telling people where to click is a good start. But you can put in the reason why the action of clicking that link is good for the visitor. As a matter of fact, it is a good policy (for credibility and emphasis) that you supply the reasons for all the needed actions in the site.

These tested ideas on preselling had worked many times over in many variations in the past. Some of them were tweaked in some parts to fit to the situation.