The Affiliate Marketing Buying Trance
I’m reading this book by Dr. Joe Vitale titled “Buying Trances: A New Psychology of Sales and Marketing“.
My full-time day job is marketing and sales for a direct mail marketing company — actually, it’s a family business started by my grandfather’s brother — and I’m always reading books to help better myself.
It occurred to me the other day that this buying trance also relates to affiliate marketing when you’re using landing pages to presell the visitor on the product you’re hoping they buy through you.
The whole purpose of a landing page is to get the visitor in a buying mood — you want to warm them up to the product and put them in a buying trance — this way when they click through to the merchant’s website, they’re in the right frame of mind to buy.
Here are a few things I’ve found to help:
1. The product you’re promoting is good, reputable and presents well — this should be a given for every promotion you run.
2. You write in a conversational tone. This is so important — proper grammar isn’t necessary, but spelling errors are a big NO. Take a look at this blog post for example — doesn’t it feel like I’m talking directly to YOU. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do and I accomplish this by writing how I speak — I try to write as if I’m talking to you about this, not writing it.
3. Take a soft-sell approach on your pre-sell landing page because no one wants to be sold to. Your job is to warm the person up to whatever product or service you’re promoting and let the merchant do the selling. If your copy “screams” at the person reading it — or if it smells of “buy from me!”, I can guarantee you’ll make a fraction of what you could be earning.
Learning how to presell takes time and practice, but here’s a free eBook that will help shorten the learning curve:
It’s titled “Make Your Content PREsell” and it’s written by Ken Envoy of SiteSell. This isn’t an affiliate link. Ken used to charge for the eBook, but I guess he gives it away for free now to promote his other products and services.
Read it a couple of times and try to apply what you learn.
When I think about it, preselling is what really started earning me affiliate income — so I know it works.
Talk to you soon,
Ryan
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Tags: Buying Trances, Landing Pages, Preselling
Hi Ryan,
I came across you from Caroline’s twitter about you.
I’m curious, have you done A/B testing with a landing page vs. website to see which performs better with affiliate marketing? I’d be interested to hear your results if so.
Thanks!
Hi Joanne,
From my experience, a presell landing page definitely converts better than direct linking…but only if you do it right.
So it’s definitely worth your time in learning how to presell…and the ebook I mentioned above should do the trick.
I will also write some blog posts on preselling as well.
That being said, I’ve had some decent success lately with direct linking and I plan on writing about this very soon.
Thanks for writing me,
Ryan
Really. On some level, I’m surprised by hearing that a pre-landing page done right converts better. Heck, you could make a great post about that. Since you’re re-visiting direct linking (I got here from your Direct Linking is Not Dead post), you could do an a/b landing page/direct link experiment running on identical ads.
I’d do it, but, well, I can’t get my direct link campaigns to work very well.
Anthony Borelli / Greg Holden’s book on Affiliate Millions is what got me trying my hand online. One of the ideas that appealed to me was, why loose traffic by sending to an intermediate site, if you can send direct.
Do you have an example of a presell site that works better than direct linking? Does it have to do with whether you can deep link directly into an advertiser’s site for a specific keyterm?
Thanks for your insights.
Hey WebDiggin, there’s a lot of good questions here and you’ve given me some ideas for future posts…but let me try to address some of your questions here.
Direct linking can work…I’ve found some products that did very well for me. But I then turned these campaings into landing pages and made much more.
I’ve found direct linking works best as “testing the waters”. If you find a product sells this way, then you can be almost certain you’ll make more if you create a landing page for it.
But that assumes you write copy well and have a general idea of good page layout.
- Easy to read font like Verdana
- Pleny of white space
- Well-written copy that doesn’t scream “buy!”
- Relevant graphics
- etc.
The purpose of a landing page is to presell and put the visitor in a buying mood. Sure you can send direct and not waste any clicks, but what frame of mind is that person in? You don’t know (well you sorta do depending on the keywords you’re bidding on)…but with your landing page, you can influence their thoughts and make them more likely to buy.
Hope this helps,
Ryan
Helps a lot. Thanks. The link to the e-book had a lot of helpful information as well. Appreciate the lead and the lengthy response.
The e-book seems garnered around the idea of generating sites with content good enough that they’ll be picked up by natural searches themselves.
I’ve always thought about landing pages as simply one-off pages in cyberspace that receive traffic through my PPC campaigns. (Which is clearly why I haven’t experienced a lot of luck with landing pages.)
So… is the logic then that I should be thinking about creating genuine sites of their own merit that happen to incidentally link to the advertiser, or… is preselling a landing page simply another way of saying your landing page needs to have personality and voice to build relationship before you ask for the sale.
When you create your landing pages, are you creating an actual site, or is it one of those one page wonders?
And, on that note, heading off to bed. ‘preciate the input.
Hey WebDiggin, landing pages definitely need personality, and it all starts with good copywriting skills.
Make your landing page educate the visitor and then encourage them to click thru to the merchant’s site for more info with a strong call to action.
Actually, I just thought of a free ebook that you would get a lot out of.
Download it here:
http://affiliatemarketingwithryan.com/2008/quit-your-day-job-by-jeremy-palmer-is-now-free/
Cheers,
Ryan
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