John Merrick

If you want to make more money as an affiliate, you must presell.

First, what is preselling? There are two components to it – art & science. And it’s function is to prepare your reader to buy something. Then you send them to the site that sells what you’ve prepared them for. When done correctly, your reader will not even notice.

Basically, you give them some content. Then send them to the sales page. We’ll get into how to do it correctly in a minute. Before we get into that, you should understand what’s in it for you. Here are a few benefits of preselling:

• It helps your reader trust you – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. And the more clicks you get the more sales you’ll make.
• It disarms your reader – When you’re preselling vs. pitching, you’re reader doesn’t feel the need to be guarded. Unguarded reading means they’re not filtering what you say. So your content get absorbed.
• It creates buying readiness – Now they trust you and feel open to your message. So they become more receptive to other messages. For example, the sales message on the page you’re linking to. Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
• It increases your sales – They arrive at the product website prepped to buy. With a feeling of trust and openness. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
• It increases customer satisfaction – Plus, they feel they’ve made the buying decision on their own. Versus being pitched or convinced. So they are happier with their purchase.
• Your profits go up – 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 earn more commissions. Your customers are happier. That’s a clear win-win.

Now, here’s how preselling works:

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

Mastering the art

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. The art of this is to provide enough information to be of value, but not enough to satiate the hunger. That is, they have to be wanting more when you refer them to the product sales page for the product you’re trying to sell. And because you’ve gained trust, they’re more receptive to the sales message and more likely to buy.

It’s also a science

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

One of these key elements is the presentation of the information. You have to have your end in mind. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. How can providing information accomplish this goal? The first method is to provide enough info to get them started, but not enough to finish. The other method is to explain all the details and expose how difficult it is to do what you’re explaining. Whichever method, you send them to a product website that solves the problem you just created.

But you can’t link to your affiliate link. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. That’s because nobody likes to click on affiliate links. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? Well, that’s part of the science of this whole process. You use an image tag to cookie your reader before they leave your site.

The next trick is to hyperlink specific words and phrases inside the content of the article you’re providing. Hyperlinked words are clicked more than anything else. And if the words you hyperlink relate, your reader will naturally click them for more information.

What you have now is a super powerful system for affiliate marketing success.

Now for the bad news…

It’s extremely difficult to do this correctly. Let’s look at the skills required to pull it off: Good content. The entire process depends on your being able to provide useful information to your readers. This means you have to be able to write well, and have enough knowledge to be useful. Strategic writing. Yes, you must providing useful content. And you have to make the content accessible in order to provide value. And still leave them wanting more. The other approach is to reveal a self-evident problem through the information.

Picking products. You also need to determine what products you’ll be preselling. Even if you can pull off writing and great article. Your efforts are completely wasted if you don’t pick a winning product.

Technical skills. To be most effective you have to use the “covert cookie” method. This is fairly simple – you use a 1 X 1 image and set the “source” to your affiliate link. (But if you mess it up, your referrals won’t be tracked.)

Summary:

Now you know exactly how to presell effectively. And doing this increases your affiliate commissions by over 500%! So, start now and develop preselling content for all your affiliate promotions. Don’t wait another minute. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.