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.

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this milestone, but in January 2010 I should have celebrated my 10 years working online anniversary. However instead I was actually cruising the Caribbean on the marketers cruise so I had other things to distract me.

Anyhow yup 10 years ago just after the millennium celebrations and the whole Y2k Hysteria was turning out to be something about nothing I was pretty much broke and looking for ways to make a quick buck. So like many others I turned to the internet. I’ve pretty much been a developer for most of my working life and been developing for the internet since around 1995 – wow even before the great dotcom bubble blew up and then burst LOL – so I naturally thought with my skills making money on the internet would be a breeze.

So there I sat in front of my computer and typed into a search engine “Make Money Online” and after sifting through the usual scams and sites with bold claims I ended up at MPAM (Massive Passive Advertising Machine) don’t really know why but I got a sense that this site would be a great start. It had lessons, tutorials and basic hand holding to get you up and running. So there I spent my next few months doing just what MPAM told me to do. Did I make money? well I guess I can say yes I did. However a few hundred bucks wasn’t going to solve my money worries.

However what I did learn from MPAM was that my strengths lie in the technical side of things. Don’t get me wrong I fully understand marketing and could have done it. However my passion was all things technical and me being me knew that I wouldn’t really make it unless I was doing something I really wanted to do. So I set about looking for people without my skills who wanted to hire them and I haven’t looked back.

I don’t want this post to turn into a full blown history of my life online I will save that for another time. You can find more about me here and see the sites I’ve been involved with and own or co-own here

I will share some things I have learnt from these 10 years though:

Know your strengths
We all have them, so make the most of them.

Work your strengths
Concentrate on what you know and love and spend your time using and improving them

Outsource your weaknesses
You cant do it alone and you cant do everything. So let someone else’s strength cover your weaknesses

Don’t sell yourself short
Don’t let others undermine your strengths, they need them. Find the ones who understand that and work with them.

Find Partners not just jobs
Don’t get me wrong jobs pay the bills, but long term partnerships are the key to longer and greater success.

You cant do it for Free
Sorry folks your going to have spend out some money, doesn’t have to be much in the early days but you wont get anywhere without spending some money.

Attend Offline Seminars
I’m afraid that at some point you will have to get out from in front of your computer and go to an offline seminar. This is where you will meet future business and JV partners. You bank account will love you for it.

Don’t Give Up
There is no such thing as a quick buck on the internet, it takes time and a lot of hard work. I would say that its only the past 6 years that I have been making money. The first 4 years were just cutting my teeth.

Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0 launched 24 hours ago and boy is it going down well. Up until now there have been a few different ways to cloak your links. Most either WAY too complicated for the average user, and the rest.. well, not effective whatsoever. So looks like Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0 is indeed the missing link!

We have seen a HUGE need with affiliate marketers who are looking for a way to not just get the up-front commissions, but also start building their own lists too… one of the main features of Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0 lets you do that – by adding a lightbox (with any content you like) over ANY page.

This allows your commissions to be secure, while also letting you benefit from the advantage of being able to presell the product with a custom message, video, or add in an autoresponder code.

The software also allows you to use as many domains as you want and does away with the need to purchase additional licenses. Our Installation Wizard makes it super easy to install the software, which you will only need to do once! And what’s even more exciting about this is that there are no recurring fees!

It not only protects your commissions by hiding your affiliate link from so-called commission thieves, its latest technology saves you valuable time while still giving you additional chances to earn. The software has a neat way of detecting if your page is down and automatically sends visitors to a 404 error page that you customize yourself. It will also do the same for typos as well as cut and paste errors. Either way, you get visitors to see what you are promoting. Promotions are never wasted!

Ensure higher conversions and corresponding income through the ability to add your own lead capture systems to affiliate links and building lists as you promote affiliate products. Make use of lightbox popups when you offer bonuses for your buyers. Customize the popups by adding your own message. You also get to generate links that will be given serious consideration and will give you higher chances to convert and make money.

Click here to check it out

Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0

So weeks of anticipation (not to mention hard work) has come to an end. With the success of CBPirate.com we have had a lot of people asking how they can do even better with affiliate marketing, so we put our heads together and bring you Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0.

We are constantly working to create products that will help you guys do things faster, easier and BETTER. Not only is our plan to make something that will be useful to you, but they usually come out of a need for us needing a solution ourselves…

Which is why we created Phantom Link Cloaker 2.0 as the simple answer to cloaking your affiliate links safely, securely and very effectively.

We have made it so accessible that setting it up is a breeze. To top it off, we have tutorial videos and even a step-by-step guide that you can follow in case you need additional help or get lost along the way.

There are also some features that haven’t been done on any cloaking script before that (humbly we say…) blows every script out of the water. The most talked about one is the ability to add your own lightbox into ANY page you wish.

This allows affiliates to earn money promoting any product that they like, while still letting you build your own assets (your list!).

You can have a look at the other features of, what we believe is, the ultimate link cloaking software available by visiting Phantom Link Cloaker.

We’ve just finished uploading a bunch of new cool features to Instant Banner Creator. So if your an existing member then its time to log back in and check the new stuff! and if your not a member, well whats keeping you head over and check out this excellent free resource.

So what’s new?

1. Resize Your Images

You can now easily resize all of your saved images. Just click the “Resize” button beneath the individual images, select the new size and hey presto the image will be sized accordingly.

2. Convert Your Images

Instant Banner Creator saves all the images as .png which we consider to be the best format for web graphics. However there is still a need to use other formats so we have now added the ability to easily convert them to .jpg or .gif – just click the “Convert” button beneath the saved graphic, select the required format and whether you want to also preserve the orginal .png format.

3. Create Bigger Images

Yep, due to popular demand we have increased the maximum width and height you can select when creating your own templates. And to make it even easier we have added a text box next to the size sliders – you can now just type in your preferred size as well as moving the slider.

Over the next few days we’ll also be adding a ton of new templates and clip art you can use in your designs – there’s already a few new ones in there.

And finally Cindy Battye has created an awesome new members area for us. You have to log in and see it, it looks like a million bucks

Is this the sweetest members area ever?

www.InstantBannerCreator.com