Pimpin’ Your Website For Some Affiliate Marketing Magic

Though you can succeed as an affiliate even without the benefit of having your own website, the fact is, you will do so much better if you do have your own web pages established in the World Wide Web. There are many reasons for this:

· Having your own website will give you the liberty to try out a variety of marketing tactics which would otherwise be limited by other venues like free blog accounts, free web hosting services and the likes.
· Having your own website will give you total control over the components necessary for your affiliate marketing success.
· Most importantly, having your own website will give you ONE central destination where you can lead your prospects. You won’t have to promote each and every affiliate link individually, you can host all of them under one banner and lead people there instead.

Please take note of the third reason why having your own website will greatly benefit your affiliate marketing campaign. This will be central in our discussions for this article.

Your Own Cyber Mall

One way by which you can choose to display the affiliate merchant’s products in your website is by patterning your pages to follow the cyber mall model. Familiar with websites like www.amazon.com , www.buy.com and even www.froogle.com ? See how the products are neatly organized, and how easy it is to purchase them?

You can make your own cyber mall, featuring the affiliate products you are promoting. Instead of building your own payment processing and product delivery system, however, you can just include your affiliate links and the affiliate merchant will take care of the rest.

Following the cyber mall model is a great way to kick things off with a bang.

A Review Center

A lot of affiliates I know claim that a review center-cum-website delivers the best results. Pre-selling is all about conditioning your prospects’ minds to say “yes” to the offer, after all. And what better way to condition them for their consent than through favorable reviews of the products you are promoting.

Reviews can come in the form of objective critiques of the said products. Or perhaps, recommendatory messages suggesting their usage. You can even deliver testimonials from satisfied customers as well, which can be a very powerful tool in persuading people to support what you are promoting. They’d listen more to their fellow consumers, after all, compared to the merchant’s words.

The best format for a review center is through a blog. Blogs, by their very nature, are simplified content management systems. They may publication of entries quite easy, and search engine friendly as well.

Jazzing Up Your Affiliate Links

One thing you should learn is that most affiliate links, as they are, are prone to hacking. People can actually steal your commissions by merely looking at your displayed affiliate links. To prevent this from happening, many affiliates as well as affiliate merchants have resorted to the usage of URL redirectors such as www.tinyurl.com to mask the affiliate links. You may want to try this out, especially when your affiliate links do include a unique designation.

Keep your website simple and straight to the point. You wouldn’t want to embellish your web pages with ornate decorations that will only steal the focus away from the purpose of your web presence: to pre-sell the affiliate merchant’s products. Also, you will want your website to be as accessible to as many number of online users as possible – including those with slower internet connections.

The Art Of Pre-Selling

Many people are quite confused with the term “pre-selling.” They keep questioning the statement “affiliate marketing will only require that you pre-sell the product instead of selling the same.” For them, pre-selling does seem similar to actual selling. You’d still have to come in contact with your prospects after all. You’d still have to present them your offer. You’d still have to convince them to make a purchase.

But pre-selling is very much different than actual selling because of a variety of reasons:

· You won’t have to prepare the products.
· You won’t have to deliver the same.
· You won’t have to accept and process payments.
· You won’t have to provide for post-sales support.
· You won’t have to take care of refund requests.

Pre-selling, as we can clearly see, is so much easier than actual selling. All you have to do is to pick a product to promote and stick with the basics.

Know The Product

Any salesperson will tell you that it is a MUST that one knows what he is selling, or what he is pre-selling for that matter. Otherwise, any attempt to promote the same will only appear as insincere. And sincerity is a key ingredient in persuading your prospects to make a purchase. Without this, even the hottest selling products will be difficult to sell.

You have to know the product by heart… every spec, every benefit, even every weakness. You cannot convince others to believe in the product if you yourself do not believe in the same.

“But I just picked this product because of the high commission rate.”

This is the problem encountered by most affiliates. We must get out of the “commission above all else” mentality and look at the overall picture. How would we feel if someone would sell, or pre-sell, an inferior product to us? We wouldn’t want to be such a person, right?

Pushing Their Emotional Triggers

Well established is the fact that people buy based on emotions and justify their purchases with logic later on. Someone would buy a sugar-free oatmeal cereal because he’s afraid to develop diabetes, for example, and later on justify that it’s for health reasons.

In order to pre-sell successfully, you need to push your prospects’ emotional triggers. There are 5 main emotional triggers you can capitalize on:

· Fear. There is no greater motivation than fear.
· Wealth. Earning more always generates a lot of interest.
· Health. Health is our number one investment, and it is that which a lot of people value the most.
· Vanity. Who wouldn’t want to look better, right?
· Fame. People want to be accepted.

There are a variety of ways by which you can push these triggers. And the emotional triggers applicable will depend on the nature of the product you are tasked to pre-sell, of course.

The Value Of Over-Delivering

Since you will be competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of other affiliates, you will have to discover your own unique selling proposition, or USP. This is quite easy for the creative mind.

One form of USP that you should always consider, however, is over-delivering. Though it is true that the affiliate merchant is in charge of producing and delivering the actual products, such shouldn’t bar you from giving something extra for the people who have trusted your words. This manner of over-delivering comes in many forms. The important thing to note is that you should always aim to give them more than what they paid for.

In the long run, over-delivering will work wonders for your future affiliate marketing campaigns, as one customer can always be a customer over and over again.

Discovering Your USP

So you have decided to become an affiliate. Congratulations! This is truly the easiest, fastest way to earn some profit in the World Wide Web.

Your excitement, however, ma have been extinguished by some eventual realizations. So indeed, you’d earn 70%, or maybe even 90%, per successful sale you will manage to refer. That’s a big amount.

Then again, you’d have to compete with other affiliates who are pre-selling the same products and who have the same goals as you do. If the affiliate program has 5,000 affiliates, you will have to compete with 4,999 other people offering the same products to the same market.

Now, faced with such odds, how are you to succeed with affiliate marketing?

Market Saturation Is A Given

The market will get saturated. This is a given eventuality. It’s how fast or how slow the saturation will be that is of the essence. If many people are trying to sell the same products to the market, saturation point will be reached sooner rather than later.

Hence, it’ll be a matter of how fast you’ll be able to reach your target audience and pre-sell your products to them. Will you be able to do it before saturation point is achieved? Or will you be a little too late? This will spell your success.

But only initially.

There is one tried and tested way that you can implement to give you the best chances of succeeding in the affiliate marketing field. We call this the unique selling proposition, or the USP for brevity.

What Is The USP?

The USP, simply put, means that you should put your own twist into things. It’s a given that hundreds, if not thousands, of other affiliates will be pre-selling the same products. The challenge that the USP presents is this: how can you make your offer different than theirs?

How can you make your offer BETTER than theirs?

Remember, all of you will be pre-selling the same products. Hence, you must find a way by which your audience will be more interested with what you have to offer than what other affiliates are presenting.

This is an exciting challenge, one which will test your creativity and aptitude for this business. And since affiliate marketing requires little financial investment, if at all, we can say that it’s a safe game. The risks are low… but the rewards are great. So don’t forget to have fun in finding your USP.

The USP In Action

Take a look at the following examples to give you an idea how established affiliate marketers utilize their own USP so that you can come up with your own…

· Offering a straight up discount if your prospects will order from your affiliate link. This discount can be compensated by the commission you will receive per sale.
· Offering a cash rebate if your prospects will order from your affiliate link. Just like discounts, this rebate can be taken from the commission you will receive per sale.
· Offering a plethora of bonuses that will increase the perceived value of the affiliate merchant’s products. Be sure to inform your prospects that such bonuses can only be availed of from your offer.
· Offering discounts for future products.
· Offering access to an exclusive membership website that will provide for them some fantastic bonuses through time.

These are just a few of the more popular USPs in action.

There are more of course. Chances are, with a little inspiration, you’d be able to come up with your own. That’ll certainly emphasize “unique” in the term “unique selling proposition!”