April 4, 2007
The Holy Grail of Affiliate Marketing
80% of my customers (or customers I refer to others as an affiliate) make their buying decisions at the presale.
In case you're wondering, a presale is the review, preview, and/or recommendation made for a product. I don't care if you have a prior relationship with the potential customer or not as this method works just as well from warm traffic (PPC) as it does from hot traffic (your own list).
A strategy I began using 2-3 years ago works like this:
1. I review a product or service and signup as an affiliate.
2. I write an article about my experience with the product/service, or I create a video showing how the product/service solved a problem (problem can be fabricated). Spend some time on this step and make it interesting and compelling. This is where copy skills (or a good paid copywriter that understands this concept) come in.
3. At the end of the article, use a redirect via your affiliate link directly to the order page of that affiliated product. Any good affiliate link cloaker can do this for you. I skip the product owners sales page for several reasons… but the main one is that I can control the sales process on my own domain and make adjustments where needed without having to worry about the product owner killing off the sale with a poor sales process.
4. I drive traffic to my presale.
There you have it…
Woody
Filed under Marketing Strategy
Comments on The Holy Grail of Affiliate Marketing »
Woody -
An example of such landing page with the video would be great.
If you can post a short 1-2-3-4-5 step sales-flow stucture we could follow, it would be nice too.
Are you serious?
It's pretty simple.
Look at the 4 SIMPLE steps I laid out for you. Can you not figure out how to write a review?
Do you really need to be hand held through this?
I'm not trying to put you down, I just want you to think this through.
Woody
I would just like you to deposit
a bag of money into
my bank account directly Woody.
KThxBye
Yeah, its interesting about the product review–even though I know and recognize the product review tactic, and my hunch is that there's a good chance the marketer is BS, I still respond more favorably than a typical landing page. (I like to gauge my reactions to different tactics out there.)
That said, I've seen enough of them that I'm starting to react to them the same way as I am the blah blah blah is a scam, or Don't buy anything from _____ until you read this.
Jecklin,
It's interesting you say that. If you read the April issue of Maximum Overdrive, you will find a way that I get around this problem very easily.
Woody
————————————————–
"At the end of the article, use a redirect via your affiliate link directly to the order page of that affiliated product. Any good affiliate link cloaker can do this for you"
————————————————-
This is always been something I've wondered how to do.
I recently paused an Adwords campaign (driving a clickbank affiliate product) because I felt that the visitors were 'put off' seeing the vendors landing page — after viewing mine.
Shamir
I use http://www.affiliatecloner.com/.
Woody
Cheers mate.
Shamir
If you are going to send someone to the order page from your landing/review page directly, make sure your l/p drops the affiliate cookie on the visitor's computer or you can kiss your sweetass affiliate commission bye bye
That's what http://www.affiliatecloner.com/ does.
Woody
OK, that is cool.
I assume you're talking about generating traffic primarily by Google Adwords. But how do you do this without getting slapped down by Google Adwords?
(For about 2 years, I had a set up just like this, but then I got hit with the Google slap. They started demanding I pay $1-10 per click! That shut my site down overnight and they wouldn't budge either.)
Woody may be able to shed some more light here, or in his upcoming posts/newsletters, but the way I see it is Google do pretty much what they want.
I've run only 2 Google campaign, but I've haven't been slapped in either of them. I've used landing pages which meet the following criteria:
a) *make sure* the landing page is relevant and is visitor friendly. This means the stuff that's on the page is directly related to ad itself (I'm talking about for the 'search network' here - for 'content network' they aren't nearly as fussy).
b) have sub pages linked from the main landing page - with Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Contact Info, FAQ, Blog, Content, anything else you can think of that's highly relevant. The first 4 things are the most important.
c) go easy when you start a new campaign. Don't dump thousands of keyword and run 20 adgroups from day one. Start with a few keywords (as in 10) and go from there. I've found this effective.
d) web re-directs are frowned upon by Google (they state they don't allow it) so if you're using those, then get rid of that. I tried using an exit pop up and their robots caught on within 48 hours. (what a bitch that was).
If this still doesn't resolve the issue then CALL them. They usually TELL you what to do.
Shamir
Thanks Shamir that helps!
Thanks for the tips Woody
Cheers
Tony
Another useful addition to this tactic is as follows.
1. Create a secondary offer on your pre-sale or review page that is a signup for your newsletter.
2. Once you have decent sales and signups, clone the original product (got that idea from Woody in a previous post)
3. Sell/launch your new product to the list that you have built.
4. Change the focus of your pre-sale/review page to upsell them to your new and improved product.
5. Potentially run your competition into the ground
6. Cash your checks.
Glen.