Selling Or Pre-Selling On The Internet?

If you are an affiliate marketer you often find yourself writing sales copy for a product or service. You upload the page. The page does a great job selling. You get great CTR -- but no sales. It must be the sponsor that cannot close the deal. Not necessarily.

When I started out I would make one and the same mistake over and over until I finally figured it out. I was selling and not pre-selling. Before explaining why I believe the concept of pre-selling is important, I would like to describe how I used to go about affiliate marketing.

It went like this: I would find a new company to represent. Great. I would go to their site to learn about the product and look for great copy to use on my site. This was my mistake. Not to learn about the product but to use their copy with only slight alterations. Why was that a mistake?

Imagine a visitor coming to my site and getting all hooked and ready to buy. The visitor clicks on my "borrowed" call to action link that states "Order Today and Get Free Shipping". The vistor arrives at the sponsor site and..... finds that they too are selling him the same product "all over again". I am certain I lost a lot of sales this way.

How do I know? Well, I do know that when I changed my sites to be more informational and worked with "problem-solution", "features and benefits" and "click for more information" type of links, I started doing a lot better. And there is nothing more telling than your bottom line, in dollars and cents.

Poor conversions can stem from other reasons. There are many sponsors out there that cannot close the deal -- even with targetted traffic. But if that is the case, no problem, send your traffic elsewhere.