Making money with a website involves product sales, affiliate programs and advertising.
All of these methods require visitors to perform specific actions whether it’s clicking on an ad or link, purchasing a product, or subscribing to a newsletter. Some type of action is required.
Your success in getting the visitor to perform the necessary acts is usually dependant on your design and strategic placement of links/ads, thereby making your website and content surrounding the product or promotion extremely important.
The success of affiliate programs are highly dependent on well written content . Sometimes it can be as simple as the power and influential ability behind your reviews and recommendations. In fact, I don’t think there is anything more effective when you’re trying to get visitors to act on your affiliate links.
Direct Affiliate Links Are Easy But They Don’t Always Work
Direct affiliate links point directly to an external website or sales page, of which you have an affiliate relationship with. While these links are affiliate links and “could” make you a profit, they are links that send your traffic away from your website. Once your visitor is sent away, you then rely on the referred website and their effectiveness at getting your visitor to convert to a customer.
If the host site is poorly designed or provides a poor landing page, you’ll likely lose your referral and sale.
I’ve seen many websites that are not designed well enough to appeal to the visitor’s I send them, but realize they do have an amazing product I believe is worth buying. Sending readers to these types of pages is essentially an affiliate kiss of death.
While I like to create my own pre-sell pages, it does take time. Sometimes I will do a simple mention of a product and link to them if their sales and landing page is of higher quality, but, if their sales page is of poor quality – that’s when the affiliate bumps to the top of my “To Do” list of articles. Eventually, in a perfect world, I will have pre-sell pages for all the affiliates I belong to. I cannot recommend enough that you take the time to create pre-sell pages on your website. Keep the power to encourage, control and track greater conversion rates to yourself and reliant on your own abilities.
Benefits of Creating a Pre-sell Pages
There are several benefits of creating a pre-sell page dedicated to a specific product or website you are promoting. Here are just some of the benefits I believe are most important:
- Attract Search Engine Traffic – Creating a pre-sell page provides keyword relevant webpages that will appear on search engines. If optimized properly, these webpages will yield extra search engine traffic searching for information on a specific topic.
- Leverage Visitor Trust – A personal voice in promoting affiliate programs is often overlooked. If your website is designed well and offers useful content, it will cultivate trust from visitors. Creating a pre-sell page and sharing your personal thoughts on products or services instead of just throwing down a link to an external site maximizes the number of happy customers who will likely turn into loyal customers.
- Off-Site Promotions – A pre-sell page on your website makes it easier for you to engineer future promotions. Using affiliate links on forums, blogs or other websites makes you look spammy. Being able to utilize a pre-sell page, allows you to drop a link to your website where you can introduce a product or program. Don’t discount the visitors you’ll be driving to your site instead of sending them directly to the affiliate site. You can gain new readers, customers and list subscribers.
- Reference Points – When you are creating content for your website, it’s easy to insert a link to your pre-sell page that can be used as a reference point. Deep linking is a good thing! As an example, if I compose an article that mentions Super Affiliate Handbook, I will drop a link to my own review/pitch page, instead of linking directly to the SAH site or sales page because I want my readers to see that I actually use it and what I like about it.
Create Pre-Sell Pages of Your Own
Creating a pre-sell page on your website is really a very simple process. You will simply develop a post or page with your own sales copy and promote it visibly on your website.
- Create a new page or post and include your recommendation as it pertains to the product.
- Make the new webpage visible by linking to it through a graphic banner or text link. You’ll want to make your new link visible site-wide or on a special ‘recommendations’ page.
Recommended Pre-Sell Page Guidelines to Follow
The success of your pre-sell page depends on several factors, but, great sales copy is the most important bar none. Here are a handful of guidelines to consider when creating a great pre-sell page.
- Objectivity and honesty are always the best approach. Aim to provide a well balanced review.
- This is your pre-sell page. This should be the final stop a visitor makes before clicking through to the affiliates page. This isn’t the place to link to other articles on your site or other external sites. Don’t distract your visitors by sending them someplace other than where you want them to go.
- Try to use the same affiliate link multiple times within the pre-sell page. A good rule of thumb is to aim for using it at both the beginning and the ending of your article. Mix up the anchor text too. This will prevent your links from looking so repetitive.
- Cloaking your affiliate link will likely improve your click through rate. I try to cloak at least 99% of the time, it’s just one of those things I believe in. I have found that cloaking affiliate and non-affiliate links alike actually create greater conversion rates. You could trying a test of going with the regular affiliate link for a period of time and then cloak it for a similar period to measure your own click through rates.
- A pre-sell page should not be long winded. If its too long or too pitchy, visitors will likely click away. Don’t overdue it – a good target goal is 250 – 500 words. I’ve always found more success with 500 words or less than I have with wordier reviews.
- Write for visual appeal. Make use of subheadings, bold specific keywords or phrases, use bullet points or numbers as a way to help increase the scannability of your sales copy.
- Let the visitor know just how the affiliate program will benefit them. If you would like to provide an additional incentive for signing up under your affiliate link, this is the place to do it.
Setting up a simple pre-sell page doesn’t take long and it usually doesn’t require maintenance or updating. You may wish to consider making the most out of the traffic your website receives by creating pre-sell pages for your affiliate programs. It could be one an important step in cultivating your personal plan for passive income.
What I like to do is create a list of all the affiliate programs I belong to – I keep these in an Excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I review my list and make not of those affiliates without a dedicated page or post . Those affiliates then go on my "to do list" for article writing. When I’m suffering writer’s block, looking for content, I will invest a little time in creating posts or pages dedicated to that list.
Beyond creating the pre-sell page, I then look around my site, my popular posts, and evaluate my traffic trends to see where I can update with a link to the newest pre-sell pages making them most visible and accessible.
If you’re looking to get more organized, this is actually a good task to add to your "quarterly" list of things to do. Take this time to make sure your programs, pages and links are up to date. I simply add a note to my ReminderFox Add-on for Firefox and forget it until it’s time to do a little quarterly housecleaning.
Try making some time to develop a pre-sell page or two of your own. It’ll be well worth your effort in the long run.
For more affiliate marketing tips, subscribe to the Gayla Baer dot Com RSS blog feed or join us on Facebook
SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS: If you have questions related to blogging, affiliate marketing, making money online or possible scams, I’d love to help out. Submit your questions to be answered right here on Gayla Baer dot Com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
My way of saying “Thank You!”
My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
FireFTP
