There’s a marketing saying that goes, “People hate being sold to, but they love to buy.”
This maxim pretty much hits the nail on the head. The problem with many marketers is that they go overboard trying to convince people to buy their products. If you can find a more persuasive and informative way of speaking to people instead of hyping and hard-selling you’re going to win the marketing war. Many marketers fail to realize that you say more when you say less.
Once the reader detects that you have an ulterior motive, they’ll feel that you’re biased towards the product because you’re affiliated with it. Your motives become suspect and you lose credibility and trust.
You want them to buy. We get it! However, if you’re able to refrain from being too pushy and come across as genuinely concerned about your readers, they will not only feel more comfortable purchasing the product, but they’ll also be willing to follow your advice when making future buying decisions. Keep in mind that affiliate marketing is all about building relationships with your target audience.
One of the best ways to build that relationship is to show how the product helped you or how you benefitted from it. While it may not be possible to do this for all the products you’re promoting, you can still be subtle in other ways.
For example, if you have a site showing how to build chicken coops, casually mentioning that “circular saws are much better than miter saws because they’re easy to use” will have a bigger impact than a sidebar ad of a circular saw. You just need to hyperlink the words circular saws to the product you’re promoting. Curious visitors will click on the link. After all, everyone wants to make things faster and easier for themselves.
However, if you instead break out into a segment like, “You need to buy a circular saw model XXX to do this job effectively. It is the best saw that we found for the job and only costs $YYY,” you’ve probably set off the reader’s Spidey senses. They can sense that you’re pushing the saw because you were too obvious and they may be more interested in why you’re pushing the saw than the saw itself.
The goal is to use curiosity and strategically placed anchor text to get clicks. They must feel like it was their choice. That is the key. When the reader is doing things of their own volition, they’ll not be in a guarded state and will be much more receptive to the sales copy, etc.
As an affiliate, your job is to get the click. The sales page should do the selling. While your content can gently pre-sell the reader, it should mostly be benefits/solution-oriented. You want to sell the solution to the problem and not the product. The best way to do this is by showing how the product solves the most common problems your audience faces.
Done well, you won’t even need to mention where the product is sold or the positive reviews it has. When your content convinces the reader that a product is the solution they’ve been looking for, without blatantly telling them, the reader WILL click on the links to see how they can solve their problems.
Everybody is looking for solutions. You’re just the middleman who gently guides them down the right path. That’s all there is to it. Be subtle.
Need a second set of eyes to look over your content and see if it crosses the line to pushy? I can help, click below to get in touch with me.