Preselling will improve your affiliate sales conversions.
Before you exercise, it is recommended that you do some stretching and warm-ups. This prevents injury to your muscles and joints by literally warming them up and preparing them for the exercise. Selling a product is much like exercise, and results are best had by warming up your customers - or by preselling.
Many affiliate marketers fail because they depend on the merchant to do the selling. They mistakenly think that all they need to do put up an affiliate link on their site and get the customer to click through to the merchants site. Unfortunately, this won't get you many sales. While merchants sites are set up to make a sale, it is your job to get the potential customer warmed-up for the sale and ready to buy. This is what preselling is all about.
In order to presell a product or service, you start with your site content. Preselling in your content consists of giving the potential customer information that they can use, and working your promotions for the product or service into that content, so that it flows in a natural way.
You continue to presell the products in your articles. Write informative articles that are useful to your target market, and just as you did in your website content, work the product in - listing advantages and disadvantages of the product. Make sure that the content relates to the products that you are preselling. Tell the reader how the product can help them with the topic that you are writing about.
All of your business writing should be for the purpose of preselling the products or services. This includes web content, articles, sales letters, short ads, long ads, and even your signature file. Even your forum and newsgroup postings should be used to presell your products.
It is important to remember that you are preselling - not selling. If your presell content comes off as a sales pitch, you are not preselling, and you probably won't make the sale. There is a huge difference between selling and preselling. You should view preselling as more of a recommendation that you are making, as opposed to a sales pitch.
Once you've written your presell content, read over it. Have other people read over it. Is it a sales pitch? If so, start over. Is it valuable, useful information that recommends a product or service? Does it tell the reader how that product or service can help them with a particular problem or situation that the topic of your writing covers? If so, then you have written information that will effectively presell the product or service.
Writing presell content takes practice - especially for those who excel in writing sales pitches. It may take several tries before you are able to write good, effective preselling content, but with practice you will get there. Make sure that the people who are reading over your presell content understand what you are trying to do - otherwise, their input won't be very valuable to you. Keep the general rule in mind: Sales pitches are for selling, recommendations are for preselling.
People are turned off by sales pitches. We've even become numb to them, because we hear them so often. Preselling, however, works because it’s a softer sell. The reader feels that you are looking after their best interest by offering information and making a recommendation.
If you have done your preselling right, when the potential customer clicks through to the merchant site, they no longer need to be sold. They already have their wallets open, and they are ready to make a purchase of the product that you worked hard to presell to them.