Posts Tagged ‘affiliate’

Affiliate Copywriting to Draw In Readers…

Monday, February 1st, 2010

This started as most of my blog posts do. I was talking with an affiliate that works with Ads4Dough and reviewing some of his copy he was using on a article type lander. He showed me the page and I read though it but at first pass I didn’t think it did much on the emotional or senses selling side. I know it’s supposed to be an objective artcle/news report on a product but you can still learn to use language that’s going to draw in you users, to your copy. One thing I can tell you is if you’re copy is boring to read you’re going to lose your buyers in a heartbeat. Now in the 5 years I’ve been in this business I’ve read a LOT of copy and written quite a bit as well. Most of it sucks. Certain things sell plain and simple and it’s aparent a lot of people don’t know what they are.

NOTE: What I want, you, to take for this is concepts. Not copy my copy writing exactly.

In a few older posts I talked about pain and pleasure as motivators. We also discussed how people buy. We buy on emotion and then we justify that emotional purchase with fact.

So how do we get that emotion and feelings involved in our copy?

To effectively bring emotion into our copy we’re typically going to lean towards using a lot more words that involve the senses. Do you know what the primary senses that most people operate by? Did you know if you speak to these senses, all of them, you’re going to connect with most people better? Here is a list of the big 3 senses that most people run through the world with:

  • Feeling
  • Audio
  • Visual

Take a look at those and digest them for a minute. Sure there is more senses then that but most people use these to reference the world. You’ll find certain people stronger towards one then the other. Listen to the language people use when you’re talking with them. I bet after a bit once you get and accute ear you’ll be able to pickup what someones dominant sense is. And get this did you know that men and women are different? Hhahahah of course. Here’s a short cut to get you started with what to focus one depending on what sex you’re writing for.

Most men are strong on the Visual sense. They’re going to say things like: I see what you’re talking about. I can definately picture what you’re saying. When you’re selling to men the more visual you can make your pitch in your copy the more you’re going to connect and the more emotion you’re going to bring out. On an interesting topic when it comes to something that sexually arouses someone guess what men go for? Is it the penthouse forum magazine with the emotional stories? Now of course not it’s the visual picture stimulus. :)

So have you guessed what drives most women? If you haven’t it’s pretty easy “Feeling”. Think heartfelt stories on lifetime movie network.

So lets take a couple of these ideas and put them into play on some short snippets of copy. We’ll start with a statement like:

“I was in so much debt I didn’t know what to do.”

This sounds pretty bland right but it’s not really touching on any sense or emotions. There’s honestly nothing to pull anyone in. But lets take this and write it for a strong visual sensing person:

“Every day I closed my eyes as I opened the door beacuse i knew I’d see the stacks of bills sitting there piling up to the ceiling.”

How about one for a strong audio sensing person:

“everytime the heard the mail slot open all i could say to myself was, I don’t want to look, because I knew exactly what was there.”

And one last one for for the feeling people:

“I used to cringe every day stewing over all those bills piling up and weighing on me.”

Pretty cool huh. Which one did you connect with the most?

The ideal copy weaves between all these senses almost like a web. The more you can hit on each of the sense types the more you’re going to connect with each type of person. If you’re going to be targeting one sex more specifically I’d highly suggest going about double on the keywords tha appeal to them.

Now go sell Ice to Eskimo’s :)

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 3 Comments »

Planning to Scale An Affiliate Campaign Before You Start.

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I spend most of my days helping affiliates and advertisers  become successful. And with that comes being able to communicate the things that have made me successful as an affiliate in what I’ve done. It’s often said that doing and teaching are two very very different things. In doing you do a bunch of trial and error then in instinctively and eventually learn to do what you do. So to extrapolate that out into an easily repeatable formula to train other affiliates with isn’t so easy. The more I talk with affiliates the more i realize it’s not about the “How” as much as the “What” goes on in your head and how you approach things.

As your time goes on in your affiliate career you’ll realize your ideas change. When you first start in this business you just want to find anything that will work and make you some of that affiliate cash. And as you begin to progress along the affiliate path you’ll stop caring about things that just make a couple bucks. You’ll find that it can sometimes take just as long to get a campaign profitable with little potential as is does to get one profitable that has next to unlimited potential. If you’re doing a full test on a new campaign that can include mulitple presells each with optimization tech as well as spending a ton of time writing different copy and multi-variant testing. Then there is creating and testing text, flash and banner ads. Point being if you’re going to “Truly” test a campaign it’s a very deep involved time consuming thing. If you haven’t exhausted different colors, pictures, layouts, copy for landing pages and creatives you have no idea if you’ve even really tested it. You might have dipped your toe in the water but you could have been one step away. Don’t start testing unless you’re truly going to test. Think about weight loss or business opportunity, both of those campaigns are unprofitable if you run direct rather then through a presell page. Imagine how much money you could be leaving on the table not fully testing.

There are two major parts to creating a campaign at the highest level. Of course each of these things have many parts but sometimes it helps to break things down at their highest level first.

  1. Proof of Concept
  2. Scaling

Talking to affiliates often I find most smaller affiliate don’t think of things as a proof of concept for something much greater. They’re just testing something out. Well if you don’t plan on it making you over $1,000 a day profit from the start, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

When starting have your scaling plan laid out before you start. You should have a few traffic sources you’re most comfortable with. The should allow you to test with smaller amounts of cash and risk, these are your proof of concept traffic test beds. We have these types of traffic divided into two sections

  1. Keyword driven traffic
  2. Demographic driven traffic

We divide things into these two categories because they’re two totally different trains of thought and scale in two separate ways. We group content network into demographic driven because I believe that’s how it really works. All the quality score crap with keywords and related content is lumped into the keyword driven section. ( on a side note no real marketing has QS, it’s mearly finding the audience and demo that likes your product and advertise to them ) We do all our testing to see if the concept will work on either of these or both sections.

As we get good or bad data back from the proof of concepts we have a whole plan of traffic sources laid out for each section to scale out the campaign.

In a nutshell I think the major theme here is that you need to be planning the campaign to scale before you even start it. So as you now begin to start you new proof of concepts have a plan laid out as to how you’re going to scale it up and line your pockets with green.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 3 Comments »