Affiliate Sale Warm-Up
When I was in the sales field, I would often stop on Home Shopping Network, QVC, etc. when I was scrolling through the channels at night. I guess I should also say that I didn’t have much of a life. But it is a really educational experience for anyone wanting to sell anything to pay close attention to what they are selling, not what they are saying. What in the world am I talking about? Home shopping is a BILLION dollar industry, and anyone on the show is a trained, experienced, hard-core salesman. They might have the inventor of a certain product on during the segment, but they are always accompanied by a trained sales professional. I remember being impressed by a salesman they had selling a little piece of crap robotic vacuum. He turned it upside down and showed a little roller with bristles on the side of the unit. What it did for you was as it spun, the fact that the bristles were in a spiral shape, they pushed all the dirt that wouldn’t be sucked up by the vacuum pressure towards the center where it could be sucked up. This would keep your little robot from leaving dirt, dust, etc. along the edge of the carpet near the wall. He talked about this for 10 minutes and by the time he was done, you realized that this was the vacuum for the next century. The fact is, every vacuum ever made has the exact same feature, but he sold the feature. As far as you knew, his was the only vacuum ever made that had a bristled roller on it. They definitely sold more piece of crap vacuums that day than Kevin Federline will sell piece of crap rap albums in his lifetime.
The main point here for a blogger is that you need to do some selling yourself instead of just providing a link in your sidebar. Home Shopping Network doesn’t just show a picture of a product with a phone number below it. They tell you why you need the product. Thy tell you how your life will be better with it. So here is what you do. Whatever affiliate ad you have in your sidebar, link it to a page within your blog. On that page, explain the product or service, why you use it, and what it does for you. Sell it. Then link to your affiliate from that page.
If your header navigation bar links just to your categories, you are done. If they link to your pages, you need to do the following. Go to presentation, then theme editor. Open the header on the link at the right and find the line towards the bottom that looks something like this:(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’); ?> Under your Manage tab, you can fine the page number for the page you created earlier, and you need to remove this from your navigation using the exclude command. Here is what mine looked like after excluding my shareasale warmup: (’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=55′); ?> You might even want to leave it in your navigation bar, but it never hurts to learn how to play with your header. That didn’t sound dirty, did it?
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April 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Remember this will only work if your affiliate ad remains static.
How is shareasale working out for you?
& Good to see your back, what happened?
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Nate reply on April 5, 2008:
Allllllll kinds of B.S.
I have no excuse since I have a laptop with mobile broadband, but anyway……what do you mean by “affiliate ad remains static”?
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Jimi D reply on April 5, 2008:
If an ad affiliate company gives you a piece of code that displays content that changes, your “selling page” must change with it.
I am not even sure if anyone does do something along those lines.
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Nate reply on April 7, 2008:
But if you have the code that links to their java or whatever, it would change on it’s own just like normal, wouldn’t it?
April 5th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Oh, and sorry….shareasale itself is doing great for me…I just haven’t decided on one of their merchants yet. I only want to promote products/services I either use myself or have done a lot of research on. But at $1 a pop for people signing up for a free service that can make them money….you can’t lose. I’ll let you know if my sales increased by making the warmup page. I’m sure they will.
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April 5th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Good to see you back, thought you got employed on us for a second. I still cannot figure out why my page is messed up in your IE. I look at it everyday in IE and everything is fine, minus my beginner header. So I can’t figure it out. Anyways, good to see you typing on bro.
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Jimi D reply on April 6, 2008:
Chandler, it looks like you have a problem with your column widths, ie sometimes renders the border slightly different, so it made to div slightly to wide to fit, so it moves down. Go into your css page and change the width on #content to something slightly smaller than 440px
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chandler reply on April 7, 2008:
I changed it. See if that works. And I love playing with my header…yes, THAT did sound dirty.
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Nate reply on April 7, 2008:
Still pushed down to the bottom in IE 6
p.s. your last post probably has you on some federal watch-list. ha
chandler reply on April 11, 2008:
I cannot seem to fix it then. I don’t know. I’m not a html guy.
April 6th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Nice to see you’re back! And good advice. Did you get employed or smth?
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April 6th, 2008 at 9:26 am
uhh….nope, no job!
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April 6th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Great to see you back, Nate, and what a cool article! My fiance’s grandparents just recently bought a Kirby for $1300… (talked down from $2500 or something like that). Makes me almost want to become a door-to-door vacuum salesman!
Of course it provided value — a Kirby really does take up the dirt. Providing value is really the best sales technique. But you have to be focused on your results, too! If the product is good, you don’t need to be shy about selling it.
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April 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Yeah my host for some reason suspended me sunday evening, even though the pictures weren’t even on their servers. I was linking to another site that was hosting them, which also got a warning to remove them. I got no warning, I just got suspended for close to 18 hours.
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April 10th, 2008 at 4:37 am
[…] Affiliate Sale Warm-Up- Nate from NatesPost.com explains how to create a warm-up page for your affiliate links, where you can advertise for the product and make more money. Check it out, it might work for you! […]
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:09 am
Yes, even when marketers provide you with banners and text links, you mustn’t expect these to promote the product by themselves. I certainly place banners on my marketing site but these are to make it look pretty and provide some linking for me! Sure, they tell my visitors I have goods to offer, but I don’t rely on the banners for my bread and butter.
I highlight a different link day by day in my blog posts, create a webpage that is simply an online endorsement letter as to WHY I promote that product, and BETTER STILL: what it has done for me. I may send a ’solo-ad’ about this product to my email list.
Always determeine that you will be the affiliate promoter like none other! To succeed you must be first different, and best of all: original. I don’t have all the answers, nor does anyone. We all learn every day online. We adapt strategies. Look around offline for an advertising idea you can apply online. Look at your direct mail post: what can you learn? What can you implement?
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