Natespost

   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?