Step-by-Step Presell Copywriting for Affiliate Marketers

In one of my previous affiliate marketing tips, 7 Types of Content for Affiliate Sites, I mentioned that an affiliate can rope in commissions with sales copies.

Sales copies are posted on affiliate sites with the main purpose of directly selling a product, service or a CPA offer. In this affiliate marketing tips, I am going to share with you six steps of writing a presell copy that get clicks.

Why get clicks but not sales or the actions required by merchants? Well, although an affiliate presell copy can have a huge influence on the site visitor, the merchant still plays an important role such as having a good landing page design to make sure the traffic that you send converts.

6 Steps to Write a Good Affiliate Presell Copy

When I plan to include a presell copy in my affiliate sites, I will write the copy using the steps below. To be upfront about this, I did not create the steps all by my own. I learn most of my copywriting tips from Joe Vitale (his book Hypnotic Writing helps a lot) and Ray Edwards (thanks to Ross Goldberg’s Virtual Master’s Internet Marketing Seminar), which I adapt the tricks for my affiliate presell copy after going through a few testing.

Craft an Attention Grabbing Headline

“Fire Your Boss and Make $5000 Per Hour While You Are Sleeping!” is stupid! This method is overused by scammers and it is lame enough that the next thing a site visitor can relate to will be the X button on the top right hand corner of his/her screen.

Try to dive deep into what is the major pressing problem that your site visitors might be facing and list out top reasons that they would want to solve the problem. To make the headline more powerful, tell them that they will find the solution to that problem on that page of yours itself.

We will use the hair loss niche as an example.

• Problems Faced: Hair Loss
• Reasons to Get Out of Problem: Self Esteem, failure to pick up women
• Potential Headline: Rejected by women due to hair loss? Feel intimidated just because your hair keeps falling off? Easy solutions to redeem your pride found here!

Don’t rip me up if the headline sounds bad (I have no experience with the hair loss niche ) but you should get the idea. Such headlines get attention and since it dwells on the emotional side of your site visitors, they are more likely to keep reading.

Describe Problems that Visitors Face or Achievements that Awaits

The next element that comes after your headline will be a couple of paragraphs that either extend the emotional factors of the problem or prompt your visitors to think about great things that they will achieve (become debt free, public attention, lovable and obedient kids) once the problem is solved by your product.

Again, remember to dwell on emotional factors. Emotion is one of the major factors that influence one’s buying decision.

List Benefits of Promoted Products

Next, explain to your visitors about the benefits that they will get from the product. Unlike a product review, don’t highlight the features of a product but try to turn the positive features into benefits.

Visitors or customers often ask “What’s in it for me?” before paying for anything. Once you show them that a product can solve their problems because of the benefits, a purchase or an action is very likely to happen.

Address Doubts

At this point, the visitors might have lots questions, doubts or even suspicions in their minds. You need to provide answers to all these in your copy to earn their trust. Of course, mind reading is something impossible for a new affiliate.

What you can do is to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors or get someone (parents or average Joe friends, skeptical ones will be best ) to read the copy. Write down the questions that they raise, find out the answers and include them in your copy.

Common sense may provide clues on what are the likely doubts that most will raise. For example, if an offer requires submission of personal information such as email address, phone number or credit card info, you might want to tell your visitors that these information will not be shared and the whole submission process is secured.

Call to Action

It’s human nature that sometimes, we need something to guide us on what to do next. Apart from placing banners, ‘click here’ buttons and asking your visitors to click on your affiliate links, consider guiding them through the submission process so that they complete the actions required to earn you commissions.

If you are into a non-webmaster or a non-techie niche, this element of your presell copy is crucial to improve the click-through rate.

Reminder of Benefits

At this point, it is OK to assume that some visitors will forget about the reason they are reading your copy. You can reiterate the major benefit of the product or offer and include a clickable link as a P.S (postscript).

I always include a line saying that this may be a time limited offer to trigger the “scarcity means something is good” mindset. I am not setting up some false scarcity here though. CPA offers do expire after some time and Amazon discount rates change from time to time.

Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale

I do not recommend affiliates to pay $1997 for a full blown copywriting course. Even if you are an info marketer, you should know that you can always outsource the copywriting part.

However, if you are eager to improve your presell copy, Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale is a good read. Apart from writing presell copies, the hypnotic writing techniques taught can also be used in writing a blog post, email newsletter or an article.

I actually enjoy being slightly hypnotized by the writings in the book, yes, it’s that powerful.

Continuous Trial and Error

Just like any skills, you need to constantly practice writing and target different demographics for different niches to improve yourself.

You must also track the results of your copy and one good metric to look at will be your CTR. Modify one thing at a time in order to see the effects of the changes and don’t be afraid to try new techniques out.

This will be the affiliate marketing tips for the week. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to ask in the comments section. Also, what are some of the copywriting elements that worked incredibly well in your affiliate marketing efforts? Feel free to share with me in the comment section as well.

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Photo Credits: Caitlinator

Related Affiliate Marketing Tips:

• Keyword Selection for Affiliate Sites: Make Money or Branding?
• Traffic Building and Link Building for Affiliate Sites
• Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites
• 7 Types of Content for Affiliate Sites
• Different Type of Sites for No Cost Affiliate Marketing

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