If your are an affiliate wanting to promote products online, and did not consider the art of soft selling to boost your affiliate commissions, you are probably behaving like the sales man who knocks on people’s doors only to get them slammed shut more often than not and because people do not like being sold to, they would naturally back away from you.
In online terms, there is nothing worst than not knowing the best course of action when it comes to promoting products and services. What do you think it’s going to happen when you blast emails to every person on your lists or put links around the forums? Let alone spam article directories with sales pitches for unrelated programs and services?
On the other hand, when your prospects are actually interested in buying something and they seek and get a second opinion from another customer or friend, who have already bought the product or know about it, they would more readily want to buy from you in this case than when you were simply acting as a hard sales person.
The fact is that people buy into people and this principle is real also on the web. So when someone gives an opinion about somebody else and his services or products, the results is much more powerful than selling face to face. This form of referral is what is known as soft selling and it can be achieved mostly through reviews of products and services or from word of mouth of course.
If you write reviews about services or products that you have or know about and post these articles all over the web, provided they contain the most targeted keywords possible, the search engines will pick them up and index them high in the rankings. Clearly then, these reviews will give your products a lot of exposure to create traffic to your sites and thus boost your commissions.
This is not going to work very well for highly targeted very competitive words where the big companies are already spending huge amounts of cash on back links to stay at the top of the rankings but if you go after the long tail keywords that target derivatives of the main expensive keywords or subsets of the niches you are in, followed by “review”, you can go to the top of the rankings as well to give you the chance of picking more commissions.
Soft selling a product then can be done very well by recommending it, after you have used it yourself, know about it through comments on forums or by studying the benefits given in its sales letter. In other words, you are doing a review of it and highlighting what the product can do for your customers as well.
In the soft selling reviews that you make, you will include the links to the merchant’s product, in addition to what you discovered about the product and how its benefits far out weight any minor faults that you find. That is why you recommend it, since it worked for you and you know it will work for everyone else. Oh, and use at least twice the link to the merchant in your article review.
Tell your audience how their success online will reflect how well they can position themselves against their competition and how the services and products that you recommend will help them achieve that status. When you demonstrate what the products that you soft sell to your customers can do for them, they are bound to take action to try them out.
Remember that these articles reviews type of soft selling can be sent to the social networks. Yes use the main ones at least; just Google the top 10 and shoot them these review-articles type of soft selling recommendations. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of targeted traffic that this tactic generated for you, making you lots of sales for your online business.
Use the article directories as well. Again, find out the top 10 and post these review-articles that at least include in your bio your affiliate links for the products that you promote. There may be some directories that may not allow you to do that so it is best to look at their terms and conditions first.
If you also send shortened reviews of products in your auto responder, this alone can multiply your sales as your own customers will trust your recommendations for the products they are after.
You actually can make money out of the article-review type of recommendations you create. When you have a good number of them, you could set up a review site and sell them in group form or individually. There is a lot of potential for these reviews when you packaged them in a themed review type site.
Think about the millions of searches going through Google at any time with people thinking about getting products and not knowing if they are good for them. See? Many of them need a final push to make that decision to buy and you can provide them the answer with your social proof and action taken recommendations to buy.
German Calvo.