What’s up? Not much

by Sapphire (February 20, 2007)

Offline life’s been really busy for me lately, so there’s no much to report here.  Everything I talk about is still going the way it was the last time I talked about it.  I’m still recoding one of my aff sites and struggling to write regular posts.  I figure if I do at least a little something every day, I’m still on track during times like this, when it just isn’t possible to do everything.

I do have some thoughts to share.  I’m now operating on the idea that the only way to sell aff products long term is to build sites that include aff links, but a whole lot of other stuff, like original content.  I’m getting rid of every bit of pre-written sales pitch I used to have on my aff links.  I’m finding in some cases the product pictures rather speak for themselves, so I’m just writing one sentence to highlight a distinctive feature about that specific item.

I don’t have enough traffic on that site to tell if it’s working yet… but when I consider that I’ve made a couple of sales from a site that was chock full of dead links, I have to remind myself you don’t really need to sell your visitors something from your pages.  You can’t, really, because even if you do, that click is going to take them to the merchant, who can totally un-sell them if they don’t like what they read there.  My job, as an affiliate merchant, is to get people to the store, so the store can sell them.

That means I need to pick stores I can imagine buying stuff from.  They need to give details, not hide the shipping and taxes info, have clear and reasonable return policies.  They need to have good photos of items.  They need to have a site that loads before tomorrow.  They need to look like someone I’d give my credit card info to.

That also means I have to present item photos, links and/or copy that makes someone want to see more.  It could even be that giving all the details on my site is losing sales for me by telling people something they don’t want to hear.  If I can get them to the shop, they’ll be more likely to compare items and shop around a little before giving up and deciding against it.

The good thing about this approach is that it works for selling adspace, too.  If my job as a blogger/site manager is to create a site that entices people to visit advertisers, that works for affiliates just as well as adspace clients.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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