Have you ever asked yourself about the role you play in the affiliate marketing niche? In fact, clear vision of your function not only saves you time and resources, but also increases the efficiency of your promotion strategy. Trivial replication of your affiliate link elsewhere on the web or placement of increasingly irritating media ads of a product you promote, isn’t a limit for your opportunities, when it comes to promotion of the product. Today we’ll consider another effective tool – creating a successful overview of a product, which leads a customer to purchase and increases your affiliate commissions.

boasting in affiliate marketing

Most internet users do not trust boastful slogans; neither they bend under persistent pressure created by colorful banner adverts, urging them to purchase a product or service. When searching for a product, customers analyze opinions, overviews, characteristics, only then they make a decision. Your role is to prepare a customer to making a purchase.

• Main rule

Remember two main characteristics of a successful overview: honesty and meaningfulness.  It’s not worth deceiving a customer. Draft your overview like if you’re writing it for your best friend. Don’t overload it with unreasonable compliments to product, which are not supported by facts. To make it easier, let’s use an example, something simple, like skincare products.

• The structure of an overview

There are 3 main components in a basic overview: an intro, the body of an overview and conclusion. Generally an introduction describes a setting and a problem; the body of an overview offers the solution with the help of a product or service that is promoted. The conclusion contains information regarding the actions needed in order for solution to work. Here’s a shortened example of structure: «How do I get rid of acne? » – «There is a good product, which works. Its strengths and weaknesses description» – «The product may be ordered at www.somesite.com».

Worth knowing: you need to remember that it’s ok to mention some weaknesses of the product. This way you may gain more trust from customer’s side, both to the product and overview as well. In many cases you may use this tactics to raise customer’s trust to the product by providing some insignificant fact as a weakness. In our case it could be something like this: «This product is not recommended for men over 50». It’s nothing special – our product’s target audience does not include this segment anyway.

•Drafting an overview

Here are several recommendations that specialists from Yepty.com affiliate network suggest for getting the most out of it

  · Distinguish the target audience. This stage of drafting is worth a separate article or even an academic study. The price of a mistake here is very high – it may result in a loss of efficiency on further stages down to 0. For our case the target audience would be:

· Highest priority group: women from 15 to 25 y.o;

· Medium priority group: women from 25 to 50 y.o;

· Lowest priority group: men 15 to 25 y.o;

Notice that this is only demographic breakdown, there’s so much more parameters you need to take in account, depending on specific type of products.

  1. Define the functionality. Carefully go over the characteristics of a product and, based on your knowledge about the target audience select several features that may be helpful/appealing to potential customers.  The color of a package wouldn’t be something helpful for a customer, seeking a solution for a problem. Ideally, it is worth trying a product yourself, to get a deeper understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Define the advantages you offer. However good the product has been presented in the overview, customers will look at alternatives. Let them know about the alternatives as well! Demonstrate the weaknesses of alternative products, but remember – do not try to deceive the customer, describe the alternative products that are less effective that the one you promote, especially when it comes to comparing main features/functionality (we defined that in previous step).
  3.  Do some testing. A crucial step, which is omitted quite often. After you have created the overview, let someone from your surrounding read it, collect the opinions and rewrite some parts which seem to be doubtful or provoke negative emotions from the reader

The format of description and its style highly depend on your marketing strategy, tell us about the principles you use for creating the overviews in comments below.

Image source: myblogguest

This is a guest post by Andrei Titovets – Entrepreneur, internet-marketing specialist. Founder Sharexy.com – powerful social sharing and website monetization tool and Yepty.com – PPC Advertising Network with contextual ads, clickable Ad formats and pretty cats.