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The main objective of any affiliate marketer is to generate sales and bring in revenue. To make a profit, however, you need to promote your product in a way that will attract traffic and generate conversions. There are many ways of getting products out there for customers to see and to purchase, and to do so you need to do a couple of things, such as:
- Know your audience well, and promote products that you know will be beneficial to them
- Offer huge discounts and extra bonuses on products on special days such as Easter, Christmas, Valentine's, Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Make sure you write content that is relevant and of good quality
These are all ways to ensure that you get affiliate sales, but there is another way to guarantee affiliate sales that seem to elude many affiliate marketers: telling your customers your story.
Stories Are Different From Product Reviews
A product review is a rather impersonal endorsement of a product or service. Yes, you may have actually used the product and know all the advantages and disadvantages, but writing that as a review may not get you as many sales as you want.
Customers these days don't even trust product reviews because, due to experience, they have realised that half of the time the product is not as described on the affiliate website or blog.
Rather than writing a product review then, you should write a story. Narrate the reason why you used the product, and how it worked or didn't work for you, and be honest about your findings.
How You Can Generate Affiliate Sales By Telling Your Story
Customers are getting more and more perceptive and selective by the day. Gone are the days when someone would just click on a product or service link because you said ‘this can do whatever you want it to'.
Now, customers are more discerning. They need to know more than the product description: they need to know that the product actually works. Giving a testimony, or telling how a particular product worked for you in a believable way, makes customers trust you more. And when customers trust you, you get more sales. But how do you go about getting these stories to tell them?
Use The Product
Before you sit down to spin a tale of how you suffered from writers' block, and a particular app helped you to conquer it, use that app. This is an important rule of affiliate marketing. You are not just looking out for yourself, but you are also looking out for your customers.
By testing the product or service, you are determining whether it would be useful to your customers or not. By using the product, you will know all of its advantages and disadvantages, and you will have an honest and unbiased opinion of the product to tell your customers about.
Use the Product for All it's Worth
You must use the product to its fullest potential. Make sure that you know everything the product can and cannot do. This gives you an in-depth knowledge of the product, and more material to create the content you need to tell your customers about it.
Do Not Give False Information
Something some affiliate marketers don't know is that honesty pays. Exaggerated reviews of a product, or embellishing a story to put your product or service in a better light, could turn back to bite you. Write honestly about what you discovered about that product and leave the rest to your customers' discretion. They are more likely to buy from you that way.
When detailing your experience of the product, write in a narrative form: in other words, tell a story. It doesn't have to be tear-jerkingly emotional, neither should it be bland and clinical.
Tell them how you came across a product and decided to try it, what it was purported to do, and how it worked for you. State its good points and bad points, and also make sure to say how much it costs. If there are similar products or services that you have used that are cheaper or more expensive, incorporate them into your story, giving your customers more options to choose from.
Dazzle Your Audience with Your Story
Let your audience feel that they can relate to what you have written. Make them believe that you have written the unvarnished truth, and they really stand a chance of benefiting from buying that product.
People especially like it when an affiliate marketer tells a tale that closely resembles what they have been going through. It gives them a sense of companionship and makes them feel they are doing business with an actual human, not a computer interface.
Writing your story honestly and from experience is bound to generate sales for you. One of the ways your sales will increase is by writing your experience and, if the results are great, emailing the merchant or the manufacturer your story. The merchant can share your story on social media by tweeting about it and even linking to your site. This will actually increase your credibility as an affiliate marketer, increase the traffic to your site, and boost your affiliate sales.
Word-of-mouth will also work in your favour. Customers who have read your stories and bought your product will tell others about it, bringing more visitors to your site, who can be converted to paying customers due to your honest opinions and recommendations.
