Too often, affiliate marketers view themselves simply as a promoter or peddler of third-party products. However, to accentuate your role, your value, and your income, consider yourself more of a trusted product expert that customers turn to because of the insights you provide. To achieve this status, you need to take product testing seriously.
Customers often question whether celebrities actually use the products they get paid to endorse in television commercials. This question comes from a lack of trust in the genuine nature of the endorsement and the product promotion. Just recently, Brooke Shields and Alyssa Milano suffered backlash after a hair product line they heavily endorsed reportedly caused baldness in women using it; more famously, the celebrities who promoted the catastrophic Fyre Festival just last month may be facing a lawsuit.
As an affiliate marketer, it is important that you are familiar with the products you sell and believe in them. Otherwise, you are doing your customers a disservice (and could potentially be setting yourself up for legal trouble). It is hard to defend against a complaint about a product experience if you’ve never used the product yourself. Test products, and promote those you can honestly stand behind.
By selling with integrity and improving your product knowledge, you can build better rapport with the marketplace. Your visitors will more likely see you as a credible resource than one of many eCommerce sites pushing third-party products. Establishing rapport increases the potential that you attract repeat visitors, sell add-on items and generate long-term loyalty from customers. If you have a very specific niche, product testing can help establish you as the expert in your field, making you the “go-to” person when people are searching for honest product reviews.
High-quality landing pages that promote the benefits of products and services are vital to sales success in affiliate marketing. If you don’t know the products you promote, you have to rely on generic scripts provided by merchants that look the same as those presented by all other affiliates.
First-hand experience with the product enables you to customize the message to more accurately represent your reaction as a user yourself. Talk specifically about how the product affected your life in a positive way. You can also include images of yourself using the product to demonstrate its benefits. Videos work great too.
Though some people still view sales in a negative light, sales professionals play an important role in simplifying the buying process. They acquire product knowledge about what they sell, listen to customers describe their needs, and then make the best recommendation.
In much the same way, you can simplify the buying process for your customers by testing products and only selling those that offer the best value in a given category. Share your personal insights and confidently field questions from customers to offer a more customized recommendation. Invite buyers to ask questions, and include insights on which problems or situations a product best addresses.
Product testing is overlooked as an important step by affiliate marketers. However, your customers want to feel that you promote solutions that you believe in. By using the products you sell, you can promote with integrity, build better relationships with customers and simplify the buying process.
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