Are All Affiliate Marketers Liars?

There's a dark side to marketing your wares using affiliate programs. As most of you know, I decided to go the ClickBank route for Uncommon AdSense. This means that I give up 50% of the net price (after ClickBank fees) for each copy sold by an affiliate. (You set the percentage, but it's customary to give 50% or more to the affiliate.) This gives the affiliate incentive to promote your book — any affiliate who sells a copy of Uncommon AdSense makes about $21, for example.

When I first released my book, I contacted a fairly well-known Internet marketer and asked him if he'd like to promote it to his list. Now, unfortunately, there are more and more products being sold and hyped via affiliate marketing, so it took him a while to tell his list about UA. He also sent it out in an email with two or three other products he was pushing, so it didn't get a lot of exposure. But what really got to me was the sales page he cooked up for the book.

Now, I know my sales page isn't great. I've been trying to think of how to fix that without having it turn into a cookie cutter long-copy super-hyped sales page like you see everywhere these days. I think I've finally figured out what to do, and I'll have more on that in a later posting, but in the meantime the page is what the page is. Kind of like everything I write, I guess.

Anyhow, he didn't like the fact that I was linking to other sites from my sales page. A proper sales page should only link to the order page, after all, and maybe a privacy policy and a disclaimer — or so the traditional Internet marketing gurus would tell you. So this marketer said he's get one of his staff members to put together a different sales page for promoting the book.

Well, here's what he came up with. I don't actually want to identify this person, so I copied the page over to my site, changed his affiliate link to mine and added a disclaimer at the top of the page. Other than that, though, it's all his.

Now go and compare it to the real page. If you've been a longtime reader of mine, you'll probably notice a difference in the writing style. Most of the page is devoted to some story he made up about me and a “friend” that I've apparently helped make a rich AdSense publisher.

In the industry lingo, these are “pre-sell” pages. You want a good headline, yes, but you need a good story to go along with it. Even if it's made up, I guess.

So does the fake story work for you?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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