I Wonder Whether Lazy Affiliates Lose Credibility And Sales?
Affiliate marketing is interesting.
As you know affiliates sell other peoples products.
They also get assistance from the owner of the products in the marketing of the product, or service. Sort of like online franchising, almost.
I'm all for it. It's a simple business. The affiliate provides the lead to the product owner and if they convert to a sale the affiliate gets some cash. Easy!
I've just read a shrewd sales letter about Brandon Dupsky who reputedly makes $22,000 a day on eBay.
Now eBay is huge but so is someone making so much money on it. Inevitably a system has been put together to sell so that others can emulate his success.
Will they? Who knows. But I'm sure that a lot of the systems will get sold.
And a lot will come through affiliates.
Do a Google search on "Brandon Dupsky" and you get over 18,000 hits.
From that you'll see all the affiliates involved.
I think affiliates are great. However, there is one thing wrong with the way it seems to work.
The affiliate seems to use the email, web page suggestion of the product owner almost verbatim.
In Brandon's system I've noted at least two different sales pages. One is written as though the web page owner is reviewing the content and the other more like an article.
Again that's fine. But if you look at the Brandon search results you immediately note two sites displaying the review sales page and another 2 displaying the article page. With identical content.
It's lazy selling. Have they bought and used the product?
Personally I prefer to only endorse what I've used. Then I write my own web pages - but only if I like the product. In fact the only thing I'm an affiliate for is Peter Thompsons Achiever's Edge (which I've mentioned before!).
As an aside. I particularly enjoy Peters interviews with people who really understand other people, business, marketing and sales. Peter extracts how they do what they do and makes it clear to Joe Public - that's me - so that I can apply it to my business too.
But coing to the point, and this is a huge but. It's the customers who know whether using the same web sale pages affects their buying decisions, or not.
So without testing you won't know whether they care if the sales page is exactly like another or not.
From this you can see that a predjudice I have against "lazy" selling may be just that and not actually important at all for this products target market. For another market it may be vital.
And again it all comes down to testing, testing and more testing.
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