You’ve built up an email list and nurtured your relationship with them. Now it’s time to start making offers. You want to offer them products they’ll love because if you don’t, you may lose them. Most marketers understand they need to offer products that are relevant, valuable and useful to their list. Here are a few additional tips for choosing the right products to promote.
Gravity Shmavity
There are lots of metrics on ClickBank and other affiliate networks that tell you about their products. One of the most overblown issues is ‘gravity,’ which is a stat that supposedly tells how well an item sells. This shouldn’t be important to you and it’s definitely not important to your list members. Instead of looking at this and other stats, relevance should be the key consideration. Is it something your members can use? Will it help them solve their problems? What products sell well for others might not sell well on your list, and vice versa.
No Hype
If you’re sending your list a link to a sales page, have a good look at the sales page yourself. Make sure it’s not hypey, sales-y or otherwise tacky. It should also be strictly FTC compliant. Try to choose products that don’t have pop-ups, exit splashes, or other annoying features. The reason for this is that even if a product is wonderful and helpful, its sales materials may scare off your list. If there are links in your email messages sending them to sites that seem deceptive or suspicious, you may lose trust.
Checking out Vendors
Do your research on vendors before you promote their products. Search for their name on Google with negative search terms like ‘scam,’ ‘rip-off,’ ‘jerks,’ etc. You may want to contact them before you promote anything of theirs and see if they’re responsive. You’ll want them to be responsive to your subscribers if there’s any kind of problem. The last thing you want to do is to send your subscribers to a vendor that’s untrustworthy or unprofessional.
Take Chances
It’s common knowledge that list offers should be relevant. But sometimes you can score a big response and really help out your list by offering something slightly out of the ordinary. For example, if you have an IM-related list, you may offer products on meditation (to help focus), weight loss (to burn the fat accumulated from hours in front of the computer) or writing (so they can write their own content). Don’t be afraid to think outside the box, but make sure they understand what the product is and what it will do for them.
By the way, you should always use the product yourself before promoting it. If you don’t, you take a huge risk. The product may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and its lack of quality will reflect badly on you. If you’ve used it yourself, you can truly stand by it and recommend it truthfully to your list.
Tony
