As you know, I love to read and for this Valentine's day, my wonderful wife got me a new book by one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin. It's called Free Prize Inside and so far, it's been a fantastic book. This one book alone has given me tons of new ideas of how to use new angles on what I'm already doing in order to increase conversions and, in some cases, tap into whole new markets.

I'm not completely plugging the book for this post. What I am doing is talking about how you can apply the basic idea of this book to any of your campaigns. The gist of the book is something along the lines of: "when your product is exactly like everyone else's, why would someone choose yours over another company's?" The answer, of course, is the title of the book and how this applies to your business is no stretch.

When you are selling the same product, what makes your sales pitch better than the next guy's? Either you are using different sales text or using a completely different angle. But alas, you are still selling the same product. What can you do to spice things up? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Do you want to go through page A that has the product they're looking for or do you want to go through page B that has the product you're looking for but a free e-book (or something similar) to boot?

Make no mistake, customers do their research. It's a big part of the reason your bounce rate is so high. Customers click back and forth on ads looking for the best deal or the exact information they want. Chances are, they've seen the same pitch several times before they decide to go through your (or someone else's) link. If you aren't setting yourself apart, your conversion rate is probably lower than it could be.

The other day, I was watching In Good Company, that movie where Topher Grace takes over ad sales for a magazine and uses "synergy" to re-invigorate the company. If you'll notice, he gives you the same gist in his synergy speech. Their company has several sister companies, including a cereal company. Although they're aware that their cereal is virtually the same exact cereal as several others, Topher points out what will make "Joe Couch Potato" choose their brand over another: sports factoids on the backs of the boxes. Cereal makes a great analogy here because that's where we get our "free prize inside" mentality. As a kid, you want the cereal with the prize inside over the other prize less cereal, even if it tastes better.

So don't let these small gems of wisdom pass you by. Every little bit helps you increase your profits and sales in general. It's all about your bottom line and what helps that most: customer satisfaction. Give them a reason to go to you instead of someone else and you've won.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.