Selling Directly From Content

Selling Directly From Content

You can even turn a great article into a direct way to generate sales for affiliate products without having to link out to a landing page: simply by embedding affiliate links into your content.

So let’s say you write an article on ‘how to make your first Android game’. Now of course this type of content would appeal to coders, developers, gamers and people with plans to become any of those things. As such, it would likely get shared rapidly throughout those groups and generate lots of inbound links. If in the body of the text you were to recommend a specific eBook or a program – even as an offhand remark – then people might click the link. Get enough visitors and this can result in a lot of big earnings.

And if you do this for every article and blog post on your site, then you are creating huge opportunities to make more sales each time a visitor comes to your blog.

Often, the number one form of monetization for bloggers is to place PPC advertising on their site. These pay per click ads pay them every time someone clicks on them (just like the PPC you might use on Facebook or AdWords) but they only get paid a few cents for each click and they lose the visitor whenever an ad gets clicked on. Remove these and add an affiliate link instead though and you can generate a lot more money from the same number of visitors: because you’ll be earning $30 or more for every time they  click.

How to Create Great, Clickable Titles

As you can see then, the ability to create very high-quality content within your niche is an absolutely fundamental skill for any affiliate marketer. How do you go about doing it?

The first clue is to look at what’s currently working on social media. One type of content that is doing incredibly well on Facebook at the moment is content known as ‘clickbait’. You’ve undoubtedly come across this type of content yourself and you’ve probably found it highly annoying.

Clickbait is content that uses a title that tries to tempt people into clicking on it even if they might not be interested in what it actually has to say. It achieves this by using titles that pique the curiosity of the reader, or that make wild claims or controversial statements.

An example of such a title is:

“This Woman Wouldn’t Let Her Friend Sit Down on the Bus – When You Find Out Why, It Will Blow Your Mind!”

Or

“This One Weird Trick Is Helping Men Of All Ages Build Muscle – But Should   It Be Banned?”

The first article pulls you in through curiosity alone. As a reader, you rack your brain trying to work out why a woman wouldn’t let her friend sit down and how it could possibly blow your mind and the only recourse is to click the link to find out.

The latter title makes a huge claim while also remaining very mysterious. The ‘weird’ trick makes us want to find out more, while the idea that a muscle building strategy should maybe be banned is also outlandish enough to encourage clicks. It also sounds controversial and this means that even if you suspect it’s nonsense, you might click it just to leave a comment.

You see these titles all the time on Facebook and other social media and this alone should be enough to tell you that the strategy categorically works – otherwise people wouldn’t be spending their money on that type of content and they wouldn’t  keep writing it.

But it only works in the short term. When you click on any of these titles, you will almost certainly be disappointed by what you find. Sometimes the links are so ad heavy that  you don’t even get an actual article and the question is never answered at all. In other cases, the article will simply not really offer any value or interest. The muscle building trick is almost certainly going to be a landing page for some kind of scam product, while the former will probably be a weird video. Either way, you leave frustrated and this means you’re less likely to read anything from that brand again.

The Alternative Approach

So that’s one approach to writing article titles that isn’t right for you as an affiliate marketer but keep it in mind because we’ll be coming back to it.

Another approach that doesn’t work is what a lot of other websites do: which is to post dull, derivative and dry content on a regular basis.

You know the kind: these are articles on the ’10 Best Pec Exercises’ or ‘Top SEO Tips’. These are articles that have been written a million different times by a million different writers and that most of us have read several iterations of. It just doesn’t sound interesting or different because there’s so much content out there just like it.

The question you should always be asking when posting any kind of content is: would you read it? If the answer is no, then chances are that your audience wouldn’t read it either – so forget it!

The Answer!

So what’s the answer?

Simple: you use titles that are somewhat similar to clickbait but you then deliver on your promise with actually high quality information.

So instead of saying you have one weird muscle building trick, instead you do your research and you find some cutting edge studies on new muscle building supplements or techniques. ‘Cardio Acceleration’ is one fat burning technique that involves doing brief stints of cardio in between your lifts in the gym. In studies, this type of training has been shown to burn several hundred times more fat than other types of training – but it’s not without its caveats.

When you use the term ‘Cardio Acceleration’ in your title though, you will still incur the curiosity of your audience because they likely won’t have heard the expression before. At the same time though, you’re not being strangely vague about it so they’ll know that you’re not just another scam artist. What’s more, it sounds really cool and interesting.

So now your title is ‘Cardio Acceleration – A New, Highly Efficient Fat Burning Technique That’s Only for the Hardcore!’.

This title is every bit as clickable as the others except you actually have something interesting and useful to write on the subject.

Alternatively, you could create something else new and challenging. Instead of more SEO tips, how about: ‘The Psychological Impact of Working as a Digital Marketer’. Instead of another article on the health benefits of cinnamon, how about listing some supplements for martial artists?

There are many more examples of this type of content you can create though it does involve a little more work. You just need to be unique and interesting and to do your research. Create titles that are exciting, cutting edge, different from anything else and that you would want to read.

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