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Explode Affiliate Sales By Telling Stories

by Jim Edwards

FACT: Everybody loves a good story with a happy ending!

This past weekend I discovered how telling a story with a happy ending could also make me a lot of money... with other people's products!

Here's how it all started...

Yanik Silver and I decided to write up some case studies of our past projects and through an exit popup give them away to people who visited our "33 Days to Online Profits" website but didn't immediately purchase our e-book.

This 'exit pop' technique is pretty standard e-book marketing procedure—you try to capture the name and e-mail address of people who don't buy immediately from you so you can follow up and you might sell them something in the future (go to http://www.33daystoonlineprofits.com to see the new exit popup in action).

We set it up so that once people give us their first name and e-mail address they start receiving the case studies over time...about one each week.

I wanted to test out how popular these case studies might be with readers. I decided to test the one about my very first e-book...which tells the story not only of how I came to write and publish the e-book, but also how I put it on the Web.

I then posted that story on my ebookfire.com website at http://www.ebookfire.com/fsbohelpcasestudy.shtml so people could go to that page to read the story.

Finally, I sent a brief note to a small list of subscribers inviting them to read the story. I wanted to see if anybody would be interested in reading the story before we went all out promoting it at the "33 Days" site.

I sent the note out on Friday night and went downstairs to watch a video...I ended up falling asleep in front of the TV so I didn't check on my results that night.

The next morning I got up, checked my website stats and saw that well over 250 people had visited the page with the story on it! Even better...I had sold several affiliate packages for the man I mentioned in my story! This kept up all weekend and by Sunday night I'd made over $400 in affiliate commissions!

You should click here to read the story and see how it is set up! http://www.ebookfire.com/fsbohelpcasestudy.shtml

It might give you some ideas about how you can tell a story about a product or an e-book...and in the process get people so excited, curious, and interested in a product that they go ahead and purchase it through your affiliate link!

So how can YOU use this?

Here are some important things to remember when telling a story with the ultimate intention of getting someone to make a purchase through your affiliate link:

1) Tell a *real* story! Give details with 'MEAT'! Details and a complete story are what people are really interested in.

2) Use emotion! Tell them how you felt, what you were thinking, and pull them into the story so they can actually visualize themselves taking the actions, feeling the feelings, and getting the same results that you got! Emotion dramatically increases the chances of them buying the product!

3) Be somewhat subtle about how you drive people to action, but make sure you do drive them to action (usually clicking *your* affiliate link)!

Did you notice in the story how I get people to click onto the affiliate link for this person's product?

I used strong curiosity building language.

Another technique for driving people to action is simply to very casually give the affiliate links to the tools or information you used to accomplish or achieve whatever result as you tell the story. Drop in the links at the appropriate part of the story as you tell it.

FACT: You can use this technique without even having a website of your own!

This is an excellent technique to use with autoresponders, newsletters, newsgroups, and even in the forums...as long as you keep the blatant "selling" to a bare minimum and provide value-added content in the story.

You can use this technique right now to sell more products through your affiliate links. Just tell how something helped you, made something better, faster, easier for you and how someone else can get the same results if they just "Click Here" to get more information.

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist, the webmaster behind TheNetReporter, eBookFire and "I Gotta Tell You", and the author/co-author of 7 best-selling e-books, 2 CD-ROM products, a video, numerous audio tapes, a software package and a newsletter with thousands of subscribers. In one nine-month stretch he sold over $201,738 worth of products online and he once sold over $39,631 worth of CDs with his partner in less than 30 days!

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