NOTE: What I want, you, to take for this is concepts. Not copy my copy writing exactly.

In a few older posts I talked about pain and pleasure as motivators. We also discussed how people buy. We buy on emotion and then we justify that emotional purchase with fact.

So how do we get that emotion and feelings involved in our copy?

To effectively bring emotion into our copy we’re typically going to lean towards using a lot more words that involve the senses. Do you know what the primary senses that most people operate by? Did you know if you speak to these senses, all of them, you’re going to connect with most people better? Here is a list of the big 3 senses that most people run through the world with:

• Feeling
• Audio
• Visual

Take a look at those and digest them for a minute. Sure there is more senses then that but most people use these to reference the world. You’ll find certain people stronger towards one then the other. Listen to the language people use when you’re talking with them. I bet after a bit once you get and accute ear you’ll be able to pickup what someones dominant sense is. And get this did you know that men and women are different? Hhahahah of course. Here’s a short cut to get you started with what to focus one depending on what sex you’re writing for.

Most men are strong on the Visual sense. They’re going to say things like: I see what you’re talking about. I can definately picture what you’re saying. When you’re selling to men the more visual you can make your pitch in your copy the more you’re going to connect and the more emotion you’re going to bring out. On an interesting topic when it comes to something that sexually arouses someone guess what men go for? Is it the penthouse forum magazine with the emotional stories? Now of course not it’s the visual picture stimulus.

So have you guessed what drives most women? If you haven’t it’s pretty easy “Feeling”. Think heartfelt stories on lifetime movie network.

So lets take a couple of these ideas and put them into play on some short snippets of copy. We’ll start with a statement like:

“I was in so much debt I didn’t know what to do.”

This sounds pretty bland right but it’s not really touching on any sense or emotions. There’s honestly nothing to pull anyone in. But lets take this and write it for a strong visual sensing person:

“Every day I closed my eyes as I opened the door beacuse i knew I’d see the stacks of bills sitting there piling up to the ceiling.”

How about one for a strong audio sensing person:

“everytime the heard the mail slot open all i could say to myself was, I don’t want to look, because I knew exactly what was there.”

And one last one for for the feeling people:

“I used to cringe every day stewing over all those bills piling up and weighing on me.”

Pretty cool huh. Which one did you connect with the most?

The ideal copy weaves between all these senses almost like a web. The more you can hit on each of the sense types the more you’re going to connect with each type of person. If you’re going to be targeting one sex more specifically I’d highly suggest going about double on the keywords tha appeal to them.

Now go sell Ice to Eskimo’s

See yah at Affiliate Summit West

So how can you get the most out of the show?

I’m sure you’ve read all the posts saying that all the real business at tradeshows happens at the parties. I agree a lot of business and information is shared in the settings outside the tradeshow floor. What niches are working well and where is a lot of the juicy stuff you’ll get off the tradeshow floor. Stuff that’s not usually shared publicly anywhere.

BUT….

There is a ton of good business to be done on the Affiliate Summit tradeshow floor as well, but you have to go with a plan. As affiliates what are the things we care about?

1. Traffic Sources
2. Things to promote
3. Creative and site design ( for some )

All of these things are bountiful at the actual show. Some shows are better then others for one or the other. I think Adtech is better for Traffic Sources and Affiliate Summit is better to meet networks and advertisers.

So what’s the plan? When I hit the tradeshow floor I want to meet as many people as I can. Network like a mad man meeting people that I “don’t” know. Seeing people you do know is fine but it’s the people you don’t know which is going to open new avenues, ideas and in turn create opportunities.

Here’s my plan:

Walk onto the floor and start at booth 1 then walk from booth to booth. Talk with every single person you can and find out which of your list items they have to offer you. Mostly I’m looking for traffic when I hit the tradeshow floor. More traffic sources is always what’s the most interesting to me. I know where to find offers at this point. So I walk from booth to booth collecting business cards asking “Do you sell traffic?” or “Who do you know that sells traffic?” If they answer yes I talk to them about how they sell it ie. ppc, cpm, cpv, cpa. How much inventory do they have. What does it take to get started, what offers are doing well with in their platform, what creative compliance stuff they have. Then I take all that and write as much of it as I can on the back of their  business card so when I get home I can remember what they have to offer.

Now if they say they don’t sell traffic they’re going to tell me what they do. When they tell me I try and figure out how I can get to some traffic contact they know. For example if it’s an affiliate network I might ask “what offers are doing well on your network?”, “How are affs promoting them?”, “where are they buying traffic?” Keep in mind they may not answer some of these questions but guess what if you don’t ask they will be guaranatee’d not to answer. Don’t be a panzy ask, dig, pry and get every last bit of info out of everyone you talk to. Don’t be afraid you’re going to hurt someones feeling or overstep your bounds. Now I’m not saying be a jackass but I am saying dig like a archeologist looking for bones., keep diggin.

If you, like me, plan on staying in this business long term your business will grow and you’ll need more and more people in the tradeshow. So give everyone respect and file what they do away somewhere. Because you’re going to get down the road, and this business is like a puzzle. You’re going to have some project going and there’s going to be a few pieces missing. Those cards you collected years ago at some show will fill your puzzle and complete your project.

Have fun and meet as many new people as you can. You already know the people you know come home with new connections and grow your business.

Success,
Smaxor

As your time goes on in your affiliate career you’ll realize your ideas change. When you first start in this business you just want to find anything that will work and make you some of that affiliate cash. And as you begin to progress along the affiliate path you’ll stop caring about things that just make a couple bucks. You’ll find that it can sometimes take just as long to get a campaign profitable with little potential as is does to get one profitable that has next to unlimited potential. If you’re doing a full test on a new campaign that can include mulitple presells each with optimization tech as well as spending a ton of time writing different copy and multi-variant testing. Then there is creating and testing text, flash and banner ads. Point being if you’re going to “Truly” test a campaign it’s a very deep involved time consuming thing. If you haven’t exhausted different colors, pictures, layouts, copy for landing pages and creatives you have no idea if you’ve even really tested it. You might have dipped your toe in the water but you could have been one step away. Don’t start testing unless you’re truly going to test. Think about weight loss or business opportunity, both of those campaigns are unprofitable if you run direct rather then through a presell page. Imagine how much money you could be leaving on the table not fully testing.

There are two major parts to creating a campaign at the highest level. Of course each of these things have many parts but sometimes it helps to break things down at their highest level first.

1. Proof of Concept
2. Scaling

Talking to affiliates often I find most smaller affiliate don’t think of things as a proof of concept for something much greater. They’re just testing something out. Well if you don’t plan on it making you over $1,000 a day profit from the start, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

When starting have your scaling plan laid out before you start. You should have a few traffic sources you’re most comfortable with. The should allow you to test with smaller amounts of cash and risk, these are your proof of concept traffic test beds. We have these types of traffic divided into two sections

1. Keyword driven traffic
2. Demographic driven traffic

We divide things into these two categories because they’re two totally different trains of thought and scale in two separate ways. We group content network into demographic driven because I believe that’s how it really works. All the quality score crap with keywords and related content is lumped into the keyword driven section. ( on a side note no real marketing has QS, it’s mearly finding the audience and demo that likes your product and advertise to them ) We do all our testing to see if the concept will work on either of these or both sections.

As we get good or bad data back from the proof of concepts we have a whole plan of traffic sources laid out for each section to scale out the campaign.

In a nutshell I think the major theme here is that you need to be planning the campaign to scale before you even start it. So as you now begin to start you new proof of concepts have a plan laid out as to how you’re going to scale it up and line your pockets with green.

Why do review sites convert well?

Do we need another Acai Berry or Colon offer? How do those offers convert so well?

I was on affbuzz today and saw Nickycakes post about landing page theft. So that inspired me to sharpen up my keyboard and lay down some knowledge.

Why do people steal landing pages, campaigns, creatives, ideas…..?

When I ponder this the answer seems simple. They either don’t know how to come up with their own creative ideas. So they use copying others as a crutch. Or the other reason I can come up with is they’re just to lazy. If you plan on being in this business long term those things need to change. If we all just copied each other it would be an infinite loop of us all doing the exact same thing forever. There needs to be some innovators and there’s a HUGE reward for being one of them. If you’re first to market with a concept or idea and it works you’ll make 20 times, in a few days, what others will make in months.

Now I can’t help someone “become unlazy” because I’m not motivational speaker, you’ll have to go to Tony Robbins for that. But I can give you some insight into how to come up with your own creative ideas, of how to promote something in a new way or move into a new vertical.

Some disection on what’s currently big and working in the affiliate world

There’s a few things we could break down the affiliate world but to keep things simple for this post I’m just going to break stuff into Verticals ( offers ) and presell pages ( landing pages ).

I know there’s a TON of verticals out there that are doing well and in an effort to not give aways anyones secret niche I’m going to stay with the big boys that everyone already knows about and sees everywhere. So lets focus on these verticals and find the lowest common denominators in all of them. Because if we can extract out the thing they all have in common we can parlay that to new vericals and new ideas.

Verticals:

• Weight Loss
• Business Opportunity
• Sleep
• Anti-aging
• Grants

Would you all agree these are the big boys of the affiliate world right now? Good then we’re agree’d.

What’s the one thing these verticals have in common? I know you’ve probably never looked at it this way before, but yes as I see it they all have something very in common.

People That Want These Things are in PAIN!

Read that last line 5 more times. There’s a lot of things that motivate people but when it comes to the most rudimentary or the most basic there’s are really two motivating factors:

1. Pain
2. Pleasure

We as humans are always either moving towards Pleasure or away from Pain. Would you agree with that? Now I know all the other subsets of motivation as well like keeping up with the jones, wanting love, etc. But these are even more basic then that and we’ll save the more detailed stuff to touch on in your copy for another day.

Out of these two motivators what is more motivating? Moving towards pleasure? Or moving away from pain?

Yep you guessed it PAIN motivation is much, much stronger. What’s more motivating wanting that new plasma tv ( moving towards pleasure ) or getting out of a burning house ( away from pain )?

Think about going to the Dr. and the Dr. says well you have some skin cancer and it’s going to cost $10,000 to treat. If you don’t treat it the cancer could spread to other organs and you could die. How motivating is that?

I know that’s hard to think about but it’s the facts. Pain motivates. And it motivates quickly. We in the online space have a couple of seconds to move someone to take some sort of action so I usually target the pain principles to get people motivated.

Now lets go back to our veritcals we’re focusing on.

1. Weight Loss. Are people that are fat in mental and physical pain? Yes.
2. Are people that need money in pain? Yes.
3. Are people that can’t sleep in pain? Yes.
4. Is remembering how good you used to look when you were younger painful? Yes.
5. etc. etc.

Do you see our commonality here? I’m sure you do by now.

Now that you have that knowledge lets see if if you can think of some other verticals might work through stoking that pain and leading people to a remedy? What other people are in pain? Or may be in pain and may not even know it?

• Identity theft?
• Theft?
• Fire?
• Muggers?
• People that owe more then their hosue is worth?

This is just a few fears that come to mind and guess what there is stuff to sell them. Sure their is offers out there and these are promoted but they’re being under utilized and not getting to be huge verticals in paid traffic like the before mentioned ones have.

My Invitation to you

After you read this post take some action!

Sit down with a pen and paper and write out a list of things that cause people pain. I know this isn’t a fun light hearted exercise but it’s going to allow you to allow you to see what people are going to be the most motivated. Use the old brain storming trick:

1. pull out your paper and pencil
2. set a stop watch for 5 minutes.
3. start to write down things that cause people pain
4. don’t stop writing, if you’re out of ideas just keep writing you last idea over and over for the 5 minutes as more will come to you.

If you made it through that exercise you should have a long list of pains people have that should serve your forever as long as you’re in this business. I encourage you to take these and make a memo pad on your phone of peoples pains. Because guess what? Now that you’re aware of this these pains are going to start presenting themselves to you on a daily basis. And when you get another pain just add it to your list.

Since we have a nice long list of pains now take a couple of those and see if offers exist for them and how you could market them using your current strategies that you may not have thought of.

Wow what if you found a pain their is no offer for currently? This could be your hot ticket to create your own unique offer that lots of affilaites would be excited to promote.  The sky’s the limit.

I hope you all enjoyed this post and feel free to add any fears you come up with in the comments.

Sucess,
Smaxor

P.S. Join Ads4Dough my affiliate network if you haven’t already. We constantly discuss this stuff in the office all day so they have a strong understanding of psychology and motivation and can help you make your presell pages and creatives better with it.

QUESTION:

This thread on Wickedfire started out with with a guy talking about promoting email submit offers using pay per click and the polls strategy. If you don’ t know what the polls strategy is, it’s to build a simple poll and make people believe they’re voting for something and making their opion heard. Typicaly built on a high volume keyword like Brittney Spears. You might setup a poll that said “Is Brittney Spears a whore? Vote Now!” Which of course gets clicks,  takes them to the offer and they vote and hopefully fill in your email submit on the second page.

He Said that he’d tried everything with that had very small successes and some failures but nothing had done great. And was asking for new ideas.

REPLY:

There’s tons of ideas you can stick in front of an email submit that could help it convert better. People often just fall into traps of doing what everyone else does and that’s doing the same ol’ thing.

A good question to ask yourself from a psychological perspective is why do polls work better then direct linking the offer?

One of the reasons you could abstract out of that is you’re warming up the user to take action. There’s a rule as a sales person that says get lots of small commitments or small “yes’s” first. And the big yes is much easier.
Also typicaly polls are are aimed towards getting a response about something someone is passionate about. If you’re passionate about something, for example you think Brittney is a terrible parent that gets your emotions going doesn’t it? What typically motivates people it’s emotion right? So if you get them into an emotional state then they might be more receptive to to the next action you want them to take.

Another might be if you ask rhetorical questions then if you ask something and the obvious answer is yes like “Would you like to make an extra 200$ a month?” And they take some sort of action they’re starting the sales process in their heads, actually selling the product or service to themselves.
So with those abstracted ideas what’s some other verticals that take advantage of getting the user to take action then wanting to know what they answer is so they’re motivated to take the action to do so.

IQ offers?
Crush Offers?
Carrier Pages for ringtone offers

This is just a couple of the main stream ones that have taken off. But I’m sure if you sit back and think you’ll come up with some ideas that no one is doing yet.

You can even move away from polls if you want and move to some sort of action oriented response for some sort.

A bunch of the pages being released in diet, bizopp and resv are starting to ask little quiz warm up type questions. One for resv might be, if you could how many years would you like to lengthen your life?

At the end of the day there’s MILLIONS of good ideas out there. Sit back and think, ponder and listen and you’ll come up with some pretty cool stuff. No need to copy everyone else then you’re just always behind the curve.

QUAKEBUM:

“I’ve been in AM for a few years now, going on and off, I’ve had my highs and lows. I went to college, worked for a few corps, but now I’m back at home doing AM and SEO.

I’ve come to the realization that as much as I love flexibility and the money, it’s not something I could do for rest of my life (working at home all the time really bores me, I miss co-workers) nor could I ever stand having a corporate job again. So I thought about going to culinary school, perhaps starting a restaurant later because l like owning my own business.

Are you guys in it purely for the money or do you actually love doing this, I would like to hear some opinions from AMs that’s been in the industry for a few years because the beginning is always fun especially when you’re doing well money-wise.”

SMAXOR:

Nothing I’d rather be doing. This is the coolest business and can be “anything” you want.

Want to work by yourself in you basement? I did for 3-4 years. Want to have an office with lots of other like minded people? I do now. Want a non-corp office environment? Build one.

I think without ever going to a trade show like ASW or Adtech people don’t realize how big and how much potential this industry has. Honestly if you learn affiliate marketing you can expand into general direct repsonse TV marketing, radio, mail or whatever there’s pretty much unlimited potential. From both a financial and ability to control your own destiny perspective.

One thing I find interesting again and again. Is I hire a lot of people from WF, I think we have 4-5 people from WF now that work in the office. Everyone of them that comes in says “I had no idea” I just didn’t realize the possibilities. I think a lot of noobie part time affiliate marketers have this vision of some dude sitting in his underwear in front of the computer trying to make a quick buck. Where as you walk into an office that filled with fun and excitment where people are working together to make large sums of money and whole perspective changes in an instant. If you just work on your own and try to make a quick buck are you ever going to get to the place where you have multiple systems running with rev-share deals with partners to balance out your income? Probably not.

Like any other business this is as much or as little of a “business” as you want to make it.

What is a business anyways? Systems! *think about it*

It’s nothing more then systems. So you say ok one day I’m making a mint and the next I’m making nothing. What kind of systems could you put in place to smooth that out? Does it involve doing everything yourself? Or can you work with other people?

Back when i used to do blackhat seo I’d build all my automated systems myself to start. Then I realized I had more ideas then I could ever code and manage on my own. I had the resources and the knowledge of how to make it all work. So I decided to start working with partners on projects. Basically I’d find guys that were good coders, understood the business but lacked a full ability to get to that next level. We’d split our profit 50/50 and they’d code and manage and i’d come up with the ideas and get the resources. Now you’re probably thinking ok what if you the project makes $10k/day you’re going to give the other guy $5k/day? Sure. Because the goal at that point wasn’t to make as much money as I could in the short term but rather make good stable money in the long term. Now that this person was able to code and manage their project that allowed me to work with 7 other people on 7 other projects. Guess what? One or two projects went down while a few were making money and then a few were in development at all time. Which allowed me to achieve stability. Also gave me an opportunity to help some really good guys put some money in their pockets and learn the business and get to that next level.

My whole point about all this is that Affiliate Marketing can be soooooo much more then just some dude sitting in his basement banging away and anti-social. It can truely be whatever you can dream

As always just my 3 cents

Success,
Smaxor