Have you ever thrown up a website, managed to get some traffic, but failed to make any affiliate sales?
That was me in the beginning. I had no clue what I was doing. I only knew that I was angry because I had worked so hard just to see $0 in my affiliate account.
An extremely large part in getting affiliate sales is writing effective presell copy, which essentially warms up your reader to the product you are recommending.
The more you love the product you’re selling, the higher your chances of making a sale. People can sense if you’re genuine and honest, so please don’t take shortcuts.
I promise you, it will come back and bite you, hard. There are a lot of potential problems if you’re not making sales, but in this article we’ll focus on writing awesome presell copy.
If you have something that could improve someone’s life, you owe it to them to learn this stuff and to get them excited enough to buy.
5 Ways to Make Your Presell Copy Rock
This is by no means a complete list, but if you’re completely new at this, it’s a good start. I don’t want to overwhelm you by throwing all sorts of unnecessary details at you.
I’m by no means an expert in copywriting, but I do think I’m somewhat okay at writing presell copy. I could be wrong of course.
1. Underlying Emotion. What do your visitors really want? If you’re recommending a skin care product, the underlying emotion might be the potential to attract a soul mate, feeling accepted and getting validation. Now, everyone is different, so you can’t nail them all, but at the same time, you can’t generalize because it simply doesn’t work.
2. Objections. What objections do people usually have? Sticking with the skin care creams, they might be something like how there are so many skin creams out there, why should they buy this one? Is it another product that will be a waste of their money? Address the objections right away. Ignoring them will only make things worse.
3. Proof. What proof do you have that the recommendation you’re making will help your reader? Have you had any results with it yourself? The most powerful proof is if you make a video telling how you benefited from the product. Think about what you yourself would want to see. I personally love seeing genuine recommendations on video and hearing about someone’s story.
4. Personality. The more you can add your personality and your story into the recommendation, the more powerful your presell copy will be and the higher your conversions will be (i.e. you will sell more). This might mean before and after pictures, video and whatever else you can come up with.
5. Disqualify. You might be afraid of telling who the product is not for. After all, you want as many to buy as possible, right? Well not really. When you disqualify people that it is not right for, you are helping them and making the people who really need it more excited, because they are getting further confirmation that it will help them.
Our Way of Looking at Selling
I used to believe that selling something was distasteful. Recently I figured out that this was completely backwards.
Inaccurate beliefs like this are dangerous. Once I noticed it, I realized what was wrong and changed to something like this: selling something that doesn’t improve or help the customer is distasteful.
Sounds a bit better, doesn’t it? If I have something amazing for you that could change your life, wouldn’t you want me to write at least okay sales or presell copy to get you interested?
Somehow we learn that selling and money is bad, so we get caught up in this loop of wanting money, but thinking that it’s bad.
Suspend that little voice in your head and just move forward. Promote good products that improve lives and you’ll be well on your way.
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I have the same thoughts as you, Henri, especially about selling being distasteful, when in reality, that feeling comes from picturing scammy products or shark-like sale pages.
Also, I really like the bit about “Underlying Emotion”. I know I have to relate to the customer, but I think you really hit a nerve when you understand what the customer is trying to accomplish.
I don’t have to tell you this is a good post 🙂
Exactly. It helps when you focus on solving problems and adding value to someone’s life, even though you are getting money in exchange.
If you truly believe in a product and you show that in every way you can, eventually the money will follow. Another reason to be in it for it and not just the money.
Thanks for commenting, Eric! Sometimes you have to start taking action. Even if you aren’t sure of the outcome. You know your product is good, but you don’t know if it ‘ll work.
If you’ve done all the research and it looks good, all you can do is take action and see what works. Successful entrepreneurs fail more than they succeed, at least most of them 😉
I haven’t tried to set up any landing page yet. Most of the times, I submit to those article directories allowing affiliate hoplinks, and send direct to the merchant’s websites.
I’ve found that the conversions are way lower when you send people directly to the merchant website. However, you want to test that and see what works the best.
Hi Henri,
Picturing a certain kind of salesperson can conjure up negative emotions of a time when I was taken advantage of. Live and learn.
I’m happy to re-frame ‘selling’ and view it as ‘serving.’ If it’s not helpful or some way beneficial to the customer, then it is distasteful. I especially like your Disqualify tip — if the offering doesn’t fit the customer, referring him to someone else who can fill his need would benefit everyone involved. It is not about profit, it is about good will.
Disqualifying is a counter-intuitive tool that most people don’t use, and I find myself often not wanting to use it myself because I want to get everyone to buy, but it doesn’t really work that way anyway, so it’s just our minds tricking us.
Great tips Henri. I think it’s important to take a look at the product you are promoting from the customers side. Why should he buy it? Is it better than X?!
And all the things you’ve mentioned help you to find answers for your customers. I also agree that it’s very powerful to mention for who you can’t recommend the product. It makes you look honest and honesty and trust are very important when you want to sell someone something.