find_good_product_fitOne of your main goals as an affiliate marketer is not simply to sell a user a product. Your goal is to help the user find the product that’s right for them.

Unfortunately, this can be an incredibly challenging task. Unlike a ‘traditional’ sales process where you can have a conversation about an individual’s needs, characteristics they’re looking for, etc, and then pair them up with the right product, your entire sales process as an affiliate comes without you knowing anything about your reader.

The result is that many affiliates don’t effectively convert readers because they do not do enough to help the reader determine product fit, before getting that reader to a sales page.

Create Multiple User Scenarios

The first and most often neglected way to deal with differing user needs is to create multiple user scenarios and direct different types of users to different sources of information on your site.

Think of it this way: if you were an in-store salesman and a customer walks in, your first job is to size up the customer and try to determine the following:

  • What He’s Looking For
  • Why He Needs It
  • An Approximate Budget

Depending on the customer’s answer you’ll have one of a few different types of conversations.

The solution online is similar: identify what types of conversations you might have with a customer, and have all of them, then gear the user towards the one that’s right for him. Read more on how to create sample users.

Discuss Pros and Cons of Products

The second method of helping a user determine product fit is to clearly lay out the pros and cons of any product you’re promoting, thereby targeting readers by the product characteristics.

Remember that the pros and cons of a product are going to be different depending on the scenario of the given user, so you can’t simply provide a list of pros and a list of cons.

Instead, you want to discuss each of the characteristics and why it might be either a pro or a con, depending on the user’s individual scenario.

Provide Multiple Options

Finally, the last technique is simply to provide multiple options for the user. It’s ok to say that one product is the best for feature X, but another product is best for feature Y.

The point is, you as a blogger are the source of unbiased information, which puts you more on the individual’s side of the table.

Don’t just promote a product. Match the right product to the right user. For more information, you may want to read my post on how to list affiliate products effectively.