If You Want to Be Massively Successful With Affiliate Marketing, Practice These 2 Topnotch TIPPPS™

If you own a brick and mortar business, one key to success is "Location, Location, Location!" Now, if you’re marketing online, the axiom is "Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!". That’s especially true if you make a living from an affiliate marketing business.

Or is it? Yes, you need traffic to make sales. That’s true. But what is even more important than "Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!" is "Conversion, Conversion, Conversion!" Because lets face it, it won’t do you much good to have 100 people walk through the "front door" of your Website every day if you only convert 1% of them into subscribers, customers or distributors. That’s a waste of bandwidth.

But what if your conversion rate was 10%? Now you’re talking!

There are hundreds of Internet Marketing gurus out there who can show you dozens of technical ways to increase your conversion ratios. Everything from adding video and audio, adding or removing graphics, using hypnotic writing, choosing the right font size and color, using pop-up, pop-under, exit butlers, etc.

In the end though, there is one (non-technical) thing that will increase your conversion ratios more than any other methods. It is the subject of my first TIPPPS™ (Though Ideas Principles & Practices for Professional Success): "The only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants."

That seems obvious... but just because it’s obvious (aka common sense) doesn’t mean it’s common practice. I could pick 10 Websites at random right now and sure as the sun rises in the East, 7 of those marketers will talk gibberish like features instead of benefits, or talk about themselves and what they — the marketer — want. WHY? We — the surfers — don’t care!

Here’s an excerpt from the famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

"Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what THEY want and show them how to get it.

Harry Allen Overstreet in his illuminating book Influencing Human Behavior wrote: ‘Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire... and the best piece of advice which can be given to would-be persuaders, whether in business, in the home, in the school, or in politics, is this:

First arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.’

And Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, learned early in life that the only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants."

So, you want to make tons of sales, affiliate or otherwise? Then stop talking about you and what you want, stop talking about features, and start "baiting the hook to suit the fish" — in other words, talk to people about what THEY want and you’ll make sales galore. Here’s an additional clue; people want to know What Is In It For Them (WIII-FM), not what color, size, number of pages, cost, etc.

Want to know exactly what to talk to people about? To answer that, let’s take a short course on human nature because, as stated in TIPPPS™ #2, "To talk in terms that interest people, you must be aware of the Laws that govern human nature."

There are many of those Laws, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus our attention on "Seven Laws that govern human nature", adapted from Brian Tracy’s The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement.

To be successful — in your personal and professional life — you must conform your life and behaviors to the way the world REALLY is, and to the way that people REALLY behave (as depicted in the Laws), NOT the way they SHOULD behave.

With that in mind, here are 7 Laws that govern human nature. (Note: when we say "you", we mean you and everybody else.)

The Law of Ambition: Human beings are goal-driven organisms, always driven to achieve more of ‘something’, to improve their conditions in some way. From infancy to old age, you are ambitious.

The Law of Minimum Effort: You cannot consciously choose a harder way to accomplish something if an easier way is available to you to obtain the same results. All human beings are inherently lazy in that they follow the path of least resistance.

The Law of Maximization: The desire for more is automatic and instinctive and applies to all human desires and fulfillment. In this sense, you are inherently greedy.

The Law of Time Preference: Because your time is your life, you always prefer now to later in the satisfaction of any desire. You are inherently impatient in the achievement of any goals.

The Law of Vanity (as applied to economics): You are egotistical and you place a high value on your appearance, opinions, choices, relationships, and the way you are treated by others. In that way, each person is ego-centered and vain.

The Law of Ignorance: Everything you do is characterized by a degree of uncertainty about the outcome, because you are ignorant to a certain degree, since you can never know everything there is to know about anything.

The Law of Expediency (the most important Law in understanding economics): People always strive to get the things they want the fastest and easiest way possible without regard to the secondary consequences of their actions.

The first part of The Law of Expediency says that people are naturally and normally ambitious, lazy, greedy, impatient, vain, and ignorant. This is the way people ARE. And it’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply a fact. You are all these things, and so is EVERYBODY else.

The second part of The Law of Expediency states that people strive to achieve security, comfort, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment in the fastest and easiest ways possible. Each person has many needs and desires, urges and instincts, hopes and dreams. And each person is motivated to achieve satisfaction in these areas by seeking out the fastest and easiest possible way to do so, tempered by the fact that they’re also vain, ignorant and impatient in everything they do.

The Law of Expediency explains the way the world works. It’s often called the path of least resistance. It explains why things go wrong and why people behave the way they do.

There’s a lot more on this in Mr. Tracy’s The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement. But for the purpose of this TIPPPS™, we’ll stop here. You can accept those 7 Laws as reality and act accordingly, or you can continue to live in La-La land and deal in should’s and ought-to’s. The choice is yours.

Here, now, is my affiliate marketing tip for you: if you want to sell me (the potential buyer) one of the products you are marketing, remember that by nature, I am ambitious, lazy, greedy, impatient, vain, and ignorant. What I want in life more than anything is to achieve security, comfort, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment. And I want to do that in the fastest and easiest way possible. Design your marketing material with that in mind, and I will buy from you — and so will everybody else who comes knocking on your Web site door is also a human being.

I hope the "knowledge" you gleaned from this article will be helpful. Remember though that knowledge is power ONLY when it’s combined with ACTION! If you think the 2 TIPPPS™ above are valuable, DO something with them, and seek out more of them.

I wish you ALL the business success you desire and deserve. (Just remember that...what you "desire" is a function of your ambition, what you "deserve" is a function of your ACTIONS...Are the two aligned?)

Daniel G. St-Jean, BB, IMA, AMA, FBMI, SEM
(BizzBooster, Internet Marketing Advisor, Article-Marketing Alchemist, Firm-Base Marketing Instructor, Successerenity Exponent & Mentor)

P.S.: This article was inspired by a very informative and enlightening 5,500-word article which you can read by following the link listed in the Resource Box below.

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