Affiliate Ad & Recommendation Writing Tips

You can always take any pre-written text provided by an affiliate program and see how they work for you, but it's generally better to write your own recommendations and ads. They add a personal touch that will persuade people to find out more especially since you know (or are getting know) your target market best.

Be Aware of Your Target Market’s Needs: Understand benefits (most important!) and features of the products that will appeal to them.

For example, one of our markets are work at home mothers. Someone who creates an autoresponder, for example, and markets it to a more general audience, may not understand the work at home mom's needs. Mothers are limited on time and don’t often have a lot of technical expertise. A smart affiliate, marketing an autoresponder to that market, would keep that in mind.

We know that if the kids are screaming for attention, mom can’t always have time for a weekly newsletter, but a pre-sequenced autoresponder could take care of things and she can add the emails to her autoresponder late at night, while the kids are asleep.

That is much more powerful than an "out-of-the-box" promotion that says, "Explode your profits with automation."

Share Your Experience: Give concrete examples of how the product has worked for you. Don’t just say you love it…illustrate the benefits it has provided to you. Consider fleshing this one out a bit with an example that would be relevant to your product.

And if you don’t have direct experience, try to find someone who does. If they can share their experience and results with the products…that will strengthen your recommendation.

Give Information, Not Necessarily A Sales Pitch: Your readers will get a sales pitch when they get to the seller's website. Keep the tone informational and friendly...gain trust of your reader first. Your job is to warm up the visitor to the product. The company selling the product will close the sale.

Be Honest: If there is a flaw in the product or some drawback, mention it. It makes your recommendation more believable. Just try to find a solution to overcome that flaw or drawback. For example, if you’re recommending a baby stroller that doesn’t have a drink holder but the rest of the features make it a better stroller than other options, tell them where they can find an alternate drink-holder solution. People are going to appreciate this honest feedback.

Use a provocative, attention-getting headline to your reviews, emails, etc: Ask a question: give a hard to resist benefit; tell your visitor how you’ve benefited from the product.

“Foot Stuff Cream: A Cure for Aching Feet?”
“Need Help….”

Prove your claims: Don't say, "It worked for me". Say, HOW it worked for you. List concrete benefits of using the product, how you implemented the use of the product and what results it produced.

Include photos (before and after, for example), videos, bank statements – whatever you can to show proof.

Avoid excessive exclamation points!!!!!! It looks like insincere hype. Even if you are truly excited, cut out the exclamations. I recommend going through your copy and removing most, if not all, of your exclamation points.

Avoid excessive capitalization. WRITING IN ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS IS LIKE SHOUTING! If you are writing a text only email and want to emphasize something, capitalizing a word here and there can be effective, but avoid writing sentences in all capitals.

Keep it simple and easy to read. People tend to skim while reading on the net and it can be hard on the eyes. Some ways to make it easier are to:

Break up your paragraphs into bit-sized chunks. Don’t worry about what your high school English teacher told you about grammar and paragraphs. You just want your writing to be easy on the eyes.

Use headlines and subheadings. These draw the eyes in and encourage people to read more of your writing.

Write in short sentences with simple language. Don’t use jargon or big words or, if you do, be sure to explain them in your writing.

Use bullet points. Bullet points are a great way to make your writing easier to skim and they can help highlight the most important parts of your review or recommendation.