E-Commerce Case Study #1: Squidoo
This post will cover the topic of using Squidoo lenses for affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketing campaigns act as a funnel towards a single product or service. The reason for this is that classical sales letter theory claims that most humans have poor decision making abilities.
Due to this lack of faith in the decision making ability of their average customer, marketers from this school of thought tend to only give their prospect one choice, preferably from between only two options, at a single time.
Examples of such simple choices are as follows: “opt-in or don’t opt-in to my email list”, “follow the link from my email broadcast to my sales-letter landing-page or don’t”, “click Buy Now or don’t”, “select the upgrade option or don’t”. I admit sometimes even classical sales letter advocates will get fancy and offer you two or more upgrade options, but I digress.
When we compare the above outlined funnel model to an affiliate link from a Squidoo page strait to a product landing page, we see some sharp contrasts. First, the average Squidoo page has several links going off in many directions. It may have Google AdSense Ads, links to eBay Auctions, Amazon Affiliate Links, among other possible outbound links.
In terms of your overall business strategy, these outbound links may have value, however in terms of helping your customer make the decision to purchase whatever affiliate product you are promoting, I would argue that extra outbound links serve as a distraction.
Another factor to consider is whether you really want to send your Squidoo traffic strait to a sales letter style landing page without first asking them to opt-in for an email list.
This is an area where trust starts to come into play. If a visitor is to buy a product after reading your Squidoo page and a sales letter written by the product creator, then you are asking them to take your word the quality of the product producer and asking the to take the product producer’s word on the quality of the product.
I think this somewhat violates the way that most sales happen in a person-to-person setting. Low ticket items can be sold on the first meeting, however the higher the ticket price becomes the greater the chance that several meetings will be required to land the sale.
Having a series of follow up emails helps both the build trust between you and the reader, as well as to nurture their “decision to buy”.
The classical sales letter method outlined above, is of course, not the only way to be successful in e-commerce. We will explore some of these alternative methods in our upcoming e-commerce case studies.
