Try Before You Sell

November 19th, 2007 | by Scott

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Yes, the sales pitch is usually “try it before you buy it”, but as an Internet Marketer you’re not the buying audience, you’re the seller and a good rule of thumb that will help to both protect your reputation and increase your sales rates is to always try a service or product before you attempt to sell it to others.

It is really simple, if you haven’t tried something first you can’t give your own, honest impression of how it works and will benefit your customers. All you can do is regurgitate the supplier’s sales copy and/or other marketer’s reviews and comments. If you happen to do this with a crappy service or product at some point you’ll lose all credibility with your customers. And trust me, the worst products and services typically have great sales copy and reviews out there. Why? Because the product is crap they have to sell the hype, so it is easy to get fooled into thinking you’ve hit a great affiliate product when in reality you’ve only found garbage.

However, if you try the product or service first, then you can offer unique insights and commentary on it. You can compare the pros and cons for your market customers, after all you know your readers/followers/customers and you should know their needs–being able to identify their demands and match them with the product’s benefits will lead to more sales conversions.

Trying a product or service isn’t always easy or cheap, while many suppliers will provide review or test samples to affiliates…many also won’t. So you may have to spend a little money to try something before selling it, or you can just shelve it and move on to the next product or service. This is a judgment call you have to make. If you think there’s huge potential for profits with a product then its worth paying a few dollars up front to try it first.

Also, you can get creative about trying products that are high ticket items. For example, one of my sites deals in high end electronics. Obviously I’m not getting freebie televisions and home entertainment systems, and I’m not buying a bunch of them just to try them before reviewing and selling on the site.

What do I do? Well, every other week I make a list of products I want to add to the site based on what’s newly available, and then I spend a couple hours at my local strip mall hitting the stores where I can see many of these products on display. I try not to bother the sales people (after all I’m not there to buy anything so why waste their time), but I do like to play with the dials, kick the tires (so to speak) and get an honest impression of the product(s) for myself. Then I can write a better, more honest review of the product and not just rewrite what is already being said on a million other web sites.

It can take up some time, and it is work, but if you’re not willing to do a little work and research then you need to stop trying to make money online and spend your time on finding a better 9 to 5 job for yourself. You’ll never get something for nothing!

Is it worth the efforts? Absolutely! When I first launched the electronics site I’ve been talking about it had a few dozen products and I was using the “provided” sales copy to sell them. Despite generating huge traffic my conversions were very poor. Once I began checking out products for myself and writing unique reviews and descriptions for them my conversions went up by over 300% and have remained pretty consistent.

I’ve also seen similar growths on every site I have that provides unique and honest product or service reviews, which I’m able to create for one simple reason…I try before I sell.

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