Any useful discussion of pre-selling must start with an understanding of exactly what pre-selling is.

For our purposes, pre-selling means:

  1. To promote (a product not yet on the market) by means of advertising.
  2. To condition (a potential customer) in advance for later purchase of a product.

In reality, pre-selling is the art of building relationships.

In the “real” world, business people do it all the time. Here’s a couple of examples:

Whenever I take my six year old son to our local barber for a haircut, he always gets a lollipop when the haircut is done. In fact, he usually gets one for his two sisters too.

Whenever I take the kids with me to the grocery store, the smiling people at the bakery always have a cookie with each of my children’s names on it.

As a consequence of the relationship building by the barber, my son can’t wait until it’s time for another haircut.

The bakery at the grocery store have done so well building a relationship with my kids that I can usually get them to behave through the entire shopping trip so that they can go to the bakery and get their cookie.

The point here is that these business people have gone to great lengths to build a relationship with our family so that we’ll continue to come back to their place of business. You can probably find all kinds of examples of this from your own neighborhood? real estate agents, veterinarian, family doctors, local pizza restaurant, school fundraisers, etc.

Now let’s talk about relationship building online?

Whew! That’s a whole different ball game isn’t it?

After all, you can’t give out lollipops and cookies when they stop by your website. Add that to the fact that people are much more untrusting of the internet and you have a real relationship building problem.

That’s where the art of pre-selling really comes into play.

In the online world, pre-selling is the art of warming up your visitors, building trust, and putting them in the frame of mind that they want to do business with you.

If you’re an affiliate, pre-selling is the art of warming up your visitors and putting them in a willing to buy frame of mind before you send them to an affiliate merchant’s website.

Key Envoy of Site Build It! fame has become famous for pre-selling and really brought the concept to the online world? especially for affiliates. But the art of pre-selling is really crucial for anyone doing business online.

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing • Copywriting • General Online Business

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