You want to make more online sales or boost affiliate commission. You’re getting a descent amount of traffic to your website, but your conversion rates aren’t something to write home about. Wouldn’t it be great to tweak your web site and sales copy wording to convert surfers into buyers?

When it comes to selling, how you say something is just as important as what you say. Words have an incredibly powerful way of compelling people to think, decide, and take action. Words have the power to make or break the sale.

Getting Their Attention: The first thing your sales copy or website has to do is grab your visitor’s attention. After all, if can’t get your audience’s attention, anything else that follows is useless. There are many ways of getting a customer’s attention, but the general rules are to keep it short, be specific, use language that generates interest, and keep focused on the benefits to the customer.

Yale University researchers have identified the 12 most powerful words in the English language. They are proven to attract attention and stir emotion within their readers language.

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Here are a few examples of great attention grabbers that will draw your readers in :

• ‘Make More Money with this New Proven System’
• ‘New Diet Plan that Gets You Results – Guaranteed!’
• ‘Discover an Easy Method To Get More Traffic!’

How To: Sales copies beginning with ‘how to’ are very successful. After all, isn’t the Internet is also know as the ‘Information Super Highway’? A headline beginning with ‘how to’ grabs your visitor’s attention with a desire to learn more.

• ‘How to Double Your Sales Commissions’
• ‘How to Save Money at the Grocery Store’
• ‘Discover How to Increase Your Adsense CTR’

Ask Questions: Questions are very effective attention grabbers. Anytime a question is asked, the reader answers the question in his or her mind. If the question is specific to the readers needs and desires, they will read on.

• ‘Tired of the Working a 9 to 5 Job?’
• ‘Want to Start Your Own Business?’
• ‘Looking to Lose a Few Pounds and Inches?”

Combining All Three Approaches – Now that You have a basic idea on grabbing your reader’s attention, feel free to play around with a combination of different techniques. For example:

‘Tired of the Working a 9 to 5 Job?’ Learn How to Double Your Sales Commissions and Make More Money with this New Proven System’

Considering how much time and effort you’ve put into your affiliate marketing efforts, what have you done to protect your hard work?

For example, take into account the following URLs. Be honest, which one would you click on?

http://www.dog-trainers-guide.com/?affiliate_id=joeblow
or
http://www.dog-trainers-guide.com

Affiliate links are easily recognizable by many people, which may cause them to avoid clicking the link because they don’t want to be ‘sold’ or ‘tricked’ into anything.

Another issue is link hijacking. Affiliate link hijacking is an unethical practice where someone replacing his your affiliate ID with theirs, stealing your commissions.

Cloaking your affiliate links will help prevent link hijacking, link bypassing, and encourages your visitors into clicking your affiliate links. Affiliate link cloaking has become an indispensable part of affiliate marketing and is one of the best ways to protect your affiliate sales, conversions, and commissions

If you don’t cloak your affiliate links, you are opening yourself to being robbed and losing your hard earned commissions.

There are many ways to cloak your affiliate links. Here are a few ideas:

1. URL Redirecting Services

Tiny URL and Short URL – Both of these services can shorten and hide an affiliate link. For example:

http://dog-trainer.com/?affiliate=joeblow
would look like this
http://tinyurl.com/2jgn6v

2. Using Subdomains
If you own your own domain and web hosting that allows you an ‘X’ amount of subdomains, you can redirect using a subdomains. So, instead of this:

http://dog-trainer.com/?affiliate=joeblow
would look like this
http://training-dogs.my-website-url.com

For more information on subdomains and how to redirect your subdomains, check with your web host provider.

3. WordPress Plug-In
If you are using a WordPress blog, there is a brand new Link Cloaking Plug-in that will automatically cloak all external links, including affiliate links. It is easy to install and configure. If you are using WordPress, you should check it out.