Sell Direct

Path, from the left navigation menu: ['Promotional Tools' section] > Sell Direct

SellDirect is an incredibly useful tool for generating title-specific 'buy-now' links and buttons. This in itself does not sound remarkable until you realize that, unlike a standard link (which takes a customer to your main site) these links and buttons invoke a purchase process which appears to belong to the site on which the link was first clicked - even if that is the site of one of your affiliates!

The huge benefit that is derived from this functionality is that whereas customers who are taken off a site they're browsing to purchase often bail-out' of the purchase process, keeping the transaction perceivably on the same site greatly reduces this shopping-cart abandonment and so lifts your sale conversion rate significantly. Also, the likelihood of persuading affiliates to sign up, when you can provide them with links that allow them to sell off their own site (to SellDirect) is much higher than if you are proposing to take their customers to your site (and away from theirs). Again, this has the net effect of increasing your numbers of affiliates, and increasing your sales.

SellDirect is largely targeted at 'Specialist Sites'. Imagine targeting all those niches: Murder-mystery sites with a bunch of titles on 'Suspense/Thrillers'; Kids' sites with a range of 'juvenile' titles; Schools & Colleges with 'Classic Literature' titles. You could go on for days, matching product categories to niches, and that's why this tool is so exciting.

"Hey, I can give you a set of links that you just need to paste into your existing site, and every time someone clicks that 'buy' button they'll step through a short purchase process with your header-graphic at the top. The customer will think they're buying right there on your site. And you, the affiliate, will get 10% of every sale. And the product is awesome quality, and matches your site's customer profile perfectly".

That's quite a proposition, don't you think, and when you weigh all those benefits up against the amount of work involved on the part of the would-be affiliate, it gets about as close to a 'no-brainer' decision as you can get.

•	Customer support is all taken care of (so there's no work at the back-end for the affiliate either) or that;

•	The affiliate can log onto their own Affiliate Administration Site (within the Spoken Network System) and get MORE links (which pay you, the partner, just like the original links you supplied) or that;

•	The affiliate can also view real-time sales statistics in their very own reports section.

To load the Sell Direct page, in order to create sell direct scripts for promotional purposes, you need to select the link entitled "Sell Direct" under the Promotional Tools section of the left navigation menu, as shown here:

Fig. 2.6.2.2: The "Sell Direct" page from which you can create new sell direct scripts:

Any existing SellDirect scripts that you have created (with complete reports for each script) are presented neatly here in a tabular format, with the following fields of information to make it easy to understand how each of these promotional scripts is performing:

This column displays the names of all SellDirect scripts that you created to date. If you haven't created any scripts until now, you will see a zero between parenthesis, next to "Sell Direct Website Scripts".

In the impressions column you can see how many times the "buy now" links/graphical buttons (for each SellDirect script) have been displayed to your website visitors. Of course, impressions do not always lead to clicks and/or purchases. For this reason, impressions will almost always be far greater than clicks, uniques and sales.

In this column you will see how many clicks have been made on the "buy now" links/graphical buttons in question. Please note that this value includes your website visitors that have clicked multiple times on the same link or graphical button.

The number of unique visitors that have clicked on the "buy now" links or graphical buttons is shown in this column. As you already know, some people will click on these links multiple times. You could have 50 clicks, but this does not mean that 50 different persons clicked on the links. This column filters out the 'repeat clicks' leaving only those unique visitors - a more accurate measure of the success of a particular script..

In the sales column you will see the number of copies sold through a particular SellDirect script.

So, all-in-all, the information you will have for each of your scripts is pretty conclusive. You will be able to see at a glance how many times (out of the total times the links/buttons were presented online) different people clicked through with a view to buying. Of these clicks-through, you will also see how many people then went on to buy a download.

Tip: You can use this information to quickly calculate your conversion percentage: Divide 'Sales' by 'Uniques' to see what percentage of individuals that see your script on the page actually end up purchasing - this is perhaps the best measure of how well the scripts are performing.

If you have an existing script in the list on the screen you first see (when you click the 'SellDirect' link on the left navigation menu) you can simply click the name of that script to go into its editable details. If you would like to create a new SellDirect script at any time, you may do so by simply clicking the button labeled "create new" at the bottom of the scripts table. This will launch the 8-Step script-creation wizard, which we'll be running through in overview in the following section, and then in detail throughout the sections that follow.