Have you ever been on a guided tour? You know, one of those trips where you give control of your life to some loopy tourist guide who tells you to go here, do that, look at this, don't touch that, feel this, don't stop there...
It's almost as bad as being in the army, you give up control of your life for a short period of time so that you can see the sights, experience something new or maybe even just have some time when you don't have to think for yourself. After a while you just follow the guide's instructions automatically, you don't think for yourself, you just float along with the crowd.
Sometimes something will leap out at you and rip you out of your lethargy. It might be a view or something someone said or even a thought coupled with what is in front of you. Whatever it is you become focused and your brain kicks into gear again.
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"The things that you can do with a tour are only limited by your imagination and your ability to make sales." |
Surfers can be a lot like tourists, just wandering along looking at the pics of naked women and copulating couples. Their brains are in neutral and they are just waiting to be taken in hand and led to where they can find the really good stuff, the stuff they have to pay for and the stuff that will make you money.
That means that you have to become a tourist guide, you have to gather them up, take them on their tour; tell them what they should look at, where they can stop and enjoy the sites. Of course it is a bit hard to do that over the Internet but it isn't impossible, all you have to do is build the tour and issue the invitation and slowly but surely, they will follow.
Building the tour isn't very difficult at all. The hardest part is to remember that you don't owe the surfer anything until the moment he elects to spend some money and sign up with one of your sponsors. Until that point the surfer is the one that owes you something because he is burning your bandwidth in his search for porn. All that means is that you don't have to go to any great lengths in producing your tour. All you have to do is give the surfer just enough to make a sale and not one byte more.
Let's keep that in mind as we look at what needs to go into a tour. You will have all seen the tours that appear on the front end of a sponsor's site. They are often quite ornate graphically with lots of flashing buttons and lights to encourage the surfer to hit the join page with his credit card drawn and ready for use.
Our tours don't have to be like that. They don't need a lot of graphics, they need to be able to load quickly and get the message across in just one 800x600 screen. They also need to have a very clear link that will take the surfer off to the sponsor.
Every tour page should have a little eye-candy just to catch the surfer's eye. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Sometimes I will use a sponsor's banner or even an image that fits the sponsor's site. Sometimes I will blend the image into the background of the page and sometimes I won't, it all depends on how I'm feeling at the time. There are even times when I will use a series of small images (usually supplied by the sponsor) to further encourage the surfer to move through to the sponsor.
Along with the eye candy, I will also include some key word rich text - usually in point form. This text tells the surfer of the benefits he will enjoy if he joins the sponsor's site. If you aren't sure of the benefits then take the sponsor's tour and you will see plenty of things that you can use to sell the sponsor to the surfer.
I give the surfer a nice clear invitation to 'Click Here' to access the sponsor's site and I also make the sponsor's banner and the images clickable links as well. I make sure the tour page has a title, a set of meta tags and is also optimised for the search engines.
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Of course, not every surfer is going to want to visit that sponsor so I will give him more options in a money bar set below the main sponsor's advertising. Finally, if I haven't sold him on the main sponsor or one of the sponsors in the money bar then I want to try and sell him on something else so I need him to go on with the tour.
To achieve that I use the link that you will all have seen many times: No thanks I want to see something different. That link will lead him on to another full-page ad for yet another sponsor in the same niche.
Even though that ad may look totally different to the one the surfer has just come from it is really nothing more than a variation on the theme and so will the next one and the one after that. The important thing to remember is that each tour page should link to another page in the same niche.
Nearly all of my tours are circular. That means that I can feed a surfer into the tour at any point and if he stays till the end he will come back to where he started. Along the way he will have seen all that I have to offer in that niche.
Along the way some of the tour pages will have popped blurs that offer him sites and tours in other niches, he will have seen special offers and sign-up panels for email sponsors. Those tours that are not circular and will drop the surfers that I have not been able to sell something too into top lists and other places where I can trade old traffic for new.
The things that you can do with a tour are only limited by your imagination and your ability to make sales. You are probably not going to make immediate sales out of the sort of tours I have described here but every now and again one will pop up in the referrer stats on your sponsors' sites and that makes it very worthwhile.
Oh, and how do you get surfers to take the tours? You ask them of course. On one of my TGPs I have links to several of my tours, all they say is 'Take my xyz tour and see some of the hottest (niche) sites on the web'. In other places such as my free sites, my third out-link on the last gallery page often says something like "Want to see some more (niche) sites? The tour starts here".
Just Invite them - They will come and you will make sales!
For anyone who is having trouble visualising what I have been talking about, consider taking a little webmaster tour. Just click the link below: