As an Affiliate-Pre-selling vs Hard Selling-Review site vs blog

I agree... always try to capture emails to sell to them later. It's almost a neccessity to build a list when trying to sell digital products (at least for me). As far as sites are concerned... I find that you need to do more of a presell/hard sell with digital products rather than physical products. With physical products I usually don't have to put in as much work as long as the traffic is there.

I think it all really depends on the niche and the keywords you are targeting. I also use different strategies for different offers.

But, one rule I follow, however I'm promoting is to first ask how I can help the person at my site or the person receiving my email. Don't focus on selling or making money, focus purely on how you could help the person at your site and your mindset changes, whether its a review site, blog, whatever.

That mentality will pay huge dividends

Other people have given some decent advice so ill answer this one.

I always recommend JUST pre-selling mostly, and this is what I used to do as an affiliate mostly. I think you are a bit lost as to what the difference is or how to pre-sell without "over selling". In my terms pre-selling is talking about the benefits of the product rather than the technical ins and outs. Not talking about how it works, but the end results...

Lots of poor copywriters write crappy sales pages which give the how it works, the technical info without stating in plain english what the benefit is. Copy like this just won't sell nearly as well as benefit focused copy. However for pre-selling I try and minimize the how it works / technical description and just focus on the benefits - and the main benefits at that.

Don't get too worried about if youre going into too much detail, but if in doubt just keep it simple - provide a little info and make it easy for people to access the vendor.

Another way of looking at it is that if it is a quality product then the vendor should of taken weeks to write his sales pitch, if it is an older more established product then it should of been tweaked, split tested and improved over months, maybe even years - are you going to be able to write better sales copy than that? Probably not - just give a review, your opinion, show some benefits and let the vendor do the real selling...

Another way of looking is that if you write sales copy but it isn't great then people leave your site without visiting the vendor. I think it is easier to write just a few paragrpahs and give a few bullet points of benefits without messing it up rather than a whole sales page.