The testimonial is an effective sales tool because it serves as a powerful form of social proof. If you were on the fence about purchasing a product, wouldn’t you appreciate hearing a number of positive (or negative) testimonials about that product from real people/your peers who were once in your same position?

How to Get Testimonials

Showcasing a number of immaculate testimonials on your sales page or on the packaging of your product is a very effective way to sell a product and assuage your customer of any doubts which they have about your product.

This all leads up to the obvious question, where and how should you go about asking for testimonials for your product?

If you have developed a long list of clients in the past for your product or service, you should take your best and favorite clients and poll them, asking them what they like about your product/service.

For our purposes, this is a brand new informational product which I have just created, so how can we get testimonials with only a few sales so far and how do we generate sales without testimonials? There is a way to ask for testimonials even before your product has launched.

Your best bet is to give out review copies of your new product to people in your industry. Where can we find people in our industry? Forums, of course! What I did was to visit a few music related forums which I was already a member of and create a thread about my new book, saying that the first 10 people to reply to the thread and request it would receive a free review copy of my on the condition that they wrote up an honest testimonial of their experiences with and assessment of the information in the book.

I got a lot of responses from musicians and fortunately nearly all of the responses which I received were extremely positive and I used many of them right on my sales page.

Remember that when using testimonials that they have to comply with the FTC’s guidelines. Most affiliate networks which you’ll promote your product on will make sure that you comply with those guidelines when you submit your new product’s sales page to them, otherwise they’re liable (in some cases) and will not let you sell your product on their network without making changes to your sales page.

Clickbank gives a good rundown of the latest guidelines as they relate to testimonials which you can check out here, though most of the guidelines refer to video testimonials and the basic gist is that all claims have to be able to be substantiated.