In my last two articles, “Is Click Bank A Scam?” and “Do You Know The Adwords Secret?“, I covered the basics of how ClickBank works, some of the strategies affiliate marketers use to drive traffic and why some of those methods don’t always work. Today, I’m going to get right down to the nitty-gritty of bringing in that ClickBank cash - choosing the right kind of product. If you were to assess the biggest losers in the ClickBank game, you’ll find that they all have one thing in common. They are promoting the wrong kind of products.

Yes, it’s true that with some products, the market is simply too competitive to even hope to get noticed. Other products are just things that very few people even think about buying. The secret is to find that spot between these two extremes- ideally, the products you promote should fill two important criteria. There should be a demand that exceeds existing supply. Secondly, the market shouldn’t be saturated yet.

Right now, you’re probably thinking, well all I have to do is promote new products then, right? Not necessarily- the first thing to do is check out the ClickBank Marketplace. Choose a category that you like and then select New Products. Now sort these results in order of gravity or popularity- right now, this is your most important factor. But the most popular product doesn’t necessarily mean it will bring you the most money.

The Whole Equation

There are a series of figures that you need to consider when selecting a product. When you select one, you’ll notice that it comes with a list of symbols.

• $/sale is the amount you can earn per sale.
• %/sale is the percentage that the affiliate will receive.
• %/refd is the sales generated by that vendor solely from its ClickBank affiliates
• grav is the gravity or popularity of the product

A promising product should pay you more than $20 and have a minimum percentage of 50%. The ideal gravity threshold is 10- 60. Over 60 means the product is already doing well and the market might be saturated already. However, there have been instances of products ranking higher than 60 while having low market saturation. Less than 10 is a risk, because it says that the product hasn’t been able to prove itself as a seller yet.

Apart from these figures, it’s also important to take a good look at the product and the vendor’s selling page. Deciphering sales letters does take a little practice but soon you’ll be able to spot the winners and the ones you can ignore. Testimonials, benefits and time sensitive offers are all positive aspects you should look out for. Make sure the page is designed well- this doesn’t mean it has to be fancy, just clean and pleasing to the eye. A good, attractive headline is also a good sign.

Popularity: 92% [?]

I’m sure you got into the Internet business with only one magic formula in your mind: Internet = Business = Huge profits.

But to fully integrate this formula into a working model, you will need another component: Traffic, and loads of it.

In the competitive business of making money on the internet, timing is essential. You should always be at least one step ahead of your competition. Strategies to improve your traffic should have been done on a war footing, starting yesterday!

So let’s move ahead quickly.

Top 6 methods to build traffic that pays:

1. Build a website: This would be the logical first step. Your website is your identity on the web. Choose a theme, font, colors and functionalities that nicely complement your niche. Build your website using a number of competitive keyword phrases that attract search engines.
2. Invest in ads: Yahoo’s Overture and Google Adwords are great advertising schemes that can truly pull in traffic. A Google Adwords account is cheap and it has a number of great tools like the Traffic Estimator, which helps you analyze the effectiveness of your keywords. While many people shy away from spending money on ads, these are surefire ways to boost incoming traffic. Believe me, every penny you spend on Google and Yahoo ads is worth it.
3. Exchange links with other sites: This two-way process rewards you and your link partner. When one site that specializes in a niche offers links to a supporting site, the efforts are doubly beneficial to both. The more links you trade, the more traffic you generate.
4. Join online communities: This increases your visibility dramatically. It also helps establish you as THE expert in your field. If you contribute material worthy of being read, seen or heard, you can be sure that you will experience an immediate ROI in terms of increased traffic to your site. Put up a Blog and start populating it with thoughtful comments and useful information.
5. Write: Put quality articles in your website. Publish note-worthy pieces in eZines and send your clients some outstanding newsletters or reports. Nothing can beat a piece of intelligent reading when it comes to attracting paying visitors. Your best option would be to write your own articles. However, if putting pen to paper is not your thing, hire ghostwriters to do the work. Or buy a pack of readymade PLR articles. The only thing to look out for, is that your articles need be 100% original and high-quality.
6. Use viral marketing: Viral marketing is a relatively new method of driving focused traffic to your site. It is low in cost but high in returns. Using video, audio and RSS feeds on your website can multiply the volume of people coming to your site.

These are some of the methods in which you can build traffic to your website.

But there is yet another crucial factor that decides the kind of traffic you get. I mean, while your ads can bring you visitors, it need not bring you targeted visitors, the kind of visitors who actually spend money. To do that, you have to concentrate on your keywords.

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In this article, I’m going to discuss the importance of AdWords when working with ClickBank. I’m also going to be looking at some popular strategies affiliate marketers use to sell their products. But perhaps most importantly, I’m going to take a look at why some of these strategies work and some don’t.

Let’s start with the basics- first of all, why is AdWords so important to your marketing strategy on ClickBank? Affiliates use AdWords in two very important ways. One, they are used to find out what people are looking for on the Internet. In that way, you can choose to promote a product that people actually want to buy. Secondly, affiliates use these same AdWords to market and promote their products. If your Adwords match the ones people tend to use in the search engines, you can drive a lot of traffic your way.

It used to be pretty easy to use AdWords in affiliate marketing- all you had to do was set up a direct link campaign, put your feet up and cash the checks when they came in. Today, the search engines have made things more difficult. In fact, Google now won’t allow more than one affiliate on the same page. This has simply meant that different strategies are needed to make AdWords and ClickBank work better together.

Choose A Strategy

One of the popular ways to make AdWords work for you is to bid on a specific product name. This approach can be very competitive, especially when you are bidding for a very attractive name that drives enormous amounts of traffic- you could end up in a very aggressive bidding war. The benefit of this kind of strategy is that, it gives you a direct link to traffic that is interested in making a purchase. However, the cost per click for these words could also be high.

Another option is to use keyword lists- this means, consolidate as many keyword phrases as possible and track the sales of each one. This is a very thorough strategy and will put you right on the pulse of what’s hot and what’s not. However, this can be a time-consuming job as well. You’ll probably have to invest in some keyword software to help you along.

Some affiliate marketers create campaigns, which are targeted towards sites that are AdWords enriched. This is probably one of the most difficult strategies of all, since it tells Google which web pages should hold your ads. Another drawback of this method is the click through ratio- this means that if you don’t generate enough sales, you’ll end up paying for the impressions, even though they didn’t translate into clicks.

An effective and relatively easy method to work your way around affiliate bidding wars is to write a review for your product, then offer visitors a gift or bonus if they buy using your link. It’s even better if you can harvest names and email ids, so you can do direct follow-up sales later on.

If these methods still seem too time consuming for you, you can visit CB Affiliate Revenue for a quicker way to start attracting traffic for high-profile products.

Popularity: 28% [?]

You would be amazed that the number one reason why most affiliate marketers seem to fail is because they don’t identify niche markets that are desperate and hungry. The average affiliate marketer finds a product, tries to sell it. What if there’s no market, or a small market that dries up in no time?

Let’s understand that there’s no dearth of markets out there. The point is to choose a few that are highly popular and lucrative. Why not just one? Because in case it doesn’t work out for you, you can always find better ones.

Here’s the secret to finding that hungry market that’s waiting for you to sell to them. Find the right keywords. These are the magnets that will let you find your profitable markets. A keyword selector tool can help you with this activity. Finding the keywords will help you identify markets and product ideas as well as to use Google AdWords successfully. We’ll cover this in a later part of our training series.

Keywords are those words that people use to find your website. By finding the best ones that describe your business or product, you can also use them in your pay per click advertising campaign. Using these words, your hungry market finds your website in the search engine results and then comes to your site.

The keyword selector tool tells you the number of times these keywords or phrases were searched in a given month. You can also find out how competitive these keywords are. The most popular keywords are the ones that were searched the most number of times. From the information you get, you can gauge whether there’s a potential market in that niche area for related products. Now remember - just because a keyword is popular does not mean all those who searched it were customers.

However, it gives you a pretty good idea about whether there’s a market and you constantly need to monitor it. Internet markets tend to change and by keeping track of it, you can move with the profitable ones. That’s why I said - its better to identify a bunch of markets so that you have a lot of people to sell to.

To know how hot the market you have identified is, look at its demographics. Check out related forums and online discussion boards to see what these people are expecting. If what you intend offering is available for free somewhere else, then you can bet your market will go there to get it.

So analyze your market in detail. Split them into smaller categories -find niches within niches. You need to strike the balance where you want a market with a steady flow of customers, but not so intense in competition. Next comes finding those hot products. But you don’t have to wait to know - you can head over to Duvet Dollars and grab your entire package with bonuses to know everything about making money in your sleep. Go on - do it right away.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Internet marketing lets you make thousands of dollars in as little as thirty minutes without any training at all. You don’t even have to worry about high initial investments. In fact, you can set up multiple streams of income with no cost or low cost methods. To get started it takes a mindset that believes this can be done. After that, it is smooth sailing.

You know what keywords are. Google search is based on keywords typed by people looking for information. Keywords have multiple crucial roles to play in the success of an internet business. But for someone who wants to make money online without a website, keywords have an even more important role to play.

Search engines experience hundreds of millions of searches each day and these can be repetitive for the same keyword. Some keywords have a consistent demand over a period of time. But there are others that become high-demand from time to time. This can happen for various reasons. During these times, there’s a spike in the keyword’s demand. If you are smart enough to identify it, then you have found your unlimited internet goldmine.

The idea is to make the most of those keywords that see a sudden spurt in demand. Did you ask why? Here are the answers:

There’s a high buzz factor with these keywords. When you catch them at their peak, you can enjoy no cost viral traffic. traffic in internet marketing is sales, which in turn leads to profits.

You can expect a spike in some keywords when there’s a great new product or when there’s something so newsworthy that everyone’s using the keyword to know more. What you can do is cash in on this and make a huge income either from affiliate commissions or Google AdSense or - both.

To actually find these keywords, you can use a Google feature called Hot Trends. It shows you what keywords people are using on Google search. You can see searches that are suddenly popular highlighted in this feature, along with deviations in the normal trend. You also know in what context the keywords are being searched with all the relevant information like location, etc.

From this list you can pick at least ten that have the potential to make you a profit. Here you must identify two types of keywords - revenue keywords and information keywords. Revenue keywords are the product related ones where people are likely to buy. So what you do is create an ad around that keyword on AdWords generate traffic to the affiliate program promoting the product. Find out how much competition there is and the number of existing ads in Google AdWords for the keywords. Choose the ones where there are hardly any AdWords ads. Next, find a website that has this product with an affiliate program. Sign up for the affiliate program and create an ad around the keyword for the product. Enjoy your commissions. And keep monitoring the keywords.

This entire technique will not take you more than thirty minutes. Surprised? With the information keywords, people are after information. But you can capitalize on these also to get you AdSense income.

Check out the whole package at Project Quick Cash with all the techniques. Do it now.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Now, we see a variety of ways in which we can make some kind of money online, but what we need to do is find a way that actually catapults you to online success, one that is not only feasible, but legitimate and a big money-earner.

You have not one, but two ways to do this. Lets say you have a product that you created - this could be an ebook. You can publish this ebook attractively, promote it and sell it to make money. The crucial thing here is to get the right topic, and you could be making a lot of money quickly. But this sort of thing can take up a lot of time, energy and investment since you will have product development, setting up a website, stocking inventory and handling customer support. All this involves a lot of work.

Alternately you can sign up for an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are the easiest way to profit online - and they are very popular. You choose products made by someone else, and promote it for a commission. Advantages are:

• No product development
• No office
• No stock
• No customer hassles
• No capital

While you could actually do it all without a website, it is advisable to build one so that you can attract traffic.

But wait! What if the affiliate programs you sign up with didn’t bring in the commission you expected? Worse still, what if you were unable to sell your affiliate products because there’s no demand? Don’t despair! There’s a way out.

You must become what is called a ’super affiliate’. And believe me, it is the smartest way to work. Compare the advantages with simple affiliate marketing - as a super affiliate you don’t get involved in product development. You don’t even need a website. How simple is that? What you will do as a super affiliate is generate your earnings by identifying hungry markets and established profitable products that are already being marketed. The next step is generating traffic - not with your marketing efforts but through easy to set up advertising campaigns like Google AdWords.

To summarize - the best and the easiest way to profit online is

• Become a super affiliate
• Capitalize on existing resources in the form of established products and marketing models
• Combine them
• Enjoy profits

Popularity: 29% [?]

All Internet marketers maintain a meticulous action list of the important activities involved in running their business. But there are some crucial mistakes that must be avoided and we have carefully compiled this list. These can make all the difference in making sure your business flourishes. In fact, you might like to even print and use this as a ready reference checklist. Here it is:

• If you are running a particular promotional campaign do not group all the keywords in your list. For example if you short-listed fifty keywords for this promotion split them into smaller subgroups with related keywords. You could even have separate landing pages for each of these subgroups, enabling your focussed traffic to find it easier to navigate. The more specific you get, the more the chances of your niche market reaching you.
• Do not forget to use square brackets around your keywords and key phrases. By using square brackets you can get your ad noticed easily when this particular keyword is searched for.
• Do not set your keywords with Google AdWords and leave it at that. Constant tracking is necessary to know which keywords are profitable. This will help you drop the ones that are not. You can also reallocate your promotional dollar to focus on those that bring in results.
• Do not ignore grammatical errors, dead links and complex web pages. Just imagine visiting a sloppy website where links lead to a 404 error page - it’s the best way to lose a customer. No one has the time to browse around a website that is complicated and ill maintained. Links must point to the intended web pages, audio and video clips.
• Do not underestimate the importance of using reviews as a promotional method. Reviews make you appear as a fair unbiased marketer who prefers to be honest. As an Internet marketer you will obviously use forums and blogs - so make sure writing reviews is a regular activity. And enjoy the sales that pour in.
• If your traffic is not targeted, you cannot have consistent sales and you cannot track your activity. Be wary of traffic sources you did not target - like pop unders, free links etc.
• Not making an action plan is the worst mistake an Internet marketer can make. You cant set up a website, run a Google ad and relax hoping things will take care of themselves. When your customer places an order, they must be directed to your autoresponder. When your visitor asks a question, they must be directed to your frequently answered questions page.
• Do not analyze every how-to ebook or report you read too deeply. The time could be better spent on actual practice and experimentation. In many instances learning is better through action.
• Do not lose focus on the system you have set up after a lot of research. It is necessary to be organized and stay through with what you plan until it runs on autopilot.

It is not unnatural to want to respond to every new strategy that is promoted or launched in the market, but then there will never be an end to it. What is listed above is just a partial list.

Popularity: 21% [?]