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: 97% [?]

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: 41% [?]

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: 37% [?]

There are two important concepts you must understand to start enjoying success on the Internet. The first one is affiliate marketing. You’ve probably heard and seen a lot of information about affiliate programs. Possibly, you’ve also wondered how a handful of well-known affiliate marketers have made millions by just selling other people’s products.

Well, affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money online. All you have to do is select the right products you want to promote, sign up with the program, direct visitors to your affiliate link, and earn commissions on each sale you make. It’s as simple as that and does not require any specialized knowledge to be successful. You could be earning as much as 75% commission on each sale depending on the product.

But here’s what you should know - just don’t sign up for random programs that look good. There’s a big secret you should know when it comes to choosing the affiliate program. Only look for ‘two tier” affiliate programs. In these, you earn a first tier commission on your sale. Then you earn the second tier commission on sales generated by people you refer to the program. Easy, isn’t it?

Now lets look at the next concept - Joint venture brokering. You locate different site owners who are already well established and receive a lot of traffic. If they are related to the site whose affiliate program you have signed up for, you introduce them to ‘your’ site, and give them the idea of making money by signing up through your affiliate link. This means you are brokering a deal for your site. For every sale they make after signing up through you, you will earn the ’second-tier’ commission.

The marketers you identify to sign up through you can promote the site either by adding banner ads to their site. This will enable you earn a commission each time someone clicks the ad to buy the product from the site you are brokering for. If the marketer has a huge email list that’s interested in the product you are promoting, all the better. You can earn a commission for every sale resulting from the list.

Can you see how you can practically earn a fortune as a joint venture broker from a little research? All you need to do is identify a site owner who wants to sell his products and a marketer who can sell that product. You act as the middleman, coordinating the deal - and earn your profits in the process. Legitimate. Easy. In upcoming articles, I’ll show you exactly how to find the products, the markets and several advanced techniques you can use to set up your automated cash formula.

Popularity: 29% [?]

ClickBank has emerged as a bone of contention among a number of online entrepreneurs. Some swear by it, saying that they’ve made good money on a steady basis. Others have made little or nothing at all- in fact, some people have been claiming that ClickBank is a scam! To better understand who’s right and who’s wrong, we need to get a clear idea of what ClickBank is and how it works.

In simple terms, ClickBank is the middle ground between affiliate marketers and people who have a product to sell. Normally, bringing merchants and affiliates together can be bogged down with a number of negatives for both sides. Some merchants might have a bad product or might offer low commission rates. Affiliates might drive a lot of traffic but very little sales. ClickBank offers a relatively risk-free venue for both parties. As an affiliate marketer, you can use ClickBank to instantly find products to sell that have a high market demand and can generate good revenue.

The benefits of using ClickBank for affiliate marketing are multiple- for one thing, you have instantaneous access to thousands of products to sell. Your checks will arrive twice a month and you can keep track of multiple marketing campaigns. Perhaps, the best reason ClickBank has going for it is its commission rate, which can go up to about 75% for a single sale.

The Scam Sham

So why are so many people jumping up and down, pointing fingers at ClickBank for being a scam? Simply put, they’re not making the kind of money that they thought they would. The reason for this is very simple- they don’t know the rules of the game. While ClickBank does offer high commission rates, it also requires you to have payments come in from five different credit card companies, with at least one Visa or MasterCard as a mandatory factor. ClickBank will also dock your money for periods of inactivity- these penalty rates can be as high as $15 a day, after a year of no activity. ClickBank also docks $2.50 for every check you get.

Do these guidelines seem unreasonable? If they do, keep in mind that you simply can’t find ClickBank’s commission rates anywhere else. The penalty fees are simply a way of keeping the real players in and the weaker ones off the food chain- keep in mind that just because this is an easy way to make cash, it is no less aggressive. The bottom line is that, the profits you can make on ClickBank are so high that you won’t even miss the amount docked on your checks. ClickBank isn’t a scam- it’s just a business that has tough rules.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Much of your marketing efforts rely on email marketing. So you want to make sure that the emails you send your subscribers reach their inbox and are read by them. To be successful with your email marketing efforts, you need to develop your own lists. Why? Because if you rent a list and email them, no matter how legit, its very short term. With your own list, you can build a customer relationship and communicate with them again and again. You build your list as a result of your subscribers opting in to receive your messages and avoid the risk of being reported as spam.

In spite of a well-planned marketing strategy and designing an effective series of emails, sometimes these emails end up in cyberspace, thanks to automatic spam-filters. To avoid this happening, you will need to be conversant with the words, phrases and characters that can kill your email before it reaches your recipient.

There are a lot of unscrupulous marketers out there who send unsolicited messages and give the legitimate ones a bad name, causing people to be doubly wary about which websites they subscribe to and which emails they receive.

The first step, then, is to do some quick research on the kind of words and phrases that can activate these filters and avoid using them completely. Filters especially look for certain symbols and words and by knowing what they are you can avoid them. So make sure your emails comply with the CAN SPAM Act.

You must put specific information in the title and from fields of your emails. Include your name and state your purpose. Don’t write so much in your email that your recipient has to keep scrolling till eternity to get to the point of the message. Rather than use superlative words, present the topic and content of your email so that your recipient is keen to know what it contains and how it will benefit them. Sign off with a call to action.

Many affiliate marketers invest in a reliable email service provider who also makes sure about email deliverability, hosting, customizing content and compliance with the CAN SPAM Act.

Popularity: 31% [?]

A lot of affiliate marketers tend to spend on pay per click advertising without realizing the necessity of the landing page. In fact, some even use their website’s home page as a landing page. While this could work in some instances, it is always better to create one that is separate from the home page. Why? A landing page must be regarded as the most crucial page since this is where visitors convert to customers or subscribers and this is what your visitors will see first when they click your link. That’s two excellent reasons why a landing page is worth spending time on.

Here is a list of practical tips that you can put into action immediately. Read on.

• As mentioned earlier, do not use your home page as your landing page because too many choices and links distract your visitors. They end up going through your site, which is good, but you will not achieve your goal of getting them to take that specific action which will turn them into customers or opt in subscribers to email list, ezine or newsletter. So make a separate landing page that is focused on your goal.
• Optimize your landing page after you build it with the keywords that were responsible for bringing your visitors here. This will give you the optimum conversion rates. While a high search engine ranking is great, even more important is converting your visitors to customers. So your landing page must be planned in such a way that when your visitor arrives on it, they see the words that brought them there and buy, sign up, opt in, etc.
• What you write on your landing page must be understood without ambiguity by your visitors. There must be no doubt as to what you expect from them. Don’t say too much. Succinctly convey your message with bulleted points. Use keywords in the title and subtitle. Preferably let your landing page have an 800 x 600 resolution so that anyone can view them clearly.
• Be specific. Use words that call your visitors to action. The content must flow naturally so that they go ahead and do what you expect them to do. Action words like “Buy Now” or “sign up now” “give me my free trial” etc. must be prominent. Always keep it simple to understand.
• Never put long sales letters on your landing page. Your visitors clicked your link because they are ready to buy and not read miles of text. The landing page must only contain information essential to close the sale. Of course, there’s always the chance that you’ll have visitors who would like to buy but need information. For these visitors you can always have a link to a resource page, which opens in a new window preferably.

Thus, the landing page must make it easy for your visitors who are eager to buy to just place their orders. Going deeper into your website, you can learn how to optimize your website images for search. Read the image optimization post here. 

Popularity: 21% [?]