ClickBank Marketing Tips
What You Need To Know About Your Clickbank Account
There is no question that Clickbank is the most popular affiliate network
on the Internet. This might explain why so many people become Clickbank
affiliates. However, if you're new to the game and are thinking of signing
up with Clickbank, there are a few things you should know about this giant
before doing anything. There are a number of pitfalls that you need to be
aware of so that you're not scratching your head wondering why things have
gone so terribly wrong. Hopefully, this articles will provide you with some
answers.
The first thing you need to know about signing up with Clickbank is that
there is no fee. Affiliates can join free and promote any product in the
Clickbank marketplace. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. The default
settings for a new Clickbank account are set to pay you only once you've
reached $100 in sales. So if you're selling $20 products and making $10 per
sale, you're going to have to make quite a few sales in order to get paid.
So, my suggestion is, as soon as you've completed your sign up process, to
change the minimum payout to $25. That's as low as they will allow you to
go, but it's much better than $100.
Another thing you need to know is that if you are going to be doing any email
advertising of Clickbank products, you cannot use their hoplinks directly
in your email ads. You must cloak them inside of another link, such as a
Tiny URL or something similar. The reason for this is because many years
ago, during the spam wars, Clickbank got a number of complaints. Since this
time, email ads can no longer have Clickbank hoplinks in them.
That very same problem is the reason why you will not get notified if you
make a sale unless you are a vendor. Affiliates do not get sales confirmations.
So if you want to see if you have made any sales from your Clickbank products
promotions, you must log into your account and check manually. Another annoyance
that affiliates just have to deal with.
When you first create your Clickbank account, they will send you an email
with your password. I suggest you write this down somewhere. The reason for
that is because they do not have a feature where you can have your password
sent to you if you forget it. If you do, you have to go through a process
to generate a new password, which they will send to you just as they did
your original one.
If you are an affiliate, in order to qualify for payments, you have to have
at least sales from 5 different credit card numbers and must have at least
one each from Visa and Mastercard. Nobody is quite sure why they do this,
but the theory is that this is to keep people from simply making purchases
through their own account in order to get paid.
Yes, Clickbank makes you jump through a lot of hoops to get paid and do business
with them, but they are still the best game in town and dealing with them
can literally turn you into a success overnight.
The Facts Of The Clickbank Product
Like with anything else in the world, there is good and bad with Clickbank
products. For that matter, there is good and bad with any products. So if
you're going to survive in this crazy world of Internet marketing, you're
going to need to know some basic things about the products at the Clickbank
marketplace. Hopefully, this article will give you an informed and honest
opinion on what you can expect to find in the maze of 100,000 different products
to choose from.
For starters, Clickbank products come in all shapes and sizes, from ebooks
to software to memberships. You will find these products in a number of different
categories ranging from business to health to just plain fun and games. With
so many products to choose from, it's almost impossible to know which ones
you're going to have a chance of selling unless you know what you're looking
for and what to look out for. Well, wonder and worry no more.
The Clickbank marketplace has a terrific system. They rank each product in
each category from 1 to whatever the bottom number is, according to popularity,
which isn't just a measure of the number of sales, though that is a main
criteria. One of the figures in the Clickbank marketplace is something called
gravity, and it is a very important stat. Gravity is a weighted average of
the number of affiliates who are making money selling that particular product.
For example, just recently, Day Job Killer, in the Marketing and Ads category,
had a gravity of over 1000. This was a Clickbank record. Obviously, with
that high a gravity, the product was very popular and sold well. Therefor,
it would be safe to assume that if you attempted to sell this product, you'd
have a decent chance of making some sales.
Of course gravity isn't the only statistic in the Clickbank marketplace to
go by, but it is the best indicator of how popular a product is. Of course
you can simply go by the actual rank of the product and assume the ones on
top are the most popular. However, you might also want to look at a stat
called percent referred. This stat shows the percentage of sales made by
affiliates. In most cases, the high gravity products also have the highest
percentage of affiliates, though this is not always the case. Sometimes a
vendor is such a big name that he makes more sales than all his affiliates,
no matter how many affiliates he has.
Of course, none of this tells you how good the product is, just how popular
it is. The only way to find out how good a Clickbank product is, is to buy
it and try it out. If you're concerned about doing this, don't be. All Clickbank
products come with a 56 day or 8 week complete money back guarantee. So you
don't have anything to worry about.
From my own personal experience, most of the products I have purchased from
Clickbank have been decent. Of course that doesn't mean there aren't some
turkeys out there. So do your homework.
The Truth About Adwords And Clickbank
Well, this subject has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time and
it was only a matter of when I was finally going to go on a rant about this
subject. If you've been marketing online for any length of time, then you've
seen all these so called "data entry" opportunities that are nothing more
than promoting Clickbank products using Google Adwords. Well, as easy as
people make it sound, it is time you knew the truth about Adwords and Clickbank
and what it can do to your pocketbook, not to mention your sanity. This article
will literally blow the whistle on this topic once and for all.
First of all, let me just get this right out in the open. There are NO data
entry jobs on the Internet. Nobody is going to pay you to enter data into
forms. So completely get that thought out of your mind or you're going to
end up with a world of hurt on your hands and a busted bank account to boot.
Okay, so just what is the deal with this Adwords and Clickbank thing? Well,
in theory, it is very simple. The first step of the process is to go to the
Clickbank marketplace and find a product that you want to sell. After you
have done that, you then go to your Adwords account and work up some keywords
and an ad for that product. Set your daily costs and what you want to pay
per click and you're done. Simple, right?
Oh brother, don't even get me started!
For one thing, Google Adwords is one picky son of a gun and for good reason.
However, to understand that reason, you first have to understand a little
history about Adwords advertising. In the early days of affiliate marketing,
everybody and their grandmother was promoting the same affiliate products.
So when a potential customer would see an ad, they'd go there, see the product,
close up the ad, go to the next ad and son of a gun, it was the same darn
product. Surfers were starting to get ticked off, and rightly so.
So, to better the user experience, Google instituted a lot of changes that
literally turned Adwords and Clickbank into a land mine. I'm not going to
go into all the details, because they would take a book to cover, but the
end result was that unless you do things EXACTLY the way Google wants them
to be done, your Adwords campaign could end up costing you a fortune. For
example, keywords that should only be costing you 10 cents a click, could
end up costing you a dollar a click or more. Yes, it's that bad.
And of course none of this takes into account whether or not the product
you choose to promote even converts. This is only found out through testing.
At $1 a click, that can turn out to be some expensive testing.
The point is, many people go into Adwords and Clickbank promotion without
doing their homework and end up being taken to the cleaners. It's not as
simple as people make it sound. Not anymore. So, if you are planning on tackling
this beast, you better come armed with knowledge.
You're been fairly warned.
How To Survive As A Clickbank Affiliate
I just have to laugh at some of the ads I see. "Make easy money as a Clickbank
affiliate". Let me tell you, if it was that easy, 95% of all Internet marketers
wouldn't be failing at this business. So it's time that somebody printed
a Clickbank affiliate survival guide. While this article can't possibly replace
and entire guide, it is the hopes of this author that it will at least alert
you to some of the things that as an affiliate you should be on the lookout
for. Otherwise, life as a Clickbank affiliate can be a real nightmare.
Probably the biggest pitfall of being a Clickbank affiliate is the competition.
What most people don't realize is that they're not alone in the world. Clickbank
probably has the largest affiliate base of any affiliate network on the Internet.
So if you're going to have a chance of success, the first thing you want
to do is not try to compete with the guys promoting the flavor of the day.
This is probably the easiest thing to avoid because of the tools that Clickbank
gives you. The Clickbank marketplace may very well be the greatest thing
to come to Internet marketing since the dawning of the autoresponder. At
the marketplace, you can see every product that is being sold and make an
informed decision as to what products you want to sell. How do you do this?
You do this by examining the stats.
The stats that Clickbank tracks are dollars per sale, percent per sale, percent
referred and gravity. Let's take them one at a time and point out what you'd
like to see in each.
Dollars per sale is a simple stat. That is how much you will make on each
sale. Ideally, you want to look for products that pay the most, especially
if you are going to use Google Adwords to promote these products, which can
really eat up profits quickly. But this is not the only thing you want to
look for.
Percent per sale is the percent of each sale that the affiliate gets. Ideally,
you want at least 50% on each sale. Some products pay as much as 75% or more.
Of course, these products are more popular and harder to sell because of
the competition.
Percent referred is the percentage of all sales that come from affiliates.
This is a very important figure and usually coincides with the next stat.
Ideally, you don't want to compete with the products where 85 to 90% of the
sales are coming from affiliates.
Gravity may be the most important stat of all to gauge competition. This
figure tells you, roughly, how many affiliates are promoting this product.
If you want to sell something with little competition, you want to look for
gravity numbers under 20.
Okay, putting this all together, ideally, these are the numbers you want
to look for:
Dollars per sale - $25 or more
Percent per sale - 50% or more
Percent referred - Less than 70%
Gravity - Under 20
Believe it or not, these products exist. You just have to find them. When
you do, you have found products that you will have a decent chance of selling,
especially if you use Google Adwords and mine long tail keywords.
These are just some basics on how to survive as a Clickbank affiliate.
An Honest Review Of Clickbank
People are constantly praising Clickbank. You see the ads all over the place.
Make a fortune with Clickbank. Well, I'm not here to knock the affiliate
network giant, but I thought that it was time that somebody wrote an honest
review of Clickbank, the good and the bad. Hopefully, this article will make
it so that you'll be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not
you want to have anything to do with Clickbank.
Let's start with some of the good things about Clickbank. If you are a vendor
with your own product, there is no place on the Internet where you will get
this much exposure for your product. The affiliate network at Clickbank is
huge. Just recently, a product called "Day Job Killer" had over 1000 affiliates
promoting it at one time. That is a small army. So if you are a vendor, Clickbank
can be a gold mine.
Another great thing about Clickbank is that they are an established company
and quite reliable. They pay their affiliates regularly and on time. I have
yet to have a problem with them in the four years I've been dealing with
them as far as getting my checks was concerned. They pay out on the first
and the sixteenth of each month as long as you have reached the minimum payout
balance.
Another great thing about Clickbank is that they probably have the largest
inventory of products on the Internet. If you can't find something to sell
there, you're simply not looking hard enough. Some of the products have a
lot of competition but many have no competition at all and they should be
very easy to sell.
Okay, what about the bad? Well, there's enough of it to go around, unfortunately.
One of the most recent bad things about Clickbank is actually not even their
fault. At least not entirely. Seems that a popular spyware killing software
targets Clickbank cookies as spyware. What this essentially does is it makes
it so that if a customer is using this spyware, cookies are not written to
their computer and the affiliate does NOT get credit for the sale. Yeah,
OUCH! This is actually becoming a very serious problem as many affiliates
are complaining about losing commissions. Until Clickbank does something
about this, this problem is not going to disappear.
Another problem with Clickbank is that they have gotten too big for their
own good. Whatever problems there may be, don't bother complaining about
them because they don't listen. They'll send you a polite email back but
nothing will get done. The above problem with the cookies and spyware is
a perfect example. This has been going on for a while and nothing has been
done about it.
Another problem with Clickbank is that they have a boat load of rules and
regulations that would choke the US Constitution. Unless you read them all,
which is close to impossible, you run the risk of having your Clickbank account
taken away from you without warning.
All in all, the good more than outweighs the bad. Many affiliates are still
making a good living with Clickbank in spite of all the problems.
When all is said and done, I'm more than happy with my results.
Save Big Time!
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