Clickbank marketers know the benefits of promoting Clickbank products. A huge marketplace with a broad, diverse offering, high commissions and all easy to promote with one convenient affiliate id. Clickbank is a great service. It allows the regular Joe to self-publish his e-book, software, web service or music without having to go through gate-keepers and pay gouging middle-man fees. In my opinion it’s truly the way of future online commerce and Clickbank has been the leader.
The tradeoff to the freedom Clickbank provides is that there is a lot of junk in the marketplace. Experienced CB affiliates have all had the experience of buying an e-book, shelling out thirty, fifty even a hundred bucks to get a twenty-five page manual in size 16 font choking with grammatical and spelling errors and the content suited for the beginner or the content useless. As an affiliate you do not want to waste your time and money promoting these types of products because a large percentage of your sales will end up as refunds. Refunds are torture to the affilaite marketer and can kill your business.
While it’s important to trust your gut instincts there are several parameters you can apply to find a good seller. First, what is the demand for the potential product? Use the overture keyword tool to gauge how many people are searching for content related to the product you might promote. This is a critical step. If there is no demand you’ll have a tough time selling the product. Granted, you may be able to figure out a way to cross-sell that product to a different market, but generally speaking, no searches, no demand.
Next use one of the Clickbank marketplace search tools to determine sales trends. Did the product come out with a huge upwards spike and then sink into oblivion? Chances are this product looked good, but was rejected by the market. My advice is to stand clear. What I look for in a potential product to market is solid upward trending sales… this tells me it’s a good product that is selling well. I also look for hot products that come out and in two weeks you see sales explode. This often indicates the super affiliates have picked it up and since their reputations are on the line the product is more than likely of quality. I jump on these and ride the wave until it becomes over-saturated with competition or the product runs its sales cycle. Some times you can find products that have been overlooked languishing in the lower ranks of the marketplace that can be great sellers, so make sure to do some digging and thorough investigation.
Furthermore, you’ll notice product listing will have a stat listed called gravity. The gravity number is an equation but basically the number equates to the number of affiliates actively promoting the product. I tend to look for gravity between 10 and 90. If the product is brand new and the gravity surges I’ll still likely try to wedge in and claim a piece of the pie. But a gravity of 10-90 is a good range. This means the product is proven to sell but not competitively over-saturated.
Another way to select a product to promote is by size of commissions. Personally I like to watch my money add up fast… making a couple bucks a sale just doesn’t cut it. As a general rule I will not promote a product that doesn’t pay at least $15 per sale and I love the products that pay $40 and above that have up sell products on their order pages. I promoted one a while back that brought in $60 per sale, but I was often surprised to see another $80 dollar commission on top of that as the vendor did an up sell.
Also, what percentage does the vendor give affiliates? I believe since we’re dealing with digital products with no hard costs of goods sold factoring in, the percentage the affiliate gets should be at least be 40%. It demonstrates that the vendor cares about their affiliate partners and respects their efforts. There are actually products in the marketplace that offer affiliates a paltry 1%. I don’t understand the thinking of these miserly vendors. Even if the 1% equaled my minimum required amount earned I would not touch the product, because it’s obvious they’re not a good partner who cares about building lasting relationships with affiliates. They strike me as stingy, greedy and clueless.
Check landing pages of potential products. Do they look reasonably professional? Clean layout, nice graphics? Even though there is contradictory data that demonstrates amateur websites covert better, I just don’t buy it. A nice website imbues trust in my opinion. Outside of aesthetics, does the copy read smoothly? Do you see glaring typos and grammatical errors? If so, there’s a more than likely chance the product has the same careless problems. A few minor mistakes that only an English teacher would pick up is likely not a problem. But big ones will turn buyers off quickly. Make sure the page is professional, the copy clean and readable and that the site gives you a feeling of being trustworthy.
Next, make sure the sales letter is convincing. Does it make you want to buy? Does it hook you? Is it hard to pry yourself away from the offer? If so, the sales letter will have the same affect on other potential customers and your conversion rates will increase.
Now to the two big pet peeves I have when it comes to selecting Clickbank products to promote. Nothing drives me crazier than a vendor advertising his or her affiliate program on the top of the page or drawing a lot of attention to it anywhere else on the site. I can live with a small text link buried in the footer… I’d prefer none, but at least at the bottom it is out of the way and only seasoned affiliate marketers will likely look there. But if it’s obvious, a customer can easily figure out that they can quickly sign up with Clickbank and buy the product through their own hoplink earning themselves a nice rebate. Your money and effort are wasted when this happens. I won’t touch a product that doesn’t respect the affiliate by making an effort not to glaringly advertise their affiliate program.
Next, does the vendor accept multiple payment vendors? If so, run away. You sent traffic via a Clickbank hoplink and if somebody has the option to purchase through another check-out service or the option to mail in a check you just lost your commission. In order for your commission to be protected the vendor should only have one checkout through Clickbank. Clickbank offers multiple payment methods, check, Paypal and credit card which should cover all customer needs.
Those are the parameters I use when hunting for new Clickbank products to promote. As said earlier, always trust your gut instinct. Some times nice looking sites with slick copy can be bad… I’ve found your gut combined with keyword research and analyzing sales data can lead you to successful, profitable campaigns.
