Clickbank For BeginnersClickbank Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Founded by Mike J Filsaime, a famous internet marketing expert, Paydotcom is a great alternative to Clickbank. Just like Clickbank, the main product sold at Paydotcom marketplace is eBook. Affiliate gets as high as 75% payouts.

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How to choose quality products to promote

By referring to APS: Unlike Clickbank where you can determine quality products according to gravity and popularity, Paydotcom doesn’t have such feature. Alternatively, they provide APS (Affiliate Power Score). The higher APS, the better that product is. APS is calculated on a daily basis and it depends on a number of factors such as the number of sales, total refunds, and affiliate earnings with special emphasis put on the number of unique affiliates making sales over the last 150 days with recent transactions having more relevance.

By using forum: Usually, if the product is good, you’ll find lots of positive reviews at related forums. Use Google, search for relevant forums in that market, and find out what other people say about particular products.

By referring to Clickbank gravity. Search at Clickbank marketplace for eBook in the same topic and watch for the gravity. If the gravity is 1 or higher, that is a good topic to start. Otherwise, all products in that topic has gravity lower than 1, avoid it. Probably not many people search for that topic, which leads to lower sales.

Buy the product itself: This is the best choice, but it requires money. Buy the product, see the quality whether it is good or bad.

By using Alexa: Alexa (alexa.com) provides website traffic information. Enter any URL and Alexa will return a traffic result. Website with the highest traffic on the net will be ranked 1, while the second highest will get rank 2 and so on. Think about it this way: A great products will be promoted by lots of affiliates and get consistent traffic. Hence, a website at Paydotcom marketplace which is ranked top 100,000 would probably sell q good, quality product.

Does Alexa method 100% reliable? Well, not quite. Because the rank is calculated only if visitors who visit certain sites, have Alexa toolbar installed. Otherwise, no matter how much traffic the website gets, if all visitors don’t have Alexa toolbar installed, it won’t be ranked top 100,000.

The best way to promote Paydotcom products

Email marketing. Email marketing, in my opinion, is and will always be the best method to promote informational products. Unlike software programs like antivirus, where users can download, try and finally buy, people who’s going to buy eBooks can’t try or see what’s inside. The best way is by keep following up, give them a picture of what’s inside the product. To grow a list of subscribers, you need an autoresponder service. My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. Then, to send traffic and get lots of subscribers, you need to participate in forums, use PPC ads, or write articles. These are benefits of using email marketing:

• Higher conversion rate. On average, marketers who collect visitor’s email will get 10% conversion rate. Otherwise, conversion rate for normal website is 2% of less.
• Lifetime customers. Collect a visitor’s email, and he will be your customers, possibly for lifetime. The more traffic and subscribers you have, the more money you will make.
• Viral traffic. Some subscribers might forward your follow up messages to their friends, spreading the word, and increase traffic to your website.

Article marketing. To get good ranking with SEO techniques could be a daunting task for beginners. There are lots of things you need to learn, some jargons and more work to do. Article marketing is a good source of traffic and a great alternative to SEO. There are lots of directories where you can post articles for free. My favorite is Ezine Articles. The rules might be strict, but once you are getting used to it, posting articles to this directory would be no problem.

Clickbank or Paydotcom?

Which one should be your choice? Clickbank or Paydotcom? Well, it depends. Personally, I think Paydotcom has more advantages compared to Clickbank.

• No need to wait for months to receive checks. Payments are made instantly after one month via Paypal. Getting paid by check is a problem for non-US affiliates, especially to those who use paid traffic as promotional method.
• If you are selling something, the startup cost is zero. You’ll be charged only when someone buy your products. Totally risk-free. Unlike Clickbank and 2Checkout, where you need to pay $49 initial fee. Could be an issue for some vendors, since they already invest thousand dollars to publish the eBook and need to invest again for traffic and autoresponder.
• No commission theft problems since affiliate can’t buy from his own link. Should an affiliate trying to do so, commission will default to the vendor. This is a good thing for both affiliates and vendors. Vendors, especially those who pay 75% commission won’t lose money to affiliates. While affiliates won’t get their commission stolen. Commission theft is a big problem for Clickbank affiliates these days, especially when comes to make money online products.
  

If there is one problem with Paydotcom, probably due to less marketers using this network. For affiliates, eBook in certain topics is not available here, which means you have no choice but to use Clickbank. For vendors, you will get more affiliates promoting your product, if you use Clickbank compared to Paydotcom.

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• If you are using Clickbank, commission theft become so rampant that sometimes you could hardly gain commission from each traffic.
• When you send promotional email to your list, you don’t want them to see ugly links that prevent them from clicking on it.
• You also don’t want your promotional email to fall into spam folder.
• Lots of article directories like Ezine Articles or Hubpages don’t allow affiliate links to reduce spam articles and maintain their quality in the eye of search engines.

Below are common methods that people always use to cloak or hide affiliate links.

Method 1: By using Tiny URL
To use this method, you can simply log on to http://tinyurl.com , enter your affiliate link in the box and you are ready to go. This method is just to avoid visitors recognize your link each time they hover the mouse. However, they can easily found that you gain commission as a Clickbank affiliate once they click on the link and see the address bar. For example like productwebsite.com/index.php?hop=yourclickbankid.

However, I found that some Clickbank merchants already eliminate this ugly hop issue.

This method is useful to cloak a link when sending promotional emails, or to be inserted into your website.

Method 2: By using iframe
This method requires you to have your own domain and hosting. Your visitors will see yourwebsite.com/product, in the address bar, instead of
productwebsite.com/index.php?hop=yourclickbankid.

To use this method, copy the following code to notepad, and replace the YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE with your real affiliate link. PRODUCT NAME HERE with the product name you are promoting.

<html>
<head><title>PRODUCT NAME HERE.</title></head>
<frameset border="0">
<frame src="YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE" frameborder="no">
<noframes>
Sorry, it appears you are using a Web browser thatdoes not support frames.
</noframes>
</frameset>
</html>

Save the notepad file into a .html file. For example cloak.html. Then, upload this file to your server. When someone click on the link, he will see yourwebsite.com/cloak.html. See example.

However, when people see the page source, (Press Ctrl + U for Firefox), they will able to see your affiliate link. 80% visitors won’t do this anyway, unless if they already know this method.

This method is useful when you are including affiliate link in

• promotional emails.
• your website
• the articles and bio box when you submit articles to Ezine Articles or Hubpages. These websites don’t allow affiliate links, but they allow you to include your website links which is directed to affiliate link.

Method 3: Paid method using Affiliate Cloner
This is by using a paid program called Affiliate Cloner. This program overcome all above problems. However, total price is $49.90, quite high for a program which I don’t think important. If you can’t afford it or want to save your money, then don’t buy. This is actually not really needed.

By using Affiliate Cloner, people who click your links won’t be able to detect whether it is an affiliate link or not. They can’t find your affiliate id anywhere in the page source or the address bar. This is example of link which I hide using Affiliate Cloner.

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What and why Clickbank
There’s quite a reason why Clickbank is so popular, perhaps the first affiliate network for most people when first start. Being an affiliate marketer myself, Clickbank is one of the earliest affiliate network I ever joined. For a few reasons:

• Most new marketers, including me back then start internet business by reading eBooks and at the same time lots of famous eBooks sold by experts like Ewen Chia, Mike Filsaime, Chris X and Andrew Fox are based on affiliate marketing with Clickbank.
• Clickbank is one of the largest, oldest network with over 100,000 affiliates. So many affiliates, so many people talk about it, making Clickbank is known better than other network like RegNow.
• Easy to start and easy to sell. You can register within minutes and start making money.
• The number one payment processor for eBook sellers after Paypal.

How to start selling products at Clickbank

These are a few tips on how to make money as Clickbank affiliates:

• Focus on just one traffic strategy per month. Don’t rush and try lots of them at once.
• Forum marketing does work, but it will generate passive income.
• If you want consistent income, with at least one sale or more per day, you should focus on search engine traffic only.
• Increase the sales rate of your visitors by growing your mailing list. If you don’t collect visitor’s email, 98% of them will leave your website without buying anything. However, if you collect emails, at least 10% of them will convert into customers. Even better, they might buy from you for lifetime.
• Most of Clickbank products are not worth having, to be honest. Which is why, I strongly recommend that you buy the product itself before recommending to others. If you don’t like it, request for refund.
• Clickbank gravity might be a good indicator of quality product. High gravity means lots of unique affiliates able to sell the products in the past eight weeks.

Other factors you might want to consider
Despite what you might read in lots of eBook, Clickbank might not a good way to make money. It depends on the product. I found that lots of quality internet marketing products are not necessarily sold via Clickbank. For example like Seven Figure Code from Mike Filsaime, IM Niche Formula – these products are sold via Paydotcom, a competitor to Clickbank. While membership sites like Niche Profit Classroom and Wealthy Affiliate have their own affiliate program.

These are reasons why Clickbank sucks:

• You need to wait months before enjoying your hard earned cash. Especially if you are living outside USA where the only payment method is check. Pretty tough if you use pay-per-click as promotion strategy.
• Read their affiliate FAQs properly. To receive your check, not only your earnings must reach the minimum $10, but also the sales must be from five different credit cards, with at least one Mastercard and another one is VISA and none of the five are from Paypal.
• Most people know about Clickbank affiliate program. Especially when promoting internet marketing related products. So, instead of buying from your link, they prefer to click their own affiliate link and get rebate from it.
• The refund rate is high, even for product with high gravity. Of course, you might think that selling expensive products, which the price is over $100 could make you lots of money, but think again. What if the buyer ask for refund within 30 days? The higher product price, the more chances customers would ask for refund.

How to counter these problems
These are some suggestions. It won’t eliminate all above problems but at least you can reduce them:

• If you are living in the certain countries, use direct deposit as payment method, instead of check.
• Avoid promoting internet marketing related products, especially if you use pay-per-click. Usually link hijacking would happen if the buyer is also an affiliate. Otherwise he won’t notice.
• Avoid promoting internet marketing products using paid traffic. Especially for product name keywords. Commission theft tends to be higher in this niche compared to health and fitness and hobbies.
• Give the buyer a reason why he must buy from your link. For example, offer them special bonus in exchange for their purchase.
• Cloak your affiliate link. There are lots of ways to do this. The most common is by using iframe techniques. When people click your link, they will see http://yourwebsite.com/recommends instead of http://productname.com/?hop=yournickname.

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Often, affiliates get confuse between gravity and popularity. While these terms seems similar, actually they indicates two different things. Clickbank popularity is about the number of products sold, regardless how many affiliates are selling them. Clickbank gravity indicates how many unique affiliates able to sell that product recently.

• If one affiliate made sale last week, the gravity score equal to 1.
• If one affiliate made 1000 sale last week, the gravity score is still 1, but the popularity might be higher.
• If one affiliate made sale in the last two weeks, the gravity score is 0.9. There’s 0.1 difference in gravity score from one week to another.
• If one affiliate made sale eight weeks ago, the gravity is 0.3.

What does Clickbank gravity means to affiliates

Basically, a product with high gravity means:

• The conversion rate of landing page is high, since lots of affiliates successfully sell it.
• The product is in hot, high demand market at that time, since it based on recent sales and not how many sales made years ago.
• High gravity means that product is the latest, the best product in the market at recently. Take example eBook like The Rich Jerk. This book was very popular years ago, but since then, more and better money making products are created. For example like Commission Blueprint and SEM Business Blueprint. These products comes with step-by-step video tutorials, and focusing just make money from Clickbank only, which means it is better than The Rich Jerk and easier to implement.
• High gravity also means the number of searches made on product name keyword is high recently.

How to use gravity in your affiliate campaign

Get high volume of buyer traffic for Adwords campaign. Find any product with high gravity, then create a blog or landing page with product review inside it. Send traffic to your blog or landing page using Adwords for that product name keywords only. For example, create a review page about Mass Article Control (highest gravity at the time I wrote this) then setup a PPC campaign, send traffic based on keywords like "Mass Article Control review" , " Mass Article Control " , "Buy Mass Article Control".

High conversion rate if you recommend to your list subscribers. Recommend that product to your subscribers and it can easily convert into sales.

Indication of hot niche market. When performing niche research, focus on Clickbank gravity since it is based on recent sales. Which means recently, that market is hot, with high demand.

Indication of competition. Does high gravity always good? Not quite. The higher gravity, means the more affiliate marketers in that market. Which means the competition could be fierce. For example like make money niche, internet marketing.

The right way to find untapped niche market with low competition

A good way to find good, hot market with less competition is by finding any product with gravity score 1 until 30. Not less and not more. If less than 1 probably the market is not hot recently and it’s hard to find customers. Gravity score 1 means there’s still an affiliate made sale last week. If less than 1, it means there was no sale at all last week.

If higher than 30, the competition is high and it is impossible to get ranked in Google for free listings. If you want to get free Google traffic you shouldn’t focus on the highest gravity because high gravity also means high competition. It is hard, perhaps impossible to ranked top ten in Google for a competitive search term. Markets like make money online, internet marketing, weight loss should be avoided if you want free traffic.

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