Clickbank For BeginnersClickbank Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

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.

Click here to download free Clickbank guide. No sign up required.

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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