clickbank – Micro Business Specialist

How To Decide Which Clickbank Product to Promote.

As affiliate marketers we often rely on Clickbank for inventory to sell. It offers products to sell in a lot of different niches. Quite a few in many of the more lucrative fields. Some pay to promote, others may not perform.

Deciding is a complex mix of knowing your competition, the quality of the site, its products, gravity, and trend lines, etc. Some pay more, some have residuals. We can analyze all the above or rely on pure guess work.

Now in the past, I looked and ultimately kind of grabbed a product and ran with it, if only to get the experience.

But as you get more systematic and start following a plan of consistent action for massive results, you want to focus on the best products, which when coupled with your best efforts yields maximum profit.

But you can’t be wasting your time researching the sales page of junky Clickbank products that won’t sell. Your time is too valuable. Instead spend your time focused on the best options and use the ones that best fit your particular niche and approach. Your results will be better, for the same amount of effort.

There is an easy way to discover the best performers.

Brad Callen introduced a free plug in for Firefox, that highlights the best performers from among all the products listed on Clickbank.

It’s easy to install. I have, and it works great.

The plug in color codes each product offering on Clickbank, and reports critical information on its marketability. Those colored green, met a set of standards for marketability that is proprietary to the product. The red ones didn’t and are to be avoided.

You will succeed faster by focusing on those products with stronger prospects.

The one rub is that it’s kind of a black box. We don’t really know the full contents of the equation they use to decide who gets green and red and why. But we can get a pretty good idea by listening to their introductory video. Enough to make a decision on.

http://askearlabout.com/CBSurge.php

Do you think it makes sense to try it for a while? Would it help you find better products to promote?

The basic version is free so you can test drive it for years if you want.

Once it’s working for you, upgrade to the paid version, but no need to do that now. Unless you want to.., of course.

Whether you are working facebook, twitter, blogs, email marketing, moble or more, Clickbank is a huge resource – no matter what your niches.

Your objective is to promote the cream of the crop, not the poor performers.

This free tool will eliminate 80% of the clutter, so you can focus on the 20% of solid offers that will pay you for your efforts.

http://askearlabout.com/CBSurge.php

[tags]clickbank, CBSurge, firefox, plugins, firefox plugins, affiliate marketing, niche marketing, twitter, blogs, email marketing, [/tags]

Free Gift for Clickbank Users

If you are doing affiliate marketing and use clickbank as one of your primary resources for product to sell, you will want to grab this free plug in created by Brad Callen for Firefox users.

http://askearlabout.com/CBSurge.php

One of the most important steps in promoting an affiliate product is in picking just which products you want to promote. This new FREE tool will let you see a lot more information than you can get from Clickbank itself.

Most people I know, rely on gravity scores to make their decisions. While gravity is a useful aid, it can be very misleading, and most importantly, its an incomplete means of judging.

If you are going to the trouble of setting up a full fledged marketing campaign you want to start off with a quality product with some upside. This new firefox plugin will help you do that.

[tags]clickbank, CBSurge, firefox, plugins, firefox plugins, [/tags]

Mass Money Makers Hits Top of Clickbank Gravity

Today Matt Bacak and Adam Sultanic announced that they had set a new record on Click Bank for Gravity. Gravity is an often misunderstood internal indicator that I have heard explained in multiple different ways, but is essentially a measure of how many affiliates are making money with a product in the past time period. A high gravity suggests a high level of active market success.

They have done a superb job of lining up tons of top marketers and middling ones like myself to promote their launch. I, for example, got about 10 snail mail communications from them in addition to multiple online pitches.

One attractive part of the deal, is the low price just $37 (although that will rise to $47 tomorrow). Low price means a lot more people will take advantage of the offer which means more sales.

Another attractive part is that both Matt and Adam are in the trenches marketers. They actually do this stuff themselves and do it very well. They are speaking from strength and practical knowledge. What sometimes hurts “in the know” people though is that they sometimes forget that they learned a lot of things step by step, and will on occassion assume people know stuff they don’t.

That is the strong point of the Mass Money Maker product, and surprisingly one of the points that rubbed me wrong. They do an excellent job of explaining the basics, in detail. First in theory and then by showing a step by step process to do what they are teaching. As an experienced marketer myself, I found it frustratingly detailed. Their first video is an hour long and didn’t teach me anything new. But if you are newer to the process, it may well give you an essential theoretical underpinning. So while I was bored, you may well have found it critical. They then follow with a two hour phase 2 video which also is largely theory. But the time it was done I was chomping at the bit to get going.

Finally, they though they got into some meat. Now again I picked up most of this already in the past from Adam via his Niche Profits Classroom program he does with Adam Short. But it does belong here and is critical element to understanding how to target keywords that you can rank for on Google. And that tidbit is well worth the price of the course by itself.

Now another thing, I didn’t like was their use of Market Samurai in their video. They have created a new software designed to perform all the tasks they describe in the program, and include it as part of the program, but as it wasn’t fully ready when they recorded the video portion they use Market Samurai as an alternative. Now I bought and use market samurai myself, and highly recommend it, I thought it would have made sense to do the videos with their software. It’s clear they had a scheduling problem and this was their solution.

While it may seem as though I am griping a bit about the product, the truth is that they have done a good job of creating a set of resources and a how to set of videos that can take a newbie to intermediate marketer through all the steps needed to become an effective affiliate marketer. Way too many people, myself included start out wrong. Some of us are pig headed and refuse to give up and eventually learn how to do it. Most people just give up. Those who grab this course and software and pay attention to the theory that I hated, and take action following their tips will do well, very well in fact.

Now they do push their favorite hosting service and autoresponder. In my opinion, you don’t need to use their recommended services, I don’t but that said, the ones they recommend are fine. You gotta use someone. Beyond these basics that everyone needs and has to pay for, most of what they recommend are free services, and that is another strength of what they teach.

Most people looking to make money online are doing so because they currently need more money, not more ways of spending money. The approach they teach is certainly one of the most economical approaches an their asking price for this training and software is a true bargain.

I’d appreciate it if you would use my link for Mass Money Makers

[tags]mass money makers, market samurai, clickbank, affiliate marketing, Matt Bacak, Adam Sultanic[/tags]

Practically Perfect Products To Promote

A week or two ago, I wrote a blog post I called a Provocative Suggestion in which I promoted a new system called Affiliate Silver Bullet. In addition to my blog post, I have been emailing people who have opted in to one or another of my auto responder lists. Actually, I have the message queued up as one of my follow-up messages.

Today I got a message from one of my readers who wondered if it would be effective for new people who don’t have a large list to mail to. A fair question.

And my answer was that it certainly is easier to promote things when you have a large list, but that you can’t let that get in the way of identifying a product or series of products to promote while you are building that list.

One of the benefits of the Affiliate Silver Bullet is that they have already chosen quality products for you to promote. That’s a bit more important than you might realize at first. The product they have included are proven winners, with quality you can be proud to present to your list, and with sales material that actually converts.

But what do you do, if you don’t already have a sizable list? You start building one.

The primary advantage of Affiliate Silver Bullet that makes it so much more desirable than its predecessor “Clickbank Pirate” is that you can send people to your own auto-responder list.

I have a separate list in my Aweber account for each of the five Affiliate Silver Bullets I have set up so far.

That means you can build your list by promoting the products in Affiliate Silver Bullet. Each bullet has a freebie associated with it that you can promote on safe lists, or by any other means. When people opt in for the freebie they join your list.

Once they are on your list, you need to send them emails. Writing quality follow-up emails is a skill in it’s own right. This is also handled by Affiliate Silver Bullet. With each bullet you get a series of professionally written emails that will drip on your new list members until they buy, automatically.

Combined that means you have a selection of quality products, a series of valuable giveaways to offer to prospective members to get them to opt into your list and a series of professional emails to follow-up with them. All of which you can set up each week in just a few minutes.

Your job is then to concentrate on how you will drive traffic to the free offers. Now granted if you already have a large list, it will only take a few emails to promote the individual offers. So yes, someone with a large list will have an initial advantage.

But for those without a large list, you now have all the back end pieces you need to allow you to focus on learning how to and then driving traffic to the free offers.

It does take traffic to be successful. There are many ways to drive traffic. Article marketing is just one that I use. I am writing articles relevant to each of the Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Not about the products, and not pitching them but about the topic. If the silver bullet is on bloging, I write an article about blogging and put one of the two links in my resource box to the freebie for that Silver Bullet product.

These articles will be referring prospects within days of being accepted by the directories and will send traffic for months and years to come.

I’ve also set up some simple blogger blogs, often using the same content as my articles with links to the freebie. Here I’ve found that the Blogger SEO Annihilator script I got from the first month of Jeff Dedrick’s Automated Traffic was a great value. It helps get them optimized for search engine results.

I’ve then built on them with Squidoo lens and Hub pages to send high authority back links to the blogger posts. I get some traffic from the Squidoo lens and hub pages, but more importantly raise the blogger posts to the top of the search engines for my keyword terms.

This combination is just the start, but a powerful start, to driving a ton of free traffic to these Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Add to that any safe list, traffic exchange or other traffic you can generate and you have a system that will send you traffic and ultimately revenues for years to come.

Don’t expect miraculous overnight riches with this approach. But by concentrating on building the traffic generation aspect and linking it together using multiple tools, you can develop a cash machine that send you clickbank checks on a weekly basis.

The bottom line from my point of view is this. You need a quality product to promote, with sales materials that sell. You need a freebie to get people to opt into your list, you need quality follow-up email messages to get the whole thing to convert into dollars for you. You could do it all yourself, or you could let Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. If you let Affiliate Silver Bullet solve your product, freebie and follow-up needs, you can focus your attention on the key skill you need to learn to be successful online and that is traffic generation.

That’s why I think Affiliate Silver Bullet is an appropriate starting place for may new and intermediate level affiliate marketers.

[tags]affiliate silver bullet, aweber, squidoo, hub pages, clickbank, [/tags]

Better Than ClickBank & PayDotCom?

If you sell digital products online you are no doubt aware of the two most popular affiliate networks, ClickBank and PayDotCom.

While these are great and I use and recommend both of them, I came across a brand new service today that really caught my attention.

It’s called PaySpree and the reason it caught my attention is that ALL its members get paid for their sales instantly by PayPal. I like quick payments.

Even affiliates get paid for their referred sales instantly by PayPal.

I expect it to become quite a hit as the lure of ‘instant commissions’ played a big part in the massive success of products such as RapidActionProfits and the 7DollarSecrets script.

As soon as you become a member you can start promoting any product in the marketplace, and you can add your own products so affiliates can promote them for you. All commission payments are handled automatically by PaySpree. I like that too. It’s one of my minor complaints about paydotcom. There you need to manually make payments to your affiliates and on occassion, I have had to remind others to pay me.

I’ve just signed up and had a look around the site and it seems pretty simple and non cluttered, check it out at the link below and let me know what you think:

http://cli.gs/bX8g4L

[tags]PaySpree, ClickBank, Paydotcom, affiliate networks, Instant commissions[/tags]

Creative Use of Clickbank as a Free Marketing Intelligence Tool

Clickbank is the largest affiliate network for information products. As such it is an ideal arena to research your competition and spy on existing products for virtually any specific niches that you want to pursue.

If there isn’t already at least one or more products in you niche, it may well mean that your niche is not economically viable.

If you are still searching for the right niche, you can browse through the category section to find some markets, which could potentially interest you.

With the Clickbank tool, you can identify the existing products in the market and see how many players are in the market. You can also check out their offers and see what price points they are hitting. You can evaluate their sales pages, and buy their products to determine whether or not there are any holes in the market they are missing.

Once you signed up for and logged into Clickbank you want to go the the Marketplace tab.

In the market place, you can do your research by going through the categories listing. There are a total of 9 broad categories. Next step is to then select the sub-categories and click Go.

Clickbank will then generate search results of the products under your selected category listing.

Other ways to use the Clickbank tool is to make use of the keywords search bar or sort your search by product type, popularity and languages as well.

For this demonstration, we ran through the search term, ‘Muscle gaining’.

You can see from this search, there are a high number of products that is under the niche, ‘Muscle gaining’. You may want to play around with a variety of keywords to get a full selection of products in your niche.

At the bottom of each result, there are some useful statistics, which provide a quick insight into what the merchant is offering. So in this case, for ‘No Nonsense Muscle Building’, the product vendor pays their affiliate an average of $62.30 per sale with a possible future payout of an additional $40.97 and offers a percentage sale payout of 57%. For the ‘grav’ column, this product is at 109.08.

This gravity simply indicates the number of affiliates that has made a sale over the past 8 weeks. The higher the gravity number, the more affiliates have successfully marketed this product, which also implies that this niche is profitable!

So from here, you can gather some great information to see what are the existing products that these merchants have. You may even click on ‘view pitch page’ to spy on the merchant’s sales page to see exactly what they’re doing! If they are profiting already, there is no need to re invent the wheel.

Learn from your competitors. This will save you a lot of time and research.

Instant Relief: How to Make Money with Clickbank.

Have you tried to make money with Clickbank?

I have and while I have had some success, my record has been spotty at best.

Yes, I’ve bought a ton of ebooks on how to do it. And many of them are actually pretty accurate. It just takes a ton of work, and a leap of faith that the product you are going to push is worth all the work required.

Work? What Work?

Well, to do Affiliate marketing right you need to create your own pre-sell page rather than sending people directly to the offer. Now I’ve tried the other way, and have had some success with direct linking. But mostly my campaigns either failed, or just barely broke even.

No it turns out you get better results when you do a presell. You want to capture the prospect’s name and followup with an email campaign.

But it takes a lot of time and effort to do this. And that’s true even when you know what you are doing. It is almost an insurmountable obstacle for many new people who haven’t yet learned how to do their own sites yet.

There is a lot to learn, from taking charge of your own web site, learning how to make basic pages, set up an auto-responder and then write copy on the page and the follow-up messages.

Now I believe you should learn how to do these things. But it takes time. I have some resources listed elsewhere on this page that I recommend to those of you just learning your way.

But if you are interested in making money with clickbank in the meanwhile, until now you were largely out of luck. Until yesterday…

Yesterday, Clickbank Pirate opened its doors to an enthusiastic rush of new members. I was one of them.

You see they have set up an affordable membership plan where people from the rawest newbie to the most advanced marketed can benefit. All the work is done in the form of initial videos, free reports to gather opt ins, and professionally done follow-up.

The new marketer will still need to drive traffic which is a critical task not to be ignored. Thankfully they have a powerful “how to” traffic module inside to teach newbies how to do just that.

The best part is that they offer a 60 day guarantee, so you really can try the system out and it will either work for you or it won’t.

If you don’t make what you’ve invested after 59 days, just ask for a refund. But I bet that if you give it half a try you will find yourself in clover and happy to stay on board.

This is one of the neatest things I’ve seen online. If you haven’t grabbed your membership yet, do so now. Just click on the banner below and sign up.