"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

Choosing the right product has a lot to do with how successful you’ll be as an affiliate marketer.  Some of the most common mistakes I see people making in regards to product selection is choosing a garbage product, one with a bad sales page, or one that hardly anyone will be interested in.

You’re going to search for a good quality product that has had some effective method of promotion.  You want a product that at least some people are aware of, not just a good product that the owner has never bothered to actively promote.

So, look for products that you know are getting some traffic, and buy it to gauge the quality of it.  If the product is crap and you know it, ask for a refund and don’t bother to promote it.  You’ll just get hit up with charge backs when all your customers start asking for refunds.

If you really don’t want to buy new products to test out their quality, promote something (an ebook, health drink, home gym, TV set) that you already own and can become an affiliate for.  You should know the pros and cons like the back of your hand, and you’ll be able to start earning without spending a dime.  Just make sure that the product you’re promoting is a fairly popular one that has a unique selling point compared to other products in it’s category.

If you see Adwords ads for that product, you know that someone’s probably making money from that product and it’s getting traffic.  If you signed up for a mailing list on a website that gets a lot of traffic and the webmaster sent you a promotional email, you know that many people are aware of it.  If you’ve seen it being discussed on forums or discussion boards and the reviews are mostly favorable, you know you’ve got a winner.

The more popular the product is, the more searches you’ll get.  However, I’m sure you’re aware by now that choosing a very highly promoted product means competing with a lot of other people.

Remember that just because we’re internet marketers doesn’t mean that we can’t promote physical items.  Reviewing digital products all the time can get boring.

Physical items that small niches go crazy for can make you a ton of money and are more fun to review (example: hair growth minimizers or radionics machines). However, keep in mind that physical products take longer to review, because you’ll need to wait for it to be shipped to you, and it’s not as quick as just reading through an ebook.  I suggest you save the physical product reviews for when you have a steady flow of income set and want to expand on the type of products you sell.

Also remember that physical products usually give you smaller commission percentages than digital products.  That’s why it’s preferable to promote high ticket items.

You only want to promote products (both physical and digital) that make you over $15 a sale.  Don’t waste your time promoting something pays too little.  Most of the products we’re promoting will be targeting small to medium sized niches, so you won’t get a ton of sales everyday.  You might as well make the sales that you do get worth your while.

There is however, one exception to this rule.  That exception is the ever popular $7 reports.  The reason for this is because the cash is paid immediately into your Paypal account.  Time is money, and $7 reports can fill your Paypal account with cash pretty quickly because lots of people buy it on impulse.

"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

When you boil it all down, Clickbank affiliate marketing is really just a matter of securing traffic with an interest in the product or its niche and directing it via a hoplink to the sales page.

After you’ve selected a product, you’ll need to start driving traffic to that sales page. Let’s look at some of the most common methods Clickbank affiliates use to get the job done.

Search Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic is the holy grail of Internet marketing. Everyone wants it and it’s immensely valuable. Search engine traffic is pre-qualified in the sense that the visitors were intentionally trying to find information related to the product. Additionally, one doesn’t need to pay on a per visitor basis for search engine traffic. It’s cheaper than
advertising.

There are many factors at play with respect to securing search engine traffic and a full discussion of techniques will be covered in my next ebook, due out around the end of July. However, it is worth noting that using search engine traffic as a way to produce affiliate sales will generally involve construction and maintenance of a web site unique from the product sales page. Affiliates attract traffic to their site and then direct it to the product sales page.

Article Marketing

Over the last few years, article marketing has emerged as one of the most popular ways to engage in Clickbank affiliate marketing.

Affiliates write informative articles on the topic area to which the product relates. They then place these articles on free article directory sites. These sites (EzineArticles.com is the best known but actually not my preference when it comes to promoting affiliate products ) allow the author to place a bio or resource box on the bottom of the  article. This resource box may contain links to the product sales page or to a landing page specifically designed to pre-sell the product (EzineArticles doesn’t allow direct links from articles to affiliate sales pages, making landing pages a must).

People find the articles either by browsing the directory site or by conducting searches online. In that sense, article marketing is a variation on search engine traffic strategies.

Article writing does require a certain set of skills and an understanding of effective keyword research to produce optimal results. When it’s done correctly, it can be a powerful way to drive traffic. For more information on the correct methods of writing and promoting articles you could go to the A.I.D.A. ebook on the left side of this page, or Article Cannon which you can also find through the link on the left side of this page.

Social Networking

Social media sites are the new frontier in traffic production. Networking and social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and others provide a unique opportunity to advise others of a product and to direct them to a landing page or the product’s sales page.

If you’re experienced with these options, you’ll know that it’s possible to reach a large and targeted group via social networking sites. Although the jury is still out with respect to this technique’s overall effectiveness via every social media site, there is little doubt that Twitter is a powerful tool in the right hands.

PPC

PPC stands for “pay per click”. PPC advertising involves bidding on keywords to obtain placement of your advertisement alongside organic search results at search engines like Google or on partner websites. Note: PPC is a good way to lose your shirt, if you do not know what you are doing, so I suggest you undertake some sort of training before embarking on any PPC campaigns.

You’ve undoubtedly seen those little “powered by Google” ads on other sites and on the sidebar of the pages when you perform a search. These are paid advertisements and they’re a well-known example of PPC advertising.

With PPC, you pay the program administrator for every click your ads receive. Although it can be very effective, it can also be quite expensive if not managed correctly. Again, PPC isn’t the best option for the raw beginner, but many Clickbank affiliates have found that it’s a great way to produce regular profits.

It’s important to note that most of the better PPC programs (most notably, of course, Google’s Adwords program) won’t allow advertisers to send visitors to an affiliate sales page. If you plan on working with PPC, you will need a landing page or website to which visitors can be sent. Note: Many PPC programs will punish you if your landing page does not contain quality, related content. Never use PPC campaigns to send visitors to a page that contains nothing more than an email capture facility and a direct link to an affiliate product. Google, for one, frowns on email capture pages so be sure to have at least a few paragraphs of related content on any page that you use Google Adwords to provide traffic to.

Email Marketing

One of the most popular sayings in the Internet marketing world is “the money is in the list”. It refers to the fact that one can generate a great deal of traffic and sales by  building a large list of prospects and emailing them with offers. Email marketing has long been a popular means of generating sales and it can work well for Clickbank affiliates.

No Limitations

The traffic generation methods listed above represent only a tiny fraction of available options. You’re limited only by your creativity when it comes to driving traffic. You might be a whiz with videos. Perhaps you’ll use forum posting to drum up interest. You could have a plan to buy non-PPC advertising. There are many options and all of them can, at least hypothetically, work.

Don’t limit yourself to the basics. Feel free to experiment and to pursue all available sources of traffic.

Landing Pages

When someone clicks on your PPC ad, they’ll arrive at your landing page. That landing page will also be the destination for those who read your articles and then click on the resource box link. Landing pages are a key component of successful affiliate marketing and they deserve some serious attention!

The average landing page is a one-page mini-site designed to accomplish a few goals. First, it meets the requirements of various traffic generation options who won’t allow you to send traffic directly to the sales page. Second, it will introduce the visitor to the product, emphasizing the product’s desirability and “pre selling” the visitor. Third, it will give the reader a convenient and unmistakable way to move on to the actual product sales page. Fourth, it can be used to collect email addresses as part of a list-building effort, but remember what I said earlier – capturing an email address must NOT be the primary objective of the landing page, it must contain content related to the product or service that you are promoting.

Most landing pages are relatively brief and focus on either promoting one specific product or multiple products within a niche. This should be the focus of the page and the email capture should be secondary to the actual product information. Theoretically, you could make money as a Clickbank affiliate without using landing pages. You could work with traffic generation techniques that allow the use of your hoplink and you’d never have to create or manage a landing page of your own. However, that would be an uphill struggle. In practical terms, you probably need a sales page. The best article directories require them. The good PPC programs require them.

Plus, there are actual advantages to using landing pages that no one should dismiss.

Obviously, using landing pages increases your flexibility and allows you to access a variety of traffic producing options that are closed to those who rely exclusively on utilizing their hoplink. There are other advantages, too. First, research suggests that a good landing page can actually produce a higher rate of conversion than simply sending visitors to the sales page. Pre-selling works. Second, maintaining a landing page gives you a chance to collect email addresses. You can build your own valuable list by using a smart landing page.

Elements & Tips

If you have a good landing page, it will be that much easier to profit as a Clickbank affiliate. Here are a few recommendations for creating a landing page that will boost your sales numbers.

Structure

Keep it simple. This isn’t the place to show off your fancy design skills. You want to “force” one or two actions. You want to move the visitor to the sales page and you want to capture his or her email address. Good-looking design will help you out, but bells, whistles and complications are unnecessary and usually counter-productive.

Content

There are different ways of handling landing page content. Some people like to push the product relentlessly ( not recommended ). Others prefer to offer more neutral informative material. Some will focus more on capturing email addresses than on the product itself ( be careful where you obtain your traffic for this method ). Others create review sites as a way of encouraging traffic flow to the sales page ( I find this works extremely well ).

No matter what system you use, you do need to keep it relatively brief. Your landing page should not take the form of a sales page. It should contain relevant information in an effort to encourage visitors to click through to the sales page. You also want to make sure you’re using high quality material. Spend some time writing your landing page for maximum effectiveness and readability. If that’s not one of your strengths, find someone else to take care of the job for you.

Collecting Email Addresses

No Internet marketing resource would be complete without using the old saying at least twice. So let’s do it again. The money is in the list. You should use your landing page  to get access to that money!

Why it’s important

If you aren’t collecting email addresses, you’re limiting your relationship with visitors to a one-time meeting. You get them, you send them to the sales page and you hope they buy something. If they do, you’ll make money. If they don’t, you won’t. And you’ll never get a second chance. Even if they do buy, you won’t get another chance to deal with them. If you’re not collecting email addresses, you’re just letting these potential (repeat) customers get away.

If you do get an email address, you can market to them repeatedly. By putting someone on your list, you have access to him or her until he or she opts out. Instead of working hard to drive traffic that you only interact with as they read your landing page, capturing email addresses allows you to forge longer and more profitable relationships.

How to do it

Capturing email addresses isn’t that difficult. It usually involves putting a simple form on your landing page that requests the address and a name from the visitor.

You can convince people to sign up for your list by offering them something of value. This might be a multi-part e-course. It could be a special file or an ebook that the audience may find interesting. Encouraging sign ups by offering a valuable inducement can be quite effective.

Using your list

Building a list is only half of the issue. The other half is using it to your advantage. The details of successful email marketing are going to be covered in more detail in a future post, but this will outline the basics. There are many ways to maintain and market to lists and all Clickbank affiliates should evaluate some of the more popular techniques.

You should know that successfully using your list will require a willingness to generate email messages and the use of an auto responder system. Use this link to gain access to a high quality free autoresponder service.

The Clickbank Publisher

As you’ve seen, there’s a lot of room to make money as a Clickbank affiliate. There’s also a great deal of potential in being a Clickbank publisher. In fact, it’s often possible to make more money as a product owner than as an affiliate – even when you’re doling out hefty commission payments to your affiliates!

The chief advantage of being a publisher is easy to spot. Instead of being left to try to sell your product alone, you can use Clickbank to recruit a massive organization of affiliates. Even after offering commission payments, the sheer volume of potential sales can make Clickbank publishing a winning proposition. My next post will cover the different aspects of becoming a Clickbank Publisher in more detail.

"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

The Clickbank Affiliate

Those using Clickbank invariably fall into one or two categories. There are affiliates and there are publishers.

Affiliates earn commissions when traffic they direct toward the publisher’s product sales page makes a purchase. Publishers list their digital products on Clickbank and pay a commission to those affiliates who generate product sales.

We’re going to be examining the role of an affiliate.

An Overview

Most people who deal with Clickbank started as an affiliate. It’s a great way to earn money online and it’s very easy to get started. Signing up for an account at Clickbank is a fast, simple process and it’s absolutely free. Once you have a membership, you can  start promoting products and earning commissions.

In the most basic of terms, affiliate marketing with Clickbank works like this – You drive web traffic to a publisher’s sales page. When people purchase the product to which you directed them, you’ll receive a commission payment. You are credited for a commission by sending traffic to a specialized version of the sales page, known in Clickbank parlance as a hoplink. Your hoplink is unique to your account, guaranteeing that you’ll receive all payments due to you.

Advantages

There are some definite advantages to playing the affiliate role on Clickbank. You don’t need to worry about product creation, customer service, product delivery or the creation of a sales page. The only thing you need to do to make money is an affiliate is to direct web traffic to the publisher’s sales page.

You can make a great deal of money this way. While some products offer relatively small commissions (under $10), others may pay out more than $100 per sale. If you find a converting product and are able to send a healthy flow of traffic to the sales page, you can post significant earnings. Many Clickbank affiliates make a full-time living with their efforts and some may earn well into six figures per year.

Product Selection

The first step in Clickbank affiliate marketing is product selection. You need to decide which product(s) to promote. Let’s look at some factors you should consider when making that important decision.

Interests

Many marketers argue that the best products to promote are those that you find personally interesting. If you have a passion for the product and knowledge of the subject area, you might find it easier to develop persuasive and effective promotions.

Others will argue that a love for the product or topic area isn’t nearly as important as other more business-oriented factors (many of which we’ll cover here).

Obviously, everyone would agree that the perfect product would be one that had all of the marketing characteristics necessary for success and that held great personal appeal.

Research

Researching for a product to promote happens on two different levels. You’ll want to look at the product specifications and details available via Clickbank. You’ll also want to do some wider market research.

You want to choose a product that will really sell. That means finding a product that fits in nicely with the old marketing maxim of “find out what they need and then supply it to them”. You’ll want to investigate what people really want and to get an idea as to whether or not the product will fill that desire.

Factors to Consider

Let’s look at a few of the product selection factors available for consideration within the Clickbank marketplace (which is where you’ll find the various products available for affiliates to promote).

Gravity

Gravity is a metric unique to Clickbank. It’s a statistic that is supposed to provide Clickbank users with an idea of a product’s sales and popularity. The gravity number doesn’t tell you how many copies are sold or how many affiliates are selling it. Instead, it merges those two factors using a proprietary algorithm to provide an idea of how well the product is performing.

If you find products with very low gravity numbers (gravity can range from zero to triple digits), that may be an indication that selling the product will be an uphill struggle. That indicates that few people are successfully marketing the product.

A higher gravity number shows that there may be potential for the product. While there’s no consensus as to what constitutes a “winning” gravity score, various experts have posited that gravity greater than ten provides at least some indication that the product could be successfully promoted.

Extremely high gravity is proof that a product is hot and is selling well. That’s great news if you’re looking for something people really want, but there is a downside. High gravity means more competition. It’s generally evidence that a high number of affiliates are promoting the product already.

Some people will tell you to stay away from the high-competition products and niches. Others will argue that those are the perfect products upon which to cut your Clickbank teeth because it proves the existence of high demand. Almost everyone, however, agrees that a mid-range gravity number (let’s say 30, for example) evidences a great deal of potential without too much head-to-head competition for sales.

Refunds

Refunds can be a real problem for Clickbank affiliates. Obviously, you don’t receive payment when orders are cancelled and Clickbank requires publishers to offer a generous money back guarantee policy. You want to avoid dealing with products that suffer from frequent refunds.

Clickbank won’t actually tell you what the refund rate for a given product is. The marketplace portion of the site does, however, provide the statistical information you’ll need to calculate cancellation rates.

Information about calculating refunds is readily available online (just Google “Clickbank refund calculator” and you’ll find tools that you can use to uncover this information).

Commissions

You’re going to be an affiliate marketer for one reason – money. You’ll make money in the form of a commission payment every time you send a visitor to the product sales page who decides to purchase the product. It’s obvious that you must consider commissions when determining which products to promote.

There are two different factors to consider here. First, you’ll want to analyze the payout per sale. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to work at promoting a product that won’t pay your very much, if anything relative to your efforts. Second, you’ll want to consider the percentage of the total sale price offered as a commission payment. Clickbank is recognized as having some of the most generous commission payments available and it isn’t uncommon to find publishers who are willing to offer you 50% or more of the total purchase price.

Product

The product itself, of course, is another consideration. You don’t want to work to promote a product that seems silly, unnecessary or ill conceived. Unfortunately, there’s no mechanism available via Clickbank to actually review the product. That leaves you with a few different options. You can base your decision on the sales page (you can see that) or reviews of the products available elsewhere online.

You may also purchase a copy of the product so that you may review it yourself. Others have had success in asking the publisher for a copy of the product prior to beginning promotion. Your success with that effort will vary greatly based on the publishers involved and the niche in which the product competes.

You can also, if you are short of funds, contact the vendor and request a review copy of their product. With a convincing email approach, you will be successful in the majority of cases and you can then do an honest and fair appraisal of the product. If the product is not up to scratch, simply don’t promote it – NEVER write a bad review of a product that was sent to free of charge.

Sales page

The product’s sales page is going to be a key factor in your success as an affiliate. You’re going to be sending hard-earned traffic to that page, so you want to make sure that it has the potential to convert visitors into buyers. Review the sales page carefully and assess its quality.

If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of effective copywriting, do some research on the topic. Familiarize yourself with proven sales copy and compare the product sales page with those that have produced great results in the past. The A.I.D.A. principal is a proven method of writing good copy and also of evaluating a websites sales copy. The book is free and the download link is on the left side of this page.

Publisher Support

Some publishers offer nothing more than a sales page and a commission when sales are made. And in some cases, that’s enough. Other publishers go the extra mile. They provide affiliates with helpful resources to assist them in driving traffic and in pre-selling the product.

Check for affiliate resources when choosing among products. All other things being close to equal, the presence of tools like keyword lists, sample ads, free content and product graphics can help you to find the best product to promote and inevitably make the job of product promotion much easier.

"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

Affiliate marketing is nothing new on the internet. However, it sure is something that many people go after. When you are looking to start your own website or blog and add some affiliate marketing links to it, there are some things that you should know.

Affiliate marketing is not for everyone. It is certainly not for anyone that is looking to make money fast. You have to have two things in order to be successful with affiliate marketing, and those two things are patience, and determination. When you put those two together, there is no stopping you or what you can achieve with your affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate marketing can be done many ways, through email, newsletters, websites, classifieds, social networking or blogs, just to name a few. By using any of these things, you can be successful if you are marketing the right products to the right audience. Finding your readership, and catching them with good content is what it is all about. To do so, you need to know where they go and what they look for.

Try starting with message boards to begin with. However, use some patience and don’t come off as the newbie that knows it all. Take some time and generate interest, both in yourself and in what you are promoting. Add the link to your website or blog in your signature line at the message boards you are frequenting, and most importantly, make sure that the message boards are relevant to your market. If you have a website that pertains to gardening, you will not want to be visiting a message board that is all about pregnancy. It is really quite simple to understand how these two things must be relevant to get results.

So, once you have found a busy message board that will allow you to include a link to your website in the signature of your posts, you are in business. Just start off by posting and chatting, and when someone asks a question that you know something about, answer it. This will peak their interest and before you know it, they will be clicking on the link in your signature and checking out your site. While doing this can be quite time consuming, it will pay off eventually. Gain the other members trust, and you cannot go wrong. Always check the rules of the message boards you deal with, they all vary on the do’s and don’ts, don’t take anything for granted.

Another thing that you could do to get the most out of affiliate marketing is write some articles. Writing articles on the market that you are promoting and then submitting them to article directories or ezines is a great way to get the most from your affiliate links and programs that you are a part of. Be sure that you include a link in the bio box of your articles that leads the readers back to your website. Doing so will get your site more traffic, and will pay off in the end.

However, you will not want to submit the same articles that you have on your site to these directories. You will want different variations of the articles to be used in the directories. This is because when you submit these articles to the directories, you are going to see that by checking your back links, there are other webmasters using your articles. This is great because they will, in return, give you a back link to your site. However, they are depending on you to have a different article on your site than the one that you are submitting.

These are only 2 of the many forms of promotion that can be used in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is something that takes work. You can not just set up your site and let it go. You have to work on it consistently to see a good amount of revenue come from it. You need to make sure that you are doing everything that you can to get it seen. Use the best free tools that there are available to you, and pay any upgrades available for the ones that really work.

To learn how to use your blog to promote affiliate products, join my free newsletter. You will receive a newsletter from my 24 part blog marketing ecourse every second day. Sign up is quick and easy and part 1 of the course will be sent to you immediately after confirming your subscription.