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Product Creation

In order to be a publisher, you need a high quality, marketable product. So, let’s start our examination of the role of a Clickbank publisher from the beginning – product creation.

Basics

Clickbank deals in the sale of digital products. That means you can’t effectively harness the site’s power to sell physical goods. If you’ve come up with a better mousetrap, you can sell the plans as a digital download with Clickbank. You can’t, however, sell the actual physical product through the Clickbank marketplace, although I have heard talk of this changing in the future.

The nature of Clickbank products varies considerably. They cover virtually every niche available and come in all sorts of lengths and structures. All of the successful products, however, ascribe to the simple principles noted earlier in this text. Marketing is about finding a need in the marketplace and providing a product to meet that need. In this case, that means finding information shortfalls and creating a digital product to supply that desired information.

Market Research

Market research is a key component to product development. You need to know what people really want and need. You also need to ascertain whether or not people will then be willing to pay to have that desire met (and, if so, how much they’ll be willing to pay).

Clickbank publishers, sometimes referred to as vendors, will take great pains to find needs within marketplace niches. That can involve an examination of other products, monitoring the habits and comments of people within a given niche, and more.

Product Creation

Once a would-be publisher finds an opportunity, it’s time to actually create a product. Clickbank products are downloadable, digital affairs. They may consist of text, images and/or videos.

Project creation involves gathering the information necessary to produce the final product and assembling it to create an attractive offer for those who might be interested in obtaining the final product.

That could involve writing a lengthy ebook, creating tutorial videos or just about anything else you can imagine. Take a look at the Clickbank marketplace and you’ll soon realize that Clickbank projects come in a wide variety of “shapes and sizes”.

There are a few things a publisher should keep in mind when engaged in product creation. There should be a constant reflection upon quality and a commitment to providing something that the target audience will find both valuable and irresistible!

Outsourcing

Some people are great at generating ideas and conducting research but aren’t necessarily talented at putting all of that together in the form of a final project. That doesn’t rule them out as potential Clickbank publishers, though. Many publishers outsource much, if not all, of the product creation process. They rely on talented freelancers and experts-for-hire. This is a great shortcut to product creation and can often result in a superior product than what might result from the efforts of the publisher/marketer alone.

Outsourcing does come with its share of complications, of course. One must clearly communicate a product vision to the freelancer. It’s important to develop project management skills to make sure everything is done correctly and in a timely fashion. It’s good to learn how to get the best work from the best people at an affordable price.

There’s a learning curve associated with outsourcing, but it’s a curve worth scaling. If you can master outsourcing, you can translate a series of good ideas into a collection of impressive and imminently sellable products.

Pricing

Once you have a product, you need to determine its price. There is a variety of factors at play when making that determination. Publishers need to look at the expense incurred during product creation. They need to accurately assess the relative value of the completed product. They need to apply and understanding of the target audience. They need to investigate the prices of any competing products within the same niche.

Once a price is determined, it’s important to remember that it isn’t carved in stone. A publisher may want to test the product at a variety of price points in order to find the option that will provide maximum profitability.

Sales Page

Publishers need a sales page. This is where prospective buyers will be sent and it’s designed specifically to persuade visitors to purchase the product.

Writing effective copy is an art form that defies simple explanation. One should either  outsource the sales page authoring process or prepare himself or herself to perform the task by researching proven copywriting techniques.

Clickbank has a series of specific requirements for all sales materials. Publishers must abide by the site’s terms of service in order to qualify the project for inclusion in the Clickbank marketplace.

Required Web Presence

If you’re going to be a publisher, you’re going to need a web presence. You’ll need a place to host your sales page, and a place to store the product online so that others may download it after purchase. You’ll also need a “thank you” page to which buyers will be directed after making their purchase.

These aren’t just practical requirements. They’re also mandated by Clickbank rules. All publishers should carefully read all Clickbank publisher requirements to be certain that they have all necessary elements in place and correctly structured.

Submitting to Clickbank

When you have everything put together, it’s time to submit your product to Clickbank. That involves providing all necessary information to the site and paying a nominal fee for inclusion. In order to be accepted, you will first need a Clickbank Publisher account. This is different to your Clickbank affiliate account, so be sure to go through the process and get yourself approved as a Publisher.

Then you can present your product for inclusion in the Clickbank Marketplace. Clickbank will evaluate the materials and will either advise the publisher of acceptance or explain what adjustments are necessary to get the product into the marketplace.

Getting your product into the marketplace is an exciting moment, but that milestone is really just the beginning for those who want to attract an army of affiliates who’ll be thrilled to promote the final product.

Attracting Affiliates

The ability to attract multiple affiliates is the big benefit of selling through Clickbank. That makes taking efforts to attract affiliates a critical aspect of the publisher’s role.

Setting a Commission

Affiliates aren’t involved with Clickbank out of kindness. They want to make money. One of the first things they look at is the commission offered per sale of a product. Affiliates look at a few things with respect to commissions. There’s the question of the actual sales price and the percentage of that price the affiliate will receive.

Many online affiliate networks offer relatively low commissions. That’s not the case with Clickbank, which is known for its high commission rates. If you set your commission  percentage (and amount) too low, it will be hard to attract affiliates. Obviously, you don’t want to give away so much that you won’t be able to have a profitable experience. At the same time, you will need to put together an attractive package. It can be a real balancing act.

Tools & Resources for Affiliates

Some publishers can succeed purely based on product quality and marketability. Others will find that the best way to get ahead with affiliates is by offering them as much as they can to make the process of selling the product easier.

Publishers can provide affiliates with landing page templates, graphics, advertisements, free content, keywords lists and just about anything else that might be helpful when marketing the product. Creating an “affiliate area” that’s chock-full of valuable tools and resources can be a great way to inspire affiliates to back a product. For an example of a good affiliate page, take a look at the promotional tools for one of my products that is listed on Clickbank. ( This page was created using some simple software and can also include articles, emails, PPC campaigns, keywords, and more. Contact me if you would like a copy of this software. )

Contacting Affiliates

Part of the aforementioned affiliate area should involve getting an email address from your affiliates. This will give you, the publisher, an easy way to contact affiliates whenever necessary.

You might want to make contact to advise them of special sales pricing, new tools, inspirational messages, additional content or changes to your commission structure.

Affiliate Outreach

Publishers don’t need to rely purely on what they’re doing on Clickbank to attract affiliates. They can also spread the word about their product and their desire to find affiliates at other websites frequented by Internet marketers.

Sharing a “sales pitch” for the promotion of your project with potential affiliates is a great way to inspire participation. If you have an email list in the IM niche or can access one inexpensively (buying advertising), you can spread the word about your product and why affiliates should be interested in promoting it. Get the word out in any way you can! Every affiliate you find could end up putting a great deal of money in your pocket.

Making Your Own Sales

Although attracting affiliates is at the heart of why publishers use Clickbank, having a product listed on the site doesn’t serve as an impediment to making one’s own sales. Don’t stop promoting your product to its niche just because affiliates are doing the same thing! There’s room for all of you and every sale counts. All of the methods for driving traffic discussed in the affiliate portion of the previous post still apply (with the exception of the fact that you, as the product owner, will be able to send traffic directly to your sales page).

Conclusion

Hopefully the information in this and the previous 2 posts has provided you with some usable insight regarding Clickbank and some ideas about how you can use this massive affiliate site to your advantage. In order to get the most out of Clickbank, however, you’ll need an understanding of some details. I strongly advise anyone with an interest in using Clickbank to carefully review the sites terms of service, rules and frequently asked question area. You’ll find a wealth of information about Clickbank at Clickbank!

Clickbank isn’t the only affiliate network out there, but it’s one of the most popular. The barrier to entry is low, commissions are high and the site has an established reputation for making its payments. Other options include ClixGalore and Rapbank, both of which I use for affiliate promotions.

If you’re interested in affiliate marketing or in selling as many copies of your own product as possible, you owe it to yourself to take a long and serious look at Clickbank. It’s been a profitable endeavor for many in the Internet marketing field and might be perfect for you, too.

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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.

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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.

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Clickbank is, without a doubt, the cats whiskers when it comes to finding an affiliate product to promote. I have used several companies in the past, and I am trying out a new one at the moment ( RapBank ), but Clickbank is head and shoulders above the rest. RapBank does seem to have 1 major advantage and a couple of minor downsides. Firstly the major advantage – it pays directly into your Paypal account, no more waiting for those fortnightly checks. The downsides are:-

1:- The number of products. As this company is only a few months old it has only about 620 products listed.

2:- The “gravity” on Clickbank has been replaced by an “index” on Rapbank, but it doesn’t seem to work exactly the same. For example, on Clickbank you would rarely promote a product with a gravity over 80, even though some gravities I have seen are up around 350. On Rapbank, however, the index listings go up over 3500! I am still trying to decipher exactly where the cut-off point is but I figure if I stay in the 250 to 300 range I should be alright.

Anyway, let’s just cover Clickbank for now, you can decide on your own whether the instant commissions at Rapbank are worth chasing. To find a product, simply go to Clickbank and search through their Marketplace. You don’t even need to be signed up to search through the products, but keep in mind that these are all digital products. For physical products, and the increased sales commissions that go with them, you will need to sign up with another company – perhaps “ClixGalore”. Bear in mind that physical products are generally “Country Specific”, which means that you are unlikely to get approval to promote a product that is manufactured and sold outside your country. Unlike Clickbank, ClixGalore does not have automatic approval for all products, many product owners will review your site and ClixGalore profile before approving or rejecting your request. Only after approval will you be sent the banner codes, etc.

Before you sign up for an account with Clickbank, I would like to share a few things with you. If you have already signed up, then I hope you got this right.

Clickbank Affiliate Name.

I have, in the past, seen such affiliate names as “underpants”, “900poundgorilla” and “fatbottomgirl”. While these are all very humorous, they fail to convey the image of a serious marketer. They are also seriously eye-catching, which is actually NOT a good thing.

You see, regardless of how much effort you put into disguising your links, these affiliate names will invariably show up at some stage of the process of sending the potential customer to the required sales page. These affiliate names will usually show up in the destination bar at the bottom of your browser window when you hover over an uncloaked affiliate link. They will sometimes show up in the address bar, if the link is cloaked, after redirecting to the sales page.

I suggest you use an affiliate name that consists mainly of numbers:-

http://58843d.killerpreseller.hop.clickbank.net

looks far better than:-

http://fatbottomgirl.killerpreseller.hop.clickbank.net

Having said that, you will ideally want to disguise your affiliate links even better than this. This leads me to my next point – cloaking versus redirecting. Cloaking your links will stop 90% of commission thieves. Redirecting will stop 99% of them.

I used an excellent free resource called Offto.net for the first 2 years of my affiliate marketing. This service allows cloaking, tracking and free advertising to its other members, and when I say it is a free resource, I mean it is totally free. Honestly, the link cloaking is brilliant and it also cloaks the affiliate page that you send your customers to. The link tracking is provided only to the operator who creates the cloaked link via a 4 digit security code. The advertising is good without being great, due to the fact that you are only advertising to other Offto.net members. The one downside to this service is that every now and again some clown will spam an Offto.net link to all and sundry. They will soon be caught out and removed from the service but, by then, the damage is already done. I had a set of articles suddenly removed from a directory late last year because the link in the resource box was an Offto.net link and some idiot had spammed all the members with a link from the same service.

While I still use this service, I have found that redirect links are far more beneficial.

Redirect links are not difficult and they give your potential customers the impression that they are not leaving your site. This will boost their impression of you and the product/service you are promoting. The only downside to redirect links is that you need a website. You do not need a website for each redirect link, you can use the one site for them all, but you need to be able to create a folder on that website so free blogs such as WordPress and Blogger will not do. They work like this:-

Create a folder inside your website and give it the title of whatever product or service you will be redirecting to. Then open up Notepad and add this single line of code:-

<?php header( ‘Location: http://AFFILIATENAME.PRODUCTNAME.hop.clickbank.net’ ) ; ?>

Change the AFFILIATENAME portion to your actual Clickbank affiliate name and the PRODUCTNAME to reflect the product/service you are promoting. Obviously, if you are promoting a product or service that is not on Clickbank then you would need to replace the whole link ( http://AFFILIATENAME.PRODUCTNAME.hop.clickbank.net ). Once you have changed all your respective codes, save it as index.php and upload it to the folder you created earlier. Now you simply link your sales text to:-

http://www.YOURWEBSITE.COM/FOLDERYOUCREATED/

By having the / on the end of the link, you instruct your visitors operating system that it is a folder, therefore it will automatically open an index file inside that folder and follow the instructions therein. In this case it is to forward the operator to the sales page via the script you just created. The beauty of the redirect script is that it is almost 100% safe from hackers and low-lifes who wish to steal your commissions. At no point in the redirect process will your original affiliate code be displayed, so it therefore cannot be tampered with. It will not display your affiliate code in the address bar after arriving at the sales page either, so your potential customer will be none the wiser.

Now, I could go on here with the usual guff about Clickbank but it really has been done to death and everyone seems to have an opinion on how to choose a product. So I will give you my abridged version on choosing a Clickbank product to sell and how to go about it.

1. Choose a product that you know a little about, you don’t need to be an expert in the field but you will need a basic understanding of it in order to write anything at all about it.
2. Choose a product with a Clickbank “gravity” of between 30 and 60. Too much higher than 60 means way too much competition.
3. Check the referred rate ( refd ) on the Clickbank data page. The closer it is to 100%, the less work the product owner is doing. Somewhere around 80% to 90% means that the owner has confidence in the product and is promoting it.
4. Get the product. If you cannot afford it you should contact the owner and request a review copy. Write them a good, sensible email explaining that you like the look of the product, have read some posts about it and would like to promote it yourself. Don’t make it a long, drawn-out affair, simply explain the situation and request a copy of the product so you can do a personal appraisal and review. 9 times out of 10 the product owner will send you the product without a problem, I have actually done this several times myself. Just make sure that you follow through with that honest appraisal as promised. Be sure to include both good and bad aspects of the product or it will look like a paid testimonial.
5. If the product is junk, don’t promote it. If you paid for a copy so you could review it, request a refund and move on. Do not do a product review that highlights all the bad things about it, simply leave it alone.
6. Once you are satisfied that you have a product that you are happy to endorse, promote it and then promote it some more.

In actual fact, choosing a product is fairly simple. However, stick to your guns and promote that 1 product to death before moving on to the next. Information overload comes in many forms. Focus on 1 thing at a time and don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can juggle 15 or 20 products at once. With focus and dedication you can promote a single product to some very good monthly sales figures. Try to promote several products at once and you will find that you lose track of what is working, forget to tweak campaigns, skip promotional activities, rush through articles, etc because you have something else that needs your attention. This is the way to certain failure. At best you will have low sales figures, but more likely you will have no sales at all.