Clickbank affiliate guide to product selection
Which Ones to Choose? Are you a Clickbank affiliate marketer? Or doing something similar? Would you like ten simple rules which can make the difference between earning a living and not earning a living?
I had to work them out of my own, slowly and painfully, but you’ll do much better. Just to set out my stall, I’ve been a Clickbank affiliate marketer for 21 months. For the first 5 months I earned almost nothing, because I didn’t understand product selection. Then I worked it out, got it right, and started earning a living. I do this part time and am now up to between $7,000 and $8,000 per month profit.
Everything that follows is written from the perspective of a Clickbank affiliate, simply because that’s what the author happens to be. Most of it, though, applies equally, or at least similarly, to many other forms of affiliate marketing, and to the assessment of many other potential products from other sources, too.
Affiliate marketing is a little bit like a hurdle race in which you complete the course in the dark and get a "pass" or "fail" without knowing at how many obstacles you fell, by how much, and what you need to correct for the next lap. When it doesn't work out for you, you have to try to work out, somehow, at which step(s) something's gone wrong. Unfortunately this isn’t something anyone can realistically advise you about (though many like to try) without seeing exactly what you're doing. The problem can be with keyword research, titles, articles, resource-boxes, lack of article syndication, product/service-selection, bad landing-pages, dishonest vendors (“shock horror!”) and a number of other things, any one of which can deprive you of the result you wanted and expected.
Product selection, though, is a hugely common reason for marketers’ difficulties – often without their being aware that that’s their problem. And specifically, product selection is probably the single area where most affiliates make mistakes that are most expensive in terms of opportunity-cost (I.e. using up their time, effort, skills and energy inappropriately, rather than doing something better/different instead).
One regularly sees Clickbank affiliates in internet marketing forums starting off threads saying “What am I doing wrong here?”, showing their website, describing all their marketing endeavours and asking for advice. And getting it. But if I had $1 for every time I’ve looked through these conversations and thought to myself “By the way, you’re never going to make a living selling THAT product”, I probably wouldn’t have to work for a living at all. Ok, I exaggerate: I’d be able to fill the car with gas out of those $1 proceeds.
This guide is to explain clearly how you can learn to identify those products and avoid them, concentrating instead on the ones which will actually
produce real income for you (if you get the rest of the marketing even half-way right!).
There are over 12,000 products for sale at Clickbank, and a way is needed of cutting them down to manageable proportions. When you read this, some thought like “Wow, does she really reject so many sales pages so quickly?” may strike you. The answer is “yes”. Anything that dramatically cuts the numbers down from its 12,000+ total is helpful. And if something instinctively looks wrong to you, it will to some of your potential customers, too.
So, here are my ten rules for product selection, and they‘re roughly (perhaps debatably) in order of importance. The order doesn’t matter too much, though, because all ten of them are significant and need to be taken into account. And then there are a few more little points at the other end, too, which are guidelines about potential criteria actually to be ignored: widely misunderstand things which put some people off but shouldn’t.
RULE ONE: DON’T PROMOTE INTERNET-MARKETING-ADVICE OR MAKE-MONEY-ONLINE PRODUCTS
IM and MMO products are the kiss of death to aspiring Clickbank success-stories, and there are two very compelling reasons for this:-
(a) They’re fiendishly competitive markets in which the true Masters of affiliate marketing will be your competitors.
(b) There’s no point at all in promoting products in a niche in which any measurable proportion of your potential customers are already themselves
Clickbank affiliates.
It's not possible, as a Clickbank affiliate, to be paid an affiliate commission on a purchase made by a customer who is himself already a Clickbank
affiliate. People will substitute their own affiliate link for yours before they pay. It's just naive to pretend otherwise. For me (and, I know, for some other affiliates - the ones who have worked it out, I suspect), it totally rules out becoming an affiliate for any product which is clearly and obviously aimed at existing affiliates. How vendors of such products hope to attract serious affiliates for them, and why they sell them on Clickbank (rather than on e-junkie, for example), I have absolutely no idea.
I remember many months ago seeing a post, in some internet marketing forum, from a Clickbank vendor seeking affiliates for his new product,
which was itself aimed exclusively at existing Clickbank affiliates. Totally incomprehensible. I made a very polite post asking "Isn't this a product for
which the target market comprises almost entirely existing Clickbank affiliates?" thinking I must surely have misunderstood somewhere along the
line, but no: the answer was, effectively, "Yes, it is".
Why anyone should want to become an affiliate for such a product remains shrouded in mystery. It will be a high gravity product, obviously - one of the ones of which many naive affiliates eventually make their 1 or 2 sales and then abandon it because they hardly earn any commissions, and the high gravity will (as ever) attract increasingly more affiliates who make the same mistake. This is a small part of the reason some of those very high gravity IM/MMO products produce very little affiliate income: it's not only the gravity figure itself but the turnover of affiliates that can be enormous, with these products (more coming up about that later).
Here’s the point: Clickbank allows its affiliates to purchase as customers through their own affiliate links. Yes, I know a lot of people say that this
isn’t allowed, or that you should do it only sparingly otherwise Clickbank will complain, or even ban you. They’re wrong. Clickbank expressly states
that you may do this. And other will, even if you don’t. You can hide your affiliate-link to the sales page, but you can't hide the fact that it's being sold on Clickbank, because even if the sales page doesn't say so (which some do, e.g. mentioning Clickbank's reliability and guarantee procedures as a plus point), it shows on the order page.
RULE TWO: AVOID ALL PRODUCTS WITH LEAKY SALES PAGES
A “leak” on a sales page is any way for a potential customer readily to get in contact with the product’s vendor. The classic example is a “vendor’s opt-in”, where the prospective customer can give the vendor his email address (maybe in exchange for a “free report“, a “free video” or whatever other incentive is dangled), and that’s the one I’m going to discuss in detail, as an example - but there are other leaks as well: “free trials”; links to other websites giving the vendor’s contact details, and so on.
When I started off, I promoted seven different vendors' products all of which had a vendor's opt-in. I earned almost nothing. I later found out that six of those seven unconnected vendors sent out email (to prospects who opted in) which contained a different affiliate-cookie link to the product which overwrote my own, because the most recent cookie gets the sale credited.
And don’t call me a conspiracy theorist: I’m not suggesting that they all conspired together and did it. It was even worse than that, in a way: they all did it individually. Don’t let people tell you that this is “very rare”. It isn’t. People will get away with what they think they can get away with - and Clickbank allows this trick, too.
Among affiliates in general, the great majority will promote a Clickbank product with a vendor's opt-in, won't understand the problem in doing so,
and are among the 90% of affiliates who collectively produce 10% of the vendor's affiliate sales, whereas the small minority who won't promote a
product with a leaky sales page are among the 10% of affiliates who produce 90% of the vendor's affiliate sales. They’re the professional ones.
To many of us (and for you too, I hope), this issue isn’t about comparing “opt-in with no opt-in”. Everyone knows that email follow-up greatly
increases conversions. That’s a given.
The question for many of us is whether, having produced the prospective customers with our work, time, skills, effort and money, we want them on our list or on the vendor's.
I want them on mine. I have other stuff to promote (as an affiliate) to my prospective customers, too, just like the vendor does (as a vendor and/or as an affiliate). And if a vendor doesn't like that, I'll promote instead the product of a different vendor who understands it.
I see good vendors nowadays producing a sales page with an opt-in for affiliates who want that, and another copy of the same thing, but without the opt-in, for more serious, professional affiliates, and announcing openly in their marketplace listing that that's what they do. How difficult is it,
anyway? Why can't they all just do that and make this problem go away? Someone more cynical than I might even ask “If they absolutely won't do
that, even on request from a professional affiliate, what are they really telling us?” I'm very pleased to be able to report that every vendor of whom I've made that request, myself, has been happy to do so. Ok, that's only three people, I admit, but two of them did it within 12 hours, and one within 2 hours. I was impressed, anyway.
Don’t let people tell you that you can see for yourself whether the vendor’s playing any dirty tricks with “your” leads, simply by opting in yourself and seeing what happens. This idea simply doesn't stand up to examination at all, for many reasons:-
(a) It takes 8 weeks to do (the duration of a Clickbank cookie on your prospective customers' computers). Vendors often don’t do this immediately: they do it “later“. There are 12,000 other products to choose from, and there’s absolutely no reason you should have to examine the vendor’s auto responder emails for 8 weeks before promoting his product.
(b) You’d have no way of knowing, just because you receive no new hoplinks in the vendor’s follow-up, that nobody else does either, would you?
(c) You'd also have no way of knowing whether the vendor might change his mind about that even after you'd “cleared” him for 8 weeks - and why should you take that chance when you don't have to?
Note, too, that you can’t reliably “check for this problem” by looking at the order page and making sure that your own affiliate-link still shows up there. If your ID shows up when you try that, it means that you'll get a commission on anyone buying the product from your computer. What matters in this context is your customers' computers. Don't assume that just because you opted in, read the vendor’s emails, clicked on his links and still see your affiliate-link on the sales page three weeks later that they necessarily do, too. Unfortunately, there are many instances when this doesn't happen, and not everyone receives the same emails from vendors who are "skimming" a proportion of the opted-in leads. It took me a long time to learn this, and I was horrified and appalled when I saw the evidence of how often it happens. Appearances can be deceptive.
An affiliate's opt-in list helps the affiliate enormously to get sales. And the vendor's opt-in list helps him enormously to get sales (but whether the affiliate gets paid a commission on those sales is a different question). This is a no-brainer: if a product’s only sales page has a vendor’s opt-in, just promote instead, out of the 12,000+ available products there, another one that doesn't give you all those problems.
RULE THREE: NO HYPE AND NO DECEPTION
Avoid anything obviously hyped-up beyond all measure. Some sales pages have clearly not been written by a professional copywriter, but by the vendor himself, who has misunderstood the copywriting concepts of “urgency”, “scarcity” and so on. Don’t forget that your own reputation can suffer, if you promote junk. Products with junk sales pages are likely to be junk-filled products, too.
Here are a few examples of fairly obvious things to avoid on sales pages:-
(a) “As seen on TV”, “as seen on Yahoo, MSN, Bing” and so on. These don’t sell so well, overall. (I have clients who’ve tried their sales pages both
with and without this junk - without always performs better). The one thing that customers understand when they see “As seen on …” is that the
vendor’s trying to aggrandise his product by claiming an implicit imprimatur of questionable authenticity. I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to sell something to someone, the very last thing I want the prospective customer to think is that I’m trying to fool them.
(b) “Only 9 copies remaining”: this is almost too ludicrous for words. Do these vendors really imagine that people don’t come back a week later, and
two weeks late, and see the same alleged 9 copies still remaining? Do they not worry that their dishonesty’s going to be exposed? Scarcity has its place as a copywriting tactic, but not the way it’s presented on many amateur Clickbank sales pages by vendors who have misunderstood and misapplied it. You can see through it, and so can your prospective customers. It makes people mistrustful. Give these vendors the cold shoulder they deserve: their products are probably no good, anyway.
(c) “The price will increase at midnight tonight”: the same problem as the point above, but here it’s “urgency” they’ve misunderstood and misapplied, rather than “scarcity”. Does anyone actually take this stuff seriously?! I don’t, and you don’t, and more importantly still your customers don’t: it just gives them a bad taste in their mouths.
(d) Implausible claims (income-figures, too-dramatic and unsafe weight-loss, overnight cures from serious chronic diseases, and so on): if they sound a bit suspicious to you, they do to your potential customers, too.
(e) Anything obviously non-FTC-compliant. I’m not a lawyer (though I’m available to play one on TV, if the fee’s right), but you really don’t need to
be much of a lawyer to have a pretty good sense of when vendors are naпve enough to be making grossly unlawful representations about their products.
RULE FOUR: NO POP-UPS/DISCOUNTS
In my opinion, people fool themselves (and sometimes others) about this subject. It's actually surprisingly difficult to split-test and measure, and many vendors don't bother. Call me a skepchick but I think many people very unwisely follow the “These things must work because otherwise people wouldn't be using them” philosophy, which has simply become self-perpetuating, now that it's acquired the critical mass to do so.
The classic mistake that people make, when they try one on their site, is that after a month or so of “testing” (as they imagine) an exit pop-up giving a discount, they say to themselves something along the lines of “Well, 20 people bought this product at 30% off because of the exit pop-up so it 'must' be doing its job”. It takes my breath away that so many people can imagine that validates it, but I honestly think they do, because I've seen loads of people saying exactly that quite openly and without apparently identifying the huge fallacy in it.
The two big things they often don't stop to think about are:-
(a) how many of those people would have come back later and paid the full price if they didn't have the exit pop-up?
(b) how many other people would normally have come back later if the exit pop-up hadn't put them off the site simply because they resent exit pop-ups?
For me, these are the two big questions.
Sometimes people think as marketers, not as customers. Those of my clients who have tested this sort of thing properly (which, as I said, isn't easy at all) have all abandoned them. I suppose marketers using this stuff just don't think about how the huge number of people who have a pop-up blocker installed (but still see these exit pop-ups) must react to it.
There are legal problems with them, too. There are laws preventing interference with one's computer, and that’s actually what exit pops do. On your computer, and using your software, a website takes control away from you and forces you to view something you didn’t request. As this practice with new exit pop-ups gets more and more abusive, and more people understandably become annoyed about it, something will be done. Either web browsers will figure out how to stop this reliably, or the FTC will get involved. Meanwhile, as an affiliate, don’t touch these products.
RULE FIVE: REJECT ALL HIGH-GRAVITY PRODUCTS
You read that right. I wish I’d understood this one two years ago. Yes, it’s a little extreme; but we want to be extreme, here, and we want to err on the safe side: we have over 12,000 products to whittle down to a handful we want to promote.
This is perhaps the most misunderstood subject in the whole of affiliate marketing. I’m in the process of (slowly) writing a little e-book about it,
which I’m intending to give away free of charge as a PDF download in the Warrior Forum as a “Free Warrior Special Offer”. It’s called “The Gravity
Trap” and when it’s published (late August 2010) you’ll also be able to read all about it at http://www.TheGravityTrap.com and download it there. All readers of this report are cordially invited to download it, free of charge, on publication. For now, a summary of the realities of gravity, and some examples will suffice.
Gravity is an indication of how much competition there is. It measures the number of affiliates who have each made one or more sales over the
previous 8 weeks. Each affiliate gets, effectively, a “score” between 0.1 and 1.0 (according to when they made their last sale, but not according to the quantity they sold) and the total is the product's gravity figure. Sounds easy enough to understand? It isn’t.
Nearly all internet marketing guides make the howling mistake of advising beginners to promote only high gravity products. This has a hugely distorting effect on the market and its observed statistics. There's a big and constant turnover of new affiliates trying to sell high gravity products,
failing, dropping out and being replaced by others repeating their experiences. This of course boosts those products' gravity figures further and further, because gravity measures the number of affiliates who (eventually) make a sale, not the number of sales made.
If there are two otherwise equivalent and equally good products, with otherwise matching statistical parameters, but one has a gravity of 15 and the other has a gravity of 150, my own instincts are to suspect very strongly that (other things being equal) both the conversion-rate and the numbers of sales are actually very likely to be higher for the lower gravity product.
So, avoid high gravity products: the day I learned that (and a few other things) and started acting on it was the day I started earning some real money through being a Clickbank affiliate I promote 15 different Clickbank products at the moment, and my two best-converting products, by far, out of all those, both have single-figure gravities. Some people think that's a “coincidence”. They’re wrong. I stay away from high gravity products because (as Clickbank now, finally, advises affiliates openly on their site) the one thing you know for sure about a high gravity product is that it's going to be competitive to sell.
Here's a little example, which might possibly clarify the issues:-
Clickbank Product A
- Sales-page conversion-rate 2.8%
- Solid product from well-known marketer
- Product has almost no refund requests
- He has 20 affiliates of whom 10 are superaffiliates who sell huge numbers of the product
- Product is easy to promote and sell
- Sales numbers are therefore very high, but the gravity figure is obviously very low (maybe around 10)
Clickbank Product B
- Sales-page conversion-rate 0.2%
- Dreadful product from scammy marketer
- Refund request-rate is higher, of course
- Product had a "professional launch" with 100 "temporary affiliates" (accounts used once each to buy one product, privately refunded, and/or the
figures were massaged in one of the other "customary ways")
- Product is obviously a complete and utter nightmare to promote and sell because the sales-page doesn't convert well
- Gravity figure starts out at about 110, and rapidly rises to 150/200 because gullible affiliates are attracted by the gravity figure, believing wrongly that it "validates the fact that the product is selling very well", and they all struggle and waste time/money, but eventually they obviously make 1 or 2 sales each anyway, and for this reason the gravity figure rises still further to 250/300 as the inevitable consequence of its self-fulfilling prophecy for the naive. Obviously enough, product "B" is the high gravity product. Obviously enough, product "A" is the one for which I want to be an affiliate. And so should you. These examples are in no way contrived. They're both realistic and common.
Do you see the logic, here? A product with 20 affiliates each making 1,000 sales will have a far lower gravity than a product with 500 affiliates, all attracted by the high gravity and struggling to make 1 sale each because the sales page hardly converts their traffic at all. But by the time they make 1 sale each, that boosts the gravity figure still higher. This is part of the explanation for the sometimes dreadful conversion-rates of the sales pages of the products with the highest gravities.
Key points:
(i) there's no correlation between the gravity figure and the conversion-rate
(ii) there's no correlation between the gravity figure and the number of sales: specifically, for various reasons, low gravity products can have enormous numbers of sales without this showing. High gravity products can (and quite often do) have comparatively low sales. This confuses a lot of people.
Here are more little examples of how the numbers work:-
- A product with 100 active affiliates each making steady sales will typically (but not necessarily) have a gravity score around 50 - 70
- A product with 100 active affiliates who all made their sales very recently will have a gravity score much closer to 100
- A product with 100 active affiliates who all made their last sale seven and a half weeks ago will typically have a gravity score of about 10
- A product with 100 active affiliates can't have a gravity figure higher than 100, however many copies they each sell
- If product A has 100 affiliates who each made one sale last week but have never made any other sales at all, and product B has 100 affiliates who have each made 500 sales over the last 2 months, of which in each case the most recent sale was last week, then these two products have the same gravity, though one has of course sold 500 times the number of copies of the other. (This difference will be reflected to some extent in the product's "popularity score", but not in its "gravity score").
If the five points above make sense to you, then you know how "gravity" really works.
RULE 6: THINK ABOUT YOUR TRAFFIC, NOT ANYONE ELSE’S
If you’re already doing any affiliate marketing at all, you’ll have some kind of mental picture of who your prospective customers are. Remember:
“traffic” is people. (Unless you buy “visits” by the thousand from a “traffic-seller”, in which case it’s probably automated “bots”.) I’ll use myself as an example, here, to illustrate my point. I’m an article marketer. I write articles about and around the issues of the niches in which I’m promoting products. I have a picture of what sort of people will like my articles, like my websites, join my lists, and so on. I need the sales pages of the products I’m promoting to appeal to those same people. If you’re promoting by AdWords advertising, or something similar, think about what the people who find your ad, from your keywords, are really looking for. Does the sales page of the product you’re thinking of promoting offer an immediate solution to their problem? If not, move on to another one.
RULE 7: CHECK OUT THE PRODUCT
Don’t try to promote things without knowing that the product’s good. Your reputation as a marketer is on the line. Don’t try to write a “review” of a product without seeing it for yourself. Not only is it misleading and unethical, but you can miss great opportunities that way. Some of the existing reviews of the product will have been written by people who have never seen the product. You can do better, and if you do better, you’ll sell more, too.
RULE 8: CHECK THE VENDOR’S ATTITUDE & BEHAVIOR
Good vendor reputation/attitude/behavior is essential. I'll contact them first, one way or another, and if I don't get a reply I won't promote their product, because I can imagine what their after-sales behaviour will be like if they won't even reply to a prospective business associate. You don’t want it to be too easy to contact the vendor (that would be a “leak”, remember?) but in reality, if all else fails, you’ll almost always find them by looking at their domain-name and sending email to “admin” (at) their domain.com, with a copy to “info” (at) their domain.com. There are some little-known, specific ways of making it highly likely that you’ll be offered a review copy of the product without payment (I have very nearly a 100% success-rate with this), and I’ll cover them in my e-book “Clickbank Myths & Reality” available from http://www.CbMythsAndReality.com (August/September 2010).
RULE 9: MAKE SURE IT’S FINANCIALLY WORTH PROMOTING
To be honest, I actually find that Clickbank products with “higher prices” (I’m talking about typically $79 and $99) are easier for me to promote, and I can make more sales of those than I can of $27 and $37 products. Your mileage may vary, but don’t ignore this. If you’re going to do your marketing job well, don’t let high prices put you off. I think (and I search Click bank’s “marketplace” listings) according to earnings per sale. I’m potentially interested in commissions of 75% of a small amount, 60% of a medium amount, or 50% of a larger amount. Work out your cut-off point for earnings per sale and stick to it.
RULE 10: MAKE SURE THE PRODUCT HAS A BUYING MARKET THAT YOU CAN IDENTIFY AND SELL TO
For me, the product has to be something I can write about without going to night school to understand its vocabulary. Don’t forget that there are some niches in which many people browse a lot for online information, but few are willing to pay money for it. The classic example of such a niche is perhaps “war gaming”. Most of the information in “those products” is available online, free of charge, in forums and elsewhere, and they’re all computer-literate, internet-literate customers, and many of them don’t have a credit-card anyway. Don’t ignore issues like that. It’s a very valid question: “Are this product’s potential customers going to be credit-card owners and/or PayPal users?” If not, how are they going to pay for it?
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And now a couple of things not to worry about:-
A. THE “AFFILIATE-PAGE”
Clickbank vendors who are successful enough to have statistically significant numbers of affiliates usually find that 10% of their affiliates
make 90% of their affiliate sales, while the other 90% bring in only 10% of the affiliate sales between them. This is why, when you see vendors asking in forums “What do you want from my product and sales page to become an affiliate for it?” (as they often do, albeit not quite in those words), the answers you’ll see mostly pertain to the contents of the vendor’s “affiliate page”. Who’s answering – the 90% of affiliates, or the successful 10%? The 10% of affiliates who are really making a living aren’t too interested in this stuff, and won’t use most of it. The “articles” will be duplicated all over the internet. The “banners” might be ok (though “banner marketing” is hugely overrated, in my opinion), and most of this really makes very little difference. Your own interest in this stuff may vary a little, of course, depending on what sort of marketing you’re planning/doing, but don’t be too impressed by an abundance of it, and don’t be too put off by a comparative paucity of it, either. It’s an afterthought.
B. THE “%RFD”
This causes quite a bit of confusion. It has nothing to do with the “refund rate”. It’s the percentage of the product’s sales which have been “referred” (sold by an affiliate), rather than sold directly by the vendor. The reason it’s largely meaningless is that a vendor promoting his own product can choose freely either to make affiliate-free sales, or to make them as an affiliate, using his own or his wife’s or his dog’s affiliate-link anyway, so it’s totally unreliable “information”. The one time it might be relevant to you is if you’re planning to promote the product with AdWords: you don’t want the vendor competing for keyword-bidding against his own affiliates. Anyone else can more or less forget it.
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So, there we are. Would you like a one-sentence summary of the most important parts, from everything above? The “average Clickbank affiliate having problems” with his marketing usually turns out, on examination, to be promoting either high gravity products or products with a vendor’s opt-in on the sales page, (or both: they’re often the same ones - isn‘t that “funny”?!), whereas the “average Clickbank affiliate doing very well thank you” is typically promoting lower gravity products and building his own list. My case rests. If you liked “my case”, and would be interested in reading a lot more (oh yes: there’s a whole lot more), you’ll be interested in my e-book “Clickbank Myths & Reality”, to be published in August/September 2010. You’ll find it at: http://www.CbMythsAndReality.com.
I won’t bore you with any promotional blurb about it here, other than mentioning that it’ll tell you the truth about what really goes on with Clickbank affiliate marketing and how you can take advantage of it to make a good living. Full details will be announced on the website. Bookmark this one and await developments.
AUTHOR: http://www.golearnweb.com/web-designer-pro-tutorials/clickbank-affiliate-guide-to-product-selection.html
