Minimum Overhead - Maximum Sales

There is an old phrase about technology that goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  That principle may be true of one of the many great features about the Clickbank marketplace and how they set you up to put product into their markets.  When you want to sell in Clickbank, the process is pretty simple.  You create an account like you do on any other website.  And there is a $50 fee to become a valid vendor to sell product through the Clickbank affiliate membership.  But when you consider that Clickbank has over 150,000 affiliates ready to pick up your digital product and sell it and that many of these affiliates are some of the most accomplished internet marketers in cyberspace, you are probably going to make that $50 back on your first product into the system.

A mistake some new merchant make is to see a Clickbank account as a single product account.  So if you want to put several products out into the system, the assumption is you need several dozen accounts.  This simply is not the Clickbank operating philosophy.  They want you to put as much product as is reasonable into the system so everybody makes plenty of money.  After all, not only do the affiliates make money on each sale, you prosper and Clickbank takes a little commission as well.  That those little commissions add up to big bucks for the people who run this very large marketplace.  They know they are not going to get rich on those $50 start up fees.

The fact that Clickbank by policy encourages you to offer many products with only one account set up is reflected in the way your account is structured.  You can sell up to fifty digital products on Clickbank and do it all under a single account.  This gives you the chance to take full advantage of your $50 application fee (which represents $1 per product being sold if you take full advantage of Clickbank).  But it is also much easier to manage and the more products you sell under one umbrella, the better your ranking in the Clickbank marketplace will be.  These are pretty compelling motivations to use one account to handle all of your product offerings.

To fully take advantage of Clickbank's resources to sell a lot of products under one account, you should plan to organize the products to step around the Clickbank landing page facility.  The landing page is your home base for your product which the affiliates who grab your products and sell them across the internet must have to link their customers to your product. 

Now in the past even though Clickbank encourages you to sell many products under one account, they only supported one landing page per account.  This problem is being worked out within Clickbank but it has been a weakness of the Clickbank infrastructure worth avoiding.  So to step around using Clickbank's landing page entirely, simply set up a landing page for each product outside of Clickbank.  This way you also have all the flexibility in the world to make that small web site as elaborate as you want to and to expand and modify it because you are doing so outside of the Clickbank system.  Your sales page is independent of the system so you can make it part of your overall internet marketing program which may include other approaches to the internet market such as MySpace and YouTube. 

There are resources both sold commercially and within Clickbank to intercept incoming traffic for a product and send it to the landing page you have set up externally to sell the product.  But work with the system so your affiliates get the sale and are energized to create more sales so they make you successful.  They are a group well worth taking care of. http://Bankofebook.com

Making Clickbank Affiliates Your Own

One thing many merchants love about putting product out on the Clickbank market is they really don’t have to recruit affiliates to sell the product.  Clickbank has some 150,000 affiliates scanning the product listings every day and picking up new digital products to sell.  Among this army are some of the top names in internet marketing who could be looking at your product and picking it up to sell to their very large customer base. 

You would think that with this huge number of affiliates that you would be guaranteed some good sales if you put virtually any product out there.  But believe it or not, it's still possible to list your digital product in the Clickbank marketplace and for it to just "sit there".  For one thing, your product is competing for attention with some 10,000 other products.  And the products that already have strong sales and good affiliate association are the ones that are in high demand.  If your product enters at a dead stop, it’s a hard to path to get it into the "fast lane" so the good affiliates take notice of it. 

Moreover, among those 150,000 eager sales people, there is a fair share of bad ones.  And if your product gets picked up by rookie affiliates or those in the market but who are not skilled at what they do, your product can just "lay there" making you wonder what went wrong.  So anything can do to draw affiliates to your product and to even recruit your own affiliates is entirely justified to get your sales moving in Clickbank.

Many merchants remain satisfied to just allow the nature of Clickbank to bring affiliates their way.  But to get aggressive and actually get out there and draw affiliates to you gives you some ownership of the process.  Not only do you accelerate the process of becoming successful within the Clickbank environment, you develop relationships with affiliates and work more in partnership with recruited affiliates than you would if you simply relied entirely on "random" affiliates picking up your product and beginning to make the sales you need. 

Identifying new affiliates and making them part of your affiliate network takes some creative thinking but in many ways you already have all the resources you need at your disposal.  Your primary objective is to build lines of communications which would not exist if you simply left the Clickbank affiliate arrangement operate as it is.  The assumption of the Clickbank culture is that merchants and affiliates do better if they do not have to communicate because you can focus on creating more product and affiliates can focus on sales and not having to be accountable to dozens of merchants if they are promoting a lot of product.

Of course, this formula does work in a lot of cases, particularly if your product becomes part of a catalog of hundreds of thousands of products for some very large affiliates who move a lot of digital products under the Clickbank system.  But that doesn’t mean there is not plenty of room within the Clickbank system for a partnership relationship between affiliate and merchant.  You already may be in such relationships outside of Clickbank with affiliates you work with through your web site.  That body of sales people is a natural place to go to recruit affiliates to sell for you in Clickbank.  By approaching them to consider becoming part of Clickbank and selling your product there, you can sweeten the deal by offering a higher commission and the lure of such a large catalog of products there that they can become more prosperous selling in the Clickbank marketplace.

The ideal situation is to cultivate a large body of affiliates, some of whom do sell your products "anonymously" and others with whom you are in relationship.  You can recruit affiliates for future product announcements and by simply thanking affiliates who made your last product offering a success and offering to keep them in the loop when you put more products into the marketplace.  By building a mailing list of successful Clickbank affiliates who like your work and want to know when you have something new to offer in Clickbank, you will slowly build a "team" of sales people with a good focus on your marketing approach and how they can join in your success as a merchant by seeking you out when you have something new to offer. http://Bankofebook.com

Heaven For Small Business

Starting a small business has to be one of the most courageous things a person can do.  There are a lot of unknowns that can strike fear into the heart of any small business owner.  Issues of labor, supply and demand and the market always are a concern.  And even if you do all of your market studies and prepare intensively, launching that business is sometimes an act of faith.

The modern era has opened up a new frontier for small business owners and that is the internet.  But even there, risks exist and if anything the unknowns are even more exotic.   Because the online marketplace is vastly distributed, estimating the market need as well as the potential demand for a product can seem like a cryptic exercise.  In the early days of the internet, the costs of handling money and the resources to help small business succeed were few and far between and hard to use at best.   That is why by comparison the modern internet marketing world is a relative heaven for small business due in no small part to online marketplaces and resources such as Clickbank.

One of the ways Clickbank and other online merchant accounts smooth the road out a small business to get started is by making it possible to accept payments online even when you are just getting started out.  Most online purchases are done with credit card.  But, especially at first, to do business directly with credit card companies to accept payments online was a nightmare.  They required a lot of capital and proof of the health of the business both of which are in short supply when you are just starting out.

Clickbank puts all of that at your disposal for an amazingly low investment.   You can join Clickbank for a simple one time fee of $50 and a small commission on each sale.  For that they operate virtually as your online banker accepting payments, managing the credit card transactions and the relationship with the credit card companies and faithfully handling the money to be passed to you on a routine basis.  If you are selling products through Clickbank, you might have hundreds or thousands of transactions per day from just as many customers.  But all of that financial management and customer interaction is handled by Clickbank so you just offer your product and then sit back and collect the returns on your sales.

The marketplace dynamic on the internet is as different from the traditional business model as night and day.  Small business people must already be light on their feet and able to adapt to change and new things quickly in any market.  This requirement of an online entrepreneur is even more crucial.  The business model for running a business with Clickbank at the heart of what you are doing does require a massive paradigm shift in how you do business.  But most of the ways you change your approach to small business mean giving up some of the aspects of small business that you probably won't mind giving up.

For one thing, while you can always be actively involved in sales, it is entirely possible to run a healthy and very active and prosperous small business selling digital products to a huge customer base and completely give up the sales side of the business model entirely.  That is because on Clickbank, as a merchant, your primary responsibility is to put product on the market.  Once your product or products is "out there", there is an army of sales people called affiliates who are ready to pick up your product and promote it to their large existing customer base.  By army we mean that a staggering 150,000 internet marketers are on Clickbank and every one of them can sell your product if they wish.  There is no risk to you and Clickbank manages the relationships with this marketing army and the collection and distribution of their commissions.

To take advantage of this army, you will have to grant a slice of profit in the form of a commission to the affiliate as his reward for doing your sales for you.  You can consider it a business expense and even record it to deduct it as such.  But because that commission will draw this huge and highly specialized mob of internet marketing gurus to your product, that is a pretty good use of a commission. http://Bankofebook.com

Ebook Publication is a Breeze on Clickbank

A lot has changed in the world because of the internet and nowhere is that more noticeable than the publishing industry.  At one time the big publishing houses ruled the land like wizards from stone castles and any fledgling author who wanted to have a prayer to get a book published had to scale those walls.  That meant a lot of talented writers and some excellent books never saw the light of day because the executives in those companies did not see a profit margin in it for them. 

Just as in the music industry where music distributing has been completely overhauled by the internet, publishing has gone through a similar revolution.  It’s a people's revolution too because no longer is it the large publishing houses that tell the public what they can or cannot read.  Now good authors can get their works out there simply by producing an ebook.  And merchandising services like Clickbank have completed the cycle by making merchandising, marketing and distribution a breeze as well.

There was a time that the term "self publishing" created the image of some pitiful quack with an axe to grind paying one of those do it yourself companies to put his book into prepaid print to be sold out of the back seat of his car.  But there is a new respectability to self publishing because so many ebooks have reached the public that were of just as high a quality anything the big publishers could have put out.  And for the aspiring author, moving to an internet based business model when it comes to publishing your book makes a lot of sense.

It is the ability of even writers just starting out to be a big success with online publishing that has made this revolution possible.  And there is no doubt that the reason for that ability becoming so easy for writers to access is due in a large part to Clickbank.  Clickbank being an internet marketplace devoted 100% to digital product sales and distribution is an ideal place for an ebook writer to find success.  And by simply going through the well known steps for merchandising their works, an author doesn’t have to become an "expert" internet marketer at all, just be good at following directions.

Step one is simply to write your book.  You, the author know how to do this and the merchandiser doesn’t need to teach you your craft.  A word processor any sort is a fine tool for the composition and you can put the finished product together as a PDF file or as a compiled ebook using a commercially available ebook compiler. 

Now to give Clickbank what they need to merchandise your ebook, you will need a very simple web site.  This doesn’t have to have dancing babies on it, just basically two pages of html that can respond to internet traffic flow when Clickbank sends it your way.  After setting up the web site, just follow ClickBank's instructions to set up the ecommerce software on the site which will also make possible the payment for the book.  That’s all you need and you have the means to make a lot of money selling your ebook on Clickbank.

Now you are free to play with that web site and make it as elaborate as you wish.  But the beauty of the simplicity of the basic Clickbank system is it can work at the barebones level just fine and let you go back to do what you are good at doing and what you love to do which is to write.  As you compose your next masterpiece, things will be happening in the marketing of your existing book on the market that you don’t have to do a thing to help along.

The 150,000 affiliates on Clickbank will get wind of this new exciting ebook product and they can quickly link it into their sales mechanism without even telling you it happened.  That means that a virtual internet marketing army will be able to sell your book with complete liberty taking their small commission and bulging out your bank account while you never know who they are and you never will know.  All you know is the market value of your book will be fully realized on Clickbank which means financial stability for you.  And for a creative soul, that is a highly prized commodity. http://Bankofebook.com

Driving the Customers to Clickbank

Clickbank is a great marketplace and it's worth the work and small expense to get your digital product out there because of the huge exposure it can get to a very large army of affiliates. But just putting your product into the market and letting it go at that to wait for the affiliates to do their job not only doesn’t seem to be enough, there is a lot more you can do to make the sales of your Clickbank entries take off.  So its just smart business to find the best internet marketing techniques that will pay the most rewards in terms of sales through Clickbank.

Learning to advertise your Clickbank affiliate is just as much a big priority as it was to learn to market your website or products you sell there via internet marketing methods.  And how to be a success marketing on the internet is something that is changing all the time as the internet changes and evolves.  It’s a living place and each year we have to stay on top of what works to bring the customers in.  And in our case we adapt that knowledge to specifically promote our Clickbank campaigns combines the power of Clickbank with your own marketing talents for that one two punch to wealth.

When you add Clickbank to your marketing plan, you have put a powerful resource in your corner.  But because you are now listing on what is hands down the largest internet marketplace in the world, its best to go back and evaluate your entire internet marketing plan in light of what you are doing on Clickbank.  That is because when you were driving customers to your web site to make a sale, it was pretty much a one customer at a time approach to sales which takes a long time to see real progress.  But since there are over 150,000 affiliates on Clickbank, the more you do to make your product successful and drive customers to Clickbank, the more you can see the return on that investment come by in multiples of hundreds or thousands.

It's not a bad idea to approach your internet marketing research from square one looking for advice and tools that are focused specifically on how to use your web site to create traffic to your Clickbank products.  If the person behind a web site that is promoting training or tools in marketing for Clickbank knows their stuff, they can take your sales to the next level.  As with anything else, networking with your friends who also are learning the ropes of internet marketing in a Clickbank environment is a great way to sort out the good tools and experts from those who are not going to benefit your business.  

In fact, if you are already involved in affiliate marketing directly with other internet merchants, you can pick their brains about Clickbank training and tools for moving product through that market place.  That same body of affiliates may be your first Clickbank representatives because they know the good of your product line and they will want to see your efforts to drive traffic their way work out well.

When you first learned internet marketing before you stepped into the Clickbank world, it took some work, some false starts and some real life experiences before you got good at it.  This is natural and sadly your early internet marketing programs are not as successful until you get an understanding for what really drives traffic and what doesn’t.  But you are not alone in your objectives or your desires to learn to become an expert internet marketer and make the top ranks of sellers on Clickbank.  And while those who have real world knowledge and advice to offer to help you get over your learning curve to become a Clickbank big money affiliate are probably selling that knowledge, maybe even through Clickbank, if that knowledge comes from real experience with the marketplace and grounded in both success and failure in Clickbank internet marketing efforts, you can learn a lot from the trial and error of others.

But be sure the source you are taking advantage of is credible in that way before you plop down your hard earned money to get your moneys worth in knowledge that will more than pay you back for the work you are doing to learn to market on Clickbank. http://Bankofebook.com