Pricing your Product to Move

In any marketplace finding the price to ask for your product or service that appeals to customers but doesn’t cut you out of profits is a tough balancing act to pull off. Pricing at what you think you deserve for your work may suit your self image but it might mean your product or service will not sell.  A big factor is the competition because if someone else comes into the market with a similar product for a little less, they can steal your market share.  But on the other hand selling too low means losing margin which means at some point you lose money so why be in the marketplace at all? 

This dilemma is just as much of a challenge when selling your product online in a digital marketplace like Clickbank as it is outside of cyberspace.  Clickbank doesn’t set your prices and you will live or die in their market based on the quality of your product, how well known what you have to offer is and the relationship between price and value.  All of these things are age old market principles that are unchanged just because our marketplace and our product has all gone digital.

One school of thought calls for you to come in with as low a price as you can so you can capture larger sales numbers.  Within the context of Clickbank, this does have some solid business thinking behind it.  The Clickbank tracking system reflects the movement of your product quantitatively and that is reported to existing or new affiliates.  So simply put, the more product your sell, the better it looks to new affiliates.  This means more affiliates pick up your product out of the Clickbank marketplace and your sales continue to go up which is a delightful momentum to see happen.  That kind of market behavior can offset setting your price low fairly easily.

The other school of thought calls for you to set your price higher to reflect a higher quality product and realize a greater profit per unit on each sale.  This may result in fewer affiliates picking up your product on Clickbank but the sales they do generate give you a higher return per unit.  It's possible the outcome could be a wash so deciding which approach to you can be intuitive and may be an area worth some experimentation to see which business model works best for you.

Much of the beauty of becoming an internet marketer in the first place is that you have so much more price leverage than a traditional merchant outside of cyberspace.  Because your product is entirely digital, you operate at basically zero overhead.  Once you produce the software or the e-book, production is nothing more than generating another digital copy which costs nothing.  You may have some software costs for specific formatting software but once your infrastructure is in place, your only cost is the time it takes you to make more product.  There is no manufacturing, no cost of goods sold, no distribution costs and with the Clickbank system, virtually no advertising cost either.

This means you can afford to price your product competitively because you will always make a profit of some sort.  Now the shelf life on digital products is not very long so you want to milk as much profitability out of each product during the months when it is "hot" and then pump more product into the Clickbank marketplace.  But you still have the leverage to experiment with price to see where the proper price level for your product might lie.

You do have to beware of adjusting your price too much on a single product.  If customers see your price moving around, they lose faith in you as a merchant.  The best way to "experiment" with pricing is to set a price on a product, track its sales and then sell a very similar product at a different product and continue to track and compare the results.  While other factors influence sales, you can eventually develop a model which will serve as a solid pricing strategy.  And once you have that, you are ready to compete in the Clickbank marketplace successfully for the long term. http://Bankofebook.com

Picking Products on Clickbank

When you are setting yourself up to be an affiliate on Clickbank, you almost go through overload.  Clickbank offers 10,000 products that you can pick from to sell online, each of which usually offers a pretty generous commission.  The problem is how to go about picking just the right products to represent.  You don’t have to worry about the merchants because under the Clickbank system, you can select a product and immediately start selling it and Clickbank handles all the commissions and interaction with the merchant entirely.

The anxiety comes because there are just so many products on Clickbank to pick from that you could make it a full time job evaluating all of these products.  So developing a system to "drill down" into that massive catalog to products that not only make sense for you to sell but that will represent maximum profitability to you is essential.  It will be a system that will help you narrow down catalog of products you will be excited about and a system that you can refine and improve as you get more familiar not only with the Clickbank products but with the tools they give you to evaluate those products.

The first and probably best way to "cut out from the herd" products that will work for you as a Clickbank affiliate is category.  Clickbank has it's merchants assign specific categories to all of the products that are in the marketplace.  That way if you only want to sell adventure games, you can find that category of product and then get more specific about the particular products that appeal to you.  There are two reasons category will be a big measure of your success selling Clickbank products. 

One is that you know your niche market.  You are going to take these products to a body of customers you know well. You know their tastes and they come to you to get products to fit their specific interests and the area of specialized knowledge that you share with your customer base.  The second reason is that you know what you like to sell and what you are good at selling.  You might flounder trying to sell self help courses in auto repair but be really good at selling ebooks about business.  And the more you can combine the products you are going to sell with your particular market and your skills and interests, the better chance you are going to sell a lot of units and make yourself and the Clickbank merchant wealthy.  That way everybody wins.

Using keywords similar to what your customers might use to find the products you are selling, you can narrow down the selection of products to just those you would want to sell.  But Clickbank gives you a wealth of information that can be analyzed to make the decisions of which ones make the final cut.  You can sort the product list you have developed by popularity to find out which of these products is selling well for a large number of affiliates on Clickbank already.  It might be easy to want to pick the ones that are big sellers for lots of affiliates but use some judgment here.  Remember also that if a lot of affiliates have picked up those products, the internet may be saturated with offerings of that product and you might have a lot of competition for selling the same Clickbank product offering.  Look at trends of sales and see if you can find products that are increasing in popularity but not peaked yet.  Those will be your money makers.

Popularity is not the only variable that can point you toward Clickbank products that will bring a good return on your effort to sell them from Clickbank.  Note the commission level.  As a rule only pick up products that offer a 25% or better commission.  That means the merchant wants to share the wealth with and you will see a very healthy profit from the sales you make.  Other variable limits should be that the product should have a percent of total sale of at least thirteen dollars or better, a 70% or better referral rate, low return numbers and a gravity of 50 or higher.  By developing an evaluation system that combines all of these variables about the product under consideration, you have a great chance of picking winners and money makers from the Clickbank product library every time.  http://Bankofebook.com

More Than One Way to Wealth on Clickbank

As is true in any marketplace, the potential for money making is diverse and always new in a place where merchants and buyers are always coming together to negotiate and make deals happen.  So as an entrepreneur it’s a good idea to have a fix on the various approaches to profitability in what is the largest internet marketplace in the world - Clickbank.

Clickbank at any given time represents over 10,000 products that any affiliate with the proper Clickbank account can promote and sell.  So by becoming an affiliate, that huge catalog is entirely at your disposal to sell without the need for you to request permission or any formality whatsoever.  This is the Clickbank agreement with the sellers which is one of the real secrets to success in the marketplace.

Signing up to become an affiliate on Clickbank is shockingly easy and you can have an account.  Simply log into clickbank.com and step through the process in a matter of moments.  And you are ready to go.  Now just proceed to the products catalog and work through the categories to find the niche you want to promote and the products that you feel have the best potential for profits. 

Next to selling as an affiliate, putting your own products into the Clickbank marketplace is an outstanding means to make big money.  And setting up a product is almost as easy as becoming an affiliate.  Your merchant account on Clickbank is a one time fee of $50 which you can make back quickly on the sale of one product that moves well. And the economy of Clickbank is you can sell 50 products at a time from the same account for that same set up fee.  You are sure to make at least $1 per product to pay back that set up fee. 

Once you get your products set up and some sales logged, there is an army of over 150,000 marketers really to take your product and get it out there into the sale stream.  That means that after you do the basic set up steps, you are out of the internet marketing game and you can hand off that little problem to experts who are skilled at selling literally thousands of units of your product.  You don’t have to do a thing.  Just set a commission level which is a percentage the affiliate will make for his hard work and then just sit back and let that army of skilled internet marketers do their stuff.  The money can just roll in while you focus on creating new product.

Of course you can get proactive and not wait for strangers to promote your product.  If you have a sales team, put them to work as Clickbank affiliates and they can focus exclusively on your products.  Clickbank provides their outstanding marketplace structure and one of the best run merchant accounts on the internet to assure your money is collected and accounted for correctly and safely and delivered to you on time.

There are other ways to pick up additional revenue as Clickbank rewards any kind of behavior that benefits the market.  If you send Clickbank customers of the service itself, that referral gets a reward.  There are also specialty Clickbank promotional concepts being created and promoted all the time like the Clickbank storefront.  So keep your eye on the Clickbank newsletters and "What's New?" web pages because it is such a fast moving marketplace that you may find a new moneymaking opportunity out there ready for you to jump into and pull yet more profits your way through Clickbank. http://Bankofebook.com

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