Some Clickbank Basics

You have to be somewhat in the know to even have heard the name "Clickbank" much less know what it is.  This is funny because the truth is that Clickbank is far and away the largest internet marketplace for digital products and affiliates who want to sell them in the entire internet.  That puts Clickbank in its niche on a par with Amazon or Ebay and yet few have heard of Clickbank.  It just keeps running smoothly serving the internet community without fanfare.

When Clickbank came along, it really stepped into a nightmare scenario of online marketing and smoothed out the rough edges.  In the infancy of internet marketing getting set up as an online marketer meant you had to find someone to handle credit card payments.  To do this you had to have what was called a "merchant account" with an actual credit card company and the requirements to qualify for such an account were out of reach for most new internet merchants just trying to get established.

As an example, if you got your internet business up and running, you could not get a merchant account unless you were running a minimum of $1000 a month through your business.  Of course it was almost impossible to get that kind of business moving through your site if you could not offer credit card payment so you were stuck.  But from the credit card company's point of view, they were protecting themselves if you sold something online and there were a lot of refunds to be processed which made the entire relationship unprofitable for them.   So it was a lose lose situation for the credit companies and even more so for the new internet marketer just trying to catch a break in the business.

ClickBank responded to this market need with the business goal of creating a marketplace where sellers and buyers could work together selling digital products with greater ease to benefit everybody.  And considering that since then Clickbank has grown to represent over 10,000 products and serve the needs of over 100,000 partner affiliates, they certainly have been a success in their business mission in life.  They even stepped in and solved the merchant account problem by handling all the money movement collecting sales for the products they represent and distributing it to vendors easily and with no fuss so a vendor can quickly get a product out on the marketplace with very little cost or effort and see that product begin to return profits very quickly.

ClickBank knows that to continue to be a success they have to make doing business through their marketplace simple and profitable for vendors with products and affiliates who want to sell those products.  They offer a smorgasbord of tools especially to affiliates to study products to see which ones to broker and to see statistically which ones are already a success or on a trend toward greater success soon. 

For the affiliate this means a lot of help figuring out how to be a success and then tracking that success every step of the way and making adjustments to your product mix quickly and easily.  For the vendor this means that affiliates have a natural mechanism to pick up their product and get it out on the internet markets quickly.  That means quick sales with little or no effort in the marketing process for the vendor.

This is not to say that ClickBank is internet marking for idiots and it certainly is no place for scam artists.  The regulations for both affiliates and vendors are complicated and you need to understand them.   So take some time when getting signed up with Clickbank to understand what is expected of you.  Make no mistake, Clickbank is a marketplace like any other.  Your product will stand and fall on its own value so you will have to offer something of value to customers.  But as a genuine market its one of the best the internet has to offer and the huge success in terms of products sold and satisfied affiliates attests to that. http://Bankofebook.com

Selling Everyday on Clickbank

There is a prevailing mythology about the Clickbank marketplace that it is virtually an effort free profit machine.  Its easy to get the wrong idea because it is a marketplace where if you get your product out there into the Clickbank marketplace, there are over 150,000 eager affiliates ready to pick up your product and begin to sell it.  Those affiliates don’t need to tell you that they are going to sell your product or get your permission.  Just by virtue of being in the Clickbank community gives them liberty to sell your product. So in theory you could put a product out there and see its sales soar with no more effort than that.

But even if you get some marginal or good sales from your products using that approach, you don’t want to settle for marginal or good.  You want to get the maximum sales potential you can from your listings on Clickbank. And that means you don’t just sell one day and put your product on auto pilot.  You sell every day on Clickbank and you reap the rewards in terms of higher sales, higher profits and a better rating because you are being aggressive about your sales.  And when your products rise in the sales numbers, they get noticed by more successful affiliates in Clickbank and you get to a larger audience.  It's all about establishing momentum and then keeping it.

One way to raise your profits on your product has more to do with production than it does promotion.  If you own the product you put out there so you are not selling someone else's product, 100% of what you get from Clickbank after the affiliate cut and Clickbank's fees are yours.  You can either have the product made for you and buy the rights to it completely or make it yourself.

A good example of this approach is in the marketing of an ebook.  If you write it entirely yourself, you have complete ownership over it and all of the profits are yours.  But even if you have a killer idea for an ebook that will sell like hotcakes, not all of us are writers.  But there are starving artists out there on the internet job services who for a few hundred dollars will put together an ebook that will read well and deliver a great concept to your customers.  And by having the book ghostwritten, you purchase complete ownership of the rights to the book and you can market it and reap all of the rewards all for yourself.

Within Clickbank, there are a wealth of tools that you can use to keep tabs not only on how well your products are moving but on the relationship of advertising to product movement and how your commissions look to be sure they are healthy and not undergoing any form of commission theft that is sometimes possible in Clickbank.  So part of selling every day isn't so much just paying attention to sales but to the variables of sales such as the success of specific affiliates and the level your product is reaching as a desirable product to promote. 

There is something to be said for simple positioning and learning to help your product move up so more affiliates pick it up.  So after you get your product into the system, make it a major ambition to get familiar with all of the Clickbank tracking and reporting systems.  These reports can let you stay on top of your product's performance on a daily basis and if you see change happening, you can adjust accordingly.

That is the kind of dynamic product management that will result in stronger sales.  If you see your product take a turn in the statistics that is not healthy, you have the chance to intervene and make adjustments or even pull the product if it’s a serious enough situation.  On the other hand, if you see a sudden surge in popularity and sales and a greater participation in the product, you can do your part to make sure the affiliates are enabled to jump on the band wagon and make your product successful.  And while the subtle changes to how you position your product and manage advertising is not exactly selling every day, it is making sales work better for you every day and the outcome of greater profits is the same. http://Bankofebook.com

Safe Selling on Clickbank

In the non-internet world, retailers are always fighting a war with shoplifters and people who would take your product without paying for it.  You would think that this kind of thing would not be a problem in an online world.  But in Clickbank which is the largest internet marketplace in the world, one of the biggest problems is stopping people from downloading a digital product and then not following through with payment.

Like any other retail setting there are security weaknesses in Clickbank as there are with any software environment.  But with some proper caution on the part of the vendor at the individual level, you can find ways to plug those security holes and keep your product secure so every time it gets downloaded, you get paid.

In reality we sometimes are our own worst enemies when we become Clickbank merchants because we do some things that undermine the security Clickbank already has in place.  The first thing to recognize when you market on Clickbank is that it is off limits to put links to your product files on Clickbank on one of your other website pages.  Don’t try to extend the marketing by driving traffic to your Clickbank pages in this way.  For proper security, the only way your customers should be able to download your product is after going through the normal Clickbank payment pages which enforce that payment is made before delivery.  This is one very simple precaution to keep someone from getting to your content and bypassing the payment procedure.

Another good reason not to put links to your product on your web site is that it will cause this back door to your products to appear on the search engines as links others can use.  Google will find the links and index them and they could appear fairly high in search engine rankings and that is very dangerous for the security of your product. 

Some risks that your product page could get leaked are outside of your control.  There are internet thieves who would collect your thank you page and product URL where and post them on newsgroups and forums devoted to underground theft of online products.  The actual amount of thefts you might have from that happening is fairly small.  The real problem is if those postings get picked up and listed on a search engine. Then you could have a serious security risk.

There is one step that will eliminate the search engine problem which is the bigger risk of your thank you or product pages for Clickbank getting "out there".  That is to contact your web hosting provider.  They have a way at the server level to build a customized security file that is checked by the search engines to exclude certain files form becoming indexed.  By adding the URL for your products page on Clickbank as well as your thank you page, even if those links get listed, you stop the bleeding in its place so the amount of losses will be quite minimal.

However this approach must be used with extreme caution.  The file that many web hosting servers used is called the robots.txt file.  The problem is that hackers are very aware of that file as much as search engines are.  And if a hacker can find that file, and they can, that opens the door for the locations of your product files to be stolen and then posted on another web site which opens the whole can of worms all over again.

The best thing is not to reference those locations at all so if there is going to be any leakage of their location, it will be through hackers whose influence is minimal at best.  That way at least you are living a clean life and doing what you can.  And by watching the Clickbank FAQ and updates notices so you are always up to date on any new security updates they are putting in place. http://Bankofebook.com

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