Sorting Out Clickbank

The problem that comes up sometimes when creating an online business using the Clickbank marketplace is that Clickbank almost is drowning in its own success.  For many people, sorting through his vast marketplace to figure out what product to promote can be a nightmare.  Because Clickbank is the virtual marketplace of choice for any digital product that can be bought and delivered exclusive through the internet, at any given time there may be over ten thousand products you can pick from to promote in the huge Clickbank products catalog.

Just going through that vast catalog can become your second life all by itself.  And if you did try to sort, catalog and understand every product, your brain would be so muddled it would not be able to figure out which products are the winners for you to promote and get big money from.  But at the same time, anyone who has been successful with the Clickbank system has done it by being a smart marketer and learning first how to pick the product that is choice for the market right now and then how to promote it to land big sales from the system.

The first order of business is to set yourself up as an affiliate on the Clickbank web site.  This is just getting your foot in the door but it's an essential step.  It's easy to do and free at the Clickbank web site so take the few minutes you need to get yourself set up in the system and step through the easy sign up form and become an affiliate citizen of Clickbank.

The first thing that will jump out at you when you start looking for a product to promote is that there is a small elite group of products that are clearly the most popular sellers in the catalog.  You might be drawn to those on the idea that if they are popular now, why not cash in on the wave and get some of the revenue from all those sales.  But keep in mind that a popular product also is one that is probably being merchandised by hundreds or thousands of other Clickbank affiliates.   So the internet customer base is being bombarded with sales pitches for that product.  Why join the flood when it may be already dwindling down to a trickle?

This doesn’t mean you pick a product that is not selling well just because it isn't on a lot of other affiliate web sites.  The skill is to pick a product that there is a good market out there in cyberspace for that product but it is a market that has not been heavily "tapped" yet.  Its tricky business and give yourself permission to experiment.  You may not hit pay dirt with the first product you select.  But you will make some money and you can experiment and learn how to select the right product over time.  There is an "intuition" to any kind of market and getting a gut feel for what the internet market is going to want can happen but it’s a gut feel that is developed, it doesn’t just come naturally to you.

There are some other factors of how a product is positioned and how it is already performing that can help with your decision.  Look at the sales copy for the product to see if it is the kind of marketing tool that is likely to work.  Read through it and see if it creates a desire in your to buy the product.  If they can't convince you, it's probably a poorly crafted sales page and you would be wise to steer clear of the product. 

But another variable about the products you pick other than popularity or movement numbers is far more important to your profitability.  You should pick products that pay outstanding commissions.  A commission on the sale of a product on Clickbank can run from 1% to 75%.  That’s a pretty huge variation in profitability.  A good guideline is never promote a product that pays less than 50% commission.  That way even if your sales are not through the roof, you still make a decent return on your investment for promoting the product and the product owner makes money too.  That’s what this partnership is all about. http://Bankofebook.com

Some Seriously Profitable Clickbank Tips

The "buzz" about Clickbank could convince you that you can virtually fall backward into money using this service.  And while Clickbank does do all it can to make the major functions of buying and selling easy to do, it does take some savvy to know the insider tips to really make big money in this marketplace.  There is no disputing that Clickbank is the largest marketplace of its kind in the world and one of the biggest hot trends of this decade in terms of internet marketing and money making opportunities.  But success has a price which means that many of the big deals are pretty much played out and you have to go in knowing how to look for the good deals that have yet to be tapped.  So a few seriously profitable Clickbank tips can help your profitability in this big marketplace along nicely.

Your Clickbank ID is a central code you must have to put into your link.  That is the one step that must happen for money to come your way.  But you can be a bit savvy how you create that ID in the first place.  One clever way to keep your ID from broadcasting that you are a Clickbank citizen is to use a more critic ID code.  Something like research4u2 or profits2008 and excellent choices.  These have the feel of an internet business and less of one person out on Clickbank trolling for profits.

Having a website is a great step to maximize your Clickbank listings.  By adding links to Clickbank so your website visitors can go there and use the marketplace to buy your products, Clickbank can virtually replace your catalog pages and your shopping cart with a much smoother operation that is easy to keep up to date and that puts your products into a broader affiliate market with no work from you as well.  Keep in mind your niche markets addressed by your site.  You might have a wide variety of products out on Clickbank but not all of them fit with the theme of your web site.  So if your web site is devoted to musical instruments, focus the way you add links and don’t include links to products that don’t fit there.  If you have products that have no home to be promoted on any of your websites, it's easy enough to set up a new one.

If you are thinking about selecting a product as an affiliate on Clickbank and you want to promote it, you want to know that product is doing well in its home setting so you can capture some of that momentum.  So do a little research on the websites that support the products you are thinking about.  It's easy enough to run some keyword searches and to find the page rank of those web sites.  That will give you an idea if the website owner who is behind this product is putting time and money into SEO on the site which would help it generate bigger profits.

Never stop learning how to make your product listings on Clickbank more successful or how to become a successful affiliate.  Make it a private study to learn how to spot products that are on the verge of a boom of success.  This will take some intuition and some watching the market so you learn where different products, product groups or categories are going.  Like a stock market at any time some products will be surging in sales potential while others are tapering off.

It will take some dedication, creativity and even some courage to make bold moves to keep on top of your accounts and keep them profitable week to week.  But if you treat your Clickbank management as part of your larger job of becoming successful on the internet, these efforts will pay off. http://Bankofebook.com

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