Clickbank marketplace

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1 HOW TO CHOOSE A PRODUCT So now that you understand the basics of what affiliate marketing is, and you've signed up for an account, it's time to choose a product to sell and become an affiliate! One of the crucial factors in how much money you'll make from this system is your choice of product. It should come as no surprise that some products sell better than others. A product that sells well will net you a nice profit where as a product that doesn't sell will obviously not get you any commissioned sales! You want to advertise a product that customers actually want and which they genuinely find useful. So how do you choose a good product? If you look at the Clickbank marketplace you'll be able to see all of the products available for sale, in a variety of niches (a niche is a specifically focused subset of a market). They have many different statistics which you can use to choose a product. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 8

2 GRAVITY Here you can search for products in specific niches if you want to and you can see statistics about each product. You're able to see how much you'll get per sale of a product as well as what royalty percentage you receive in commission. There is another statistic here called gravity which is very important. Gravity measures how popular a product is with affiliates. It is also loosely related to how well a product sells. It's calculated based on the number of affiliates who have made a sale on that product recently. A high gravity score means that many affiliates have sold that product recently. A low score means that not many affiliates have sold that product recently. It does not take into account the total number of sales for a product, only the number of affiliates that have sold it recently. It is a good indicator of which products are worth promoting from the marketplace and you should generally try to choose a product with high gravity. You want to choose a product that has high gravity, but not too high. A very high gravity score means that you'll be competing heavily with other affiliates for a piece of the pie since it's so popular. Start off by choosing a product with a gravity score of between 20 and 50. Later on you can experiment with a range of products. NICHE Some niches have more paying customers than others and certain niches are generally just more popular. Niches such as health, personal development, weight loss, Xbox, Playstation, Forex, Diablo, and World of Warcraft are always popular. If you don't really mind what niche your product comes from then you can simply use gravity to determine which product is best for you. I do advise however that you stay away from any products in the "make money online" niche as it is highly saturated (many affiliates in this niche trying to promote the same products) and it will be difficult to compete amongst all the noise. COMMISSION You want to choose a product that gives you a high return every time it is sold. The "Average $/sale" will tell you how much you receive for each affiliate sale. Higher numbers are always better! Most products have a good return, so choose whatever you are comfortable with. $15 per sale is a pretty good minimum to aim for. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 9

3 CB-ANALYTICS The website CB-Analytics.com makes all of the analysis easier when choosing a product to promote via Clickbank. You can organize products by their gravity and see how their statistics have changed over time. Here the "Average $/sale" is listed as EPS (Earning Per Sale). It's a valuable tool when you want to quickly sort products by gravity in all niches. I recommend using it over Clickbank's marketplace to find your product. PRODUCT CRITERIA Using the above information it's time to choose a product. Use CB-Analytics to view the Top Products page, sorted by Gravity. And then follow the criteria set out below: Gravity between 20 and 50 Popular but not oversaturated niche High EPS ("Average $/sale") - whatever amount you're happy with Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 10

4 HOPLINKS Once you've found a product, the next step is to generate a hoplink. A hoplink (also known as an affiliate link) is a unique web address that customers can visit to go to the sales page of the product that you are promoting. When a customer buys the product through that page (having been directed there via your hoplink) you will receive commission. The hoplink is the part of the affiliate system which identifies you as the one who drove a customer through to purchase. To generate a hoplink, find the product that you are promoting on the Clickbank marketplace. If you've found your product via CB-Analytics you may have to search for it on the Clickbank marketplace. Click the promote button. Next, ensuring that your account nickname is entered correctly, Click Create. You don't need a tracking ID. They are used for advanced traffic analytics. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 11

5 Finally, copy the hoplink to notepad so that we can use it later. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 12

6 STEP 2 - FINDING A GREAT KEYWORD Now that we've got a great product to promote, we need to find a great keyword to go with it! A keyword is a short phrase such as "weight loss" or "Diablo 3 gold" which relates to the product. The keyword is going to be used to generate traffic so that people can find out about the product we are promoting. We want a system where people search for our keyword on a document website, find our related document, and then click the affiliate link contained within. For this reason, your keyword must be related to the product you are promoting. Many keywords related to your product will already be highly competitive. This means that many other people are also trying to drive traffic to their own websites with the same keyword. You want to select a keyword which isn't competitive, but still has many people searching for it. This is both an art and a science. So how do you find a keyword related to your product? Go to the product's sales page, scroll to the bottom, and look for a link called something like "Affiliates". Here you'll find a whole bunch of resources for helping you promote the product better such as graphics and articles, but you'll also hopefully find some keywords that the vendor has researched for you in advance. Copy these keywords into a notepad on your computer for now. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 13

7 If the product doesn't have an affiliate page setup like this, then you can also view the source code of the website and take a look at the keywords used in its META tags. In this example we've got "Diablo 3 tips, Diablo 3 guide, Diablo 3 secrets, Diablo 3 strategy, Diablo 3 leveling". These are aall great keywords to get started with! Now that we've come up with a list of possible keywords, we have to choose one to promote our product with. SELECTING THE BEST KEYWORD Not all of our keywords are going to be good. As I mentioned before, some keywords are fairly competitive and have many people all trying to promote their own websites and products. Next I'll show you how to find out how many searches a keyword receives each month on Google and how competitive it is. Open Google Keywords Tool and put your list of keywords in. The Google Keywords Tool is capable of showing you how many searches there are each month for a particular phrase (keyword) and who else is trying to advertise for that same keyword. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 14

8 This tool makes things pretty easy from here on. What you're interested in is the Competition and the Global Monthly Searches. You're looking for Low Competition and a high number of Global Monthly Searches. Low competition means that you won't be competing against others for the same traffic, and the more people you have searching for per month, the more potential customers you have. You'll want at least 1,000 Global Monthly Searches (which equates to about 33 searches per day) but I would recommend at least 5,000. Though personally, I wouldn't bother with anything less than about 10,000. However, again, some niches are more competitive than others and sometimes you've got to take what you can get! Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 15

9 Medium competition can actually be helpful. It indicates that the keyword is popular enough for people to want to advertise through it, demonstrating that it's successful, but it's not so saturated that you won't get noticed. However, you should definitely not try anything with high competition. You'll be drowned out by someone with a much bigger marketing campaign and budget. If none of your keywords have Low Competition and a high number of Global Monthly Searches then you'll want to keep looking for new keywords. The easiest way to do this is to just add words onto you existing keywords, or try synonyms. I have some personal knowledge about Diablo 3 and so I was able to add the words "auction house" to my keywords to get the keyword "Diablo 3 real auction house". This is where selecting a niche that you're familiar with comes in handy. My knowledge of Diablo 3 allowed me to work out what some possible keywords could be, and you should do the same! Think about the niche and product you're dealing with and what people could be searching for if they needed the product. If you're not familiar with the niche you may need to do a bit of research through Google to determine what might be appropriate. Try adding filler words and phrases such as "how to" and "guide" to the start and end of your keywords. For example, the keyword "Diablo 3 gold" could turn into "How to buy Diablo 3 gold" or "Diablo 3 gold guide". The suggestions that the Google Keywords Tool give are also very useful in finding new keywords to use. Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 16

10 STEP 3 - CREATING A PDF DOCUMENT Now here comes the autopilot money making machine! We're going to create a PDF document, fill it with information on the product that you're promoting, and place our affiliate link at the end. The idea is that people will read this document, follow the affiliate link to the vendor's page, buy a copy and earn you money. Sound simple? It is. Let's do it. Open up Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, or any other program that can create documents and save them as PDF files. Open Office Writer is great because it's free! Now, if you're lucky enough, your vendor may have even given you some articles already to copy and paste, meaning you don't have to do any work at all! Check the same affiliate page that we mentioned before, the one which hopefully also gave you some keywords. If there's an article in there, great! Paste it into your document and format it so that it looks nice. If you don't have an article written for you then that's no problem. Instead, just grab all the information that you need from the sales page of your product! Start by copying the headline (the title of the product) and underneath it place the subtext or whatever other eye-catching statements are at the top of the page. If the product uses images for its headlines you might want to use those too. Next, take the core benefits of the product and list them as bullet points. You can often find a list of summarized benefits somewhere on the sales page. Then use any more information you think might be interesting to finish creating an exciting article about your product. Your document should be about a page long, and you can use large fonts to help pad it out. At the end of your article write "CLICK HERE FOR INSTANT ACCESS!" in a large font and hyperlink it to your affiliate/hop link that you saved earlier. You can hyperlink in Microsoft Word by highlighting the phrase that you wish to hyperlink, right-clicking it and entering your URL. If you're unable to hyperlink your affiliate link then simply paste it at the bottom underneath "CLICK HERE FOR INSTANT ACCESS!" Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 17

11 Here's the example that I came up with. It's a mixture of images and copy taken from articles on the sales page. Get creative and add your own flair to make it more interesting! Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 18

12 SAVE YOUR DOCUMENT Save the document as a.pdf file. If you have an older version of Word or are unable to save as PDF you can use one of the following websites to convert it for you: Name the file the same as your keyword. For example I've named my file "Diablo 3 Secrets". Copyright Edward Floyd 2012 Page 19