Selecting the product

[georgeg_g]

Using CB and so far i've been choosing products to promote that had low popularity ,thinking that competition will be less rough.
But lately am not sure,cause if you exclude the avrg-sale, commission,refrd etc
they dont really matter as much as popularity and gravity,which shows the potential earnings you could make but also the competition.

Which criteria do you use for product selection?

[patrickmorgan]

How do you promote? To what niche? First, find a hungry market and find out their need, want or urge. Then you'll know what product to sell them

[tyroneshum]

Before choosing a product, you should have started with keyword research because from there, you'll eventually get an idea whether it's a hungry market needing promoters or not. Afterward, you could head off to Clickbank to find ideas in creating your own product.

[filiks]

Well based on my experience, it's making sure all the basics are covered well:
-excellent selection of marketing tools
-proper tracking and timely payouts
-personalized support from affiliate managers
-and probably most importantly, a product that actually converts

I know that some affiliates look for EPC and conversion rates when choosing a program, while others are more concerned with the actual product and the tools available to market said product.

[georgeg_g]

I see.
Ok,now lets forget niches and hungry markets and keywords for a while.
So,there are dozens of products of different niches,you choose one niche and that specific has 5-10 products,which one do you chose to promote?
Only by the stats the product has (ave/sale,refrd,comsion etc).

[secrets2010]

Originally Posted by georgeg_g

Using CB and so far i've been choosing products to promote that had low popularity ,thinking that competition will be less rough.
But lately am not sure,cause if you exclude the avrg-sale, commission,refrd etc
they dont really matter as much as popularity and gravity,which shows the potential earnings you could make but also the competition.

Which criteria do you use for product selection?

I choose the products that pay the highest comission, the produtcs that has a good sales page, the products that will help my subscribers...I don't choose products that wont help my subscribers and that don't offer the value that you pay for...why? because my buyers will not buy again if they feel scammed...

i don't take into consideration popularity/gravity because the more popular is the product the less chances i have i will be the first in presenting the product to the subscribers...chances are that my subscribers already know about the product...

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by georgeg_g

Using CB

Originally Posted by georgeg_g

Which criteria do you use for product selection?

Good question: I think CB product selection's probably the single area where most affiliates make mistakes that are most expensive in terms of opportunity-cost.

Here's my own 10-point checklist for CB product-selection (and these are more or less the order in which I look at them, too, I think):-

1. Has to be a niche in which the prospective customers are not already Clickbank affiliates themselves (obviously! - otherwise how can you possibly ever earn an affiliate commission on a sale to them?!) - so for me that completely excludes the "IM advice" and "make money online" niches.

2. No leaks on the sales page: (no opt-in, no "free trial", no "contact the vendor here" etc.)

3. No ridiculous hype or deceptive tactics on the sales page (nothing obviously non-FTC-compliant, no phony urgency/scarcity, nothing clearly deceptive/dishonest, no credibility-losing claims, no income-claims, no cancer-curing claims, no deceptive crap about "as seen on Yahoo/MSN" which people will rightly ridicule!).

4. No pop-ups/discounts.

5. Gravity not too high (over 30 puts me off a bit; over 60 puts me off a bit more; over 100 I won't consider at the moment).

6. Sales-page looks to me as if it will convert my traffic well (obviously subjective and not entirely reliable, but as a copywriter I like to think I can guess pretty well, and I can tell whether it's "professional copy" or "home-made copy" - and I don't care about anyone else's traffic so "overall conversion rates" aren't relevant to me, not that they're available anyway).

7. Good product (I don't promote anything without seeing and assessing it myself, obviously)

8. Good vendor reputation/attitude/behaviour (I'll contact them first, one way or another, and if I don't get a reply I won't promote their product, because I can imagine what their after-sales behaviour will be like if they won't even reply to a prospective business associate).

9. Reasonably high earnings per sale (75% of small amount, 60% of medium amount, 50% of larger amount etc.) - I slightly prefer more expensive products around $100 when I can find them, because I think they're easier for me to sell than cheaper ones (really).

10. Has to be something I can write about (I'm an article marketer) - for me, that probably excludes anything terribly technical or for which I'll have to go to night school to understand the vocabulary.

The things I don't really care about, though I recognise that some affiliates do, which are therefore not on my list at all, are (i) "% rfd", and (ii) affiliate gimmicks (banners/articles etc) offered by the vendor, which I'm probably not going to use anyway. I strongly suspect that almost no professional affiliate has much interest in "marketing tools" provided by the vendor or really takes this into account in product-selection.

In my first 4 or 5 months as a Clickbank affiliate, I earned very, very little. The two things that made a huge and dramatic difference to my income were (a) not touching anything with a vendor's opt-in on the sales-page, and (b) staying well away from high gravity products. I changed just those two things and quite quickly I was really making a living, and have been ever since.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by John McEachern

Why does a gravity over 30 put you off? You think the competition is already to stiff?

Not necessarily, and I wouldn't hesitate to promote a product with a gravity of 45 or so if everything else was right about it, for me. But I can't avoid noticing a real inverse correlation (especially when including all the dreadful things I initially tried to promote when I started, having absolutely no idea what I was doing at all) between gravity-figures and my own sales-numbers. And I'm talking about well over 20 products altogether, which just feels like too many to be a coincidence.

I remember commenting here about 4 or 5 months ago that my two best-selling and easiest-selling products by far both have single-figure gravities, and that's still true now.

It took me a long time to learn and understand that there's no correlation at all between gravity and numbers of sales. I started off making all the same mistaken assumptions that everyone does, imagining that if a product has a higher gravity, this simply must be some sort of evidence that it "must be selling well". And of course it doesn't help that so many "guidebooks" and "e-courses" and even WSO's misinform people about this very point. The reality is very counter-intuitive, after all.

[Dietriffic]

Alexa, that is very enlightening.

[georgeg_g]

Wow alexa thats a post that exceeded my expectations
Big thanks <3

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by John McEachern

Of those 20 products you promote

No, I don't promote 20. I said "more than 20 including the ones I first promoted at the start when I had no idea what I was doing" (or something like that). I tried initially to promote some with vendors' opt-in and high gravity. Big mistake! I actually promote 14 at the moment.

Originally Posted by John McEachern

you typically have 2 of those within a particular niche, right?

I have an average of two within a particular niche. I have one niche with 4 products and a couple with one each, but yes, in principle, I like to try to choose a niche in which I can "add a second product later", if possible: I think it's a good idea. My overall experience with it so far has been something like getting 35% extra sales for 10% extra work.

Originally Posted by John McEachern

And if this is generally so, does this mean that you typically have 2 landing or review pages and test which one of the products do better? That kind of thing?

I always start with one product, and sometimes add a second one later. I like to do the "selection" with my rigorous 10-point list above rather than by testing sales; but I'm never promoting a product I haven't seen myself, so I ought to be able to "get it right", really ...

Originally Posted by John McEachern

do you have pages on your sites where both products you are promoting within the niche are presented?

Not normally but I can do. Depends a bit what you mean by "presented". But anyone going to the site will know that (among other stuff) there are details of two (or more) products there. I'm not sure whether I answered your question ...

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by John McEachern

Maybe another stupid question, but how will they know this, if you don't mind?

They'll see prominent picture-links to them with enticing wording. I use "little banners" to link to other pages within the same site. For no reason other than that I know how to do them (for me, this a huge advantage for anything, and a rarity), and it doesn't make it look like a "blog contents"/"archive" thing, which I don't like. I do actually make my little sites out of blogging software, but it doesn't show: I like them to look like static sites, not Wordpress blogs, however regularly updated they are.

[andr3w84]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

I have an average of two within a particular niche. I have one niche with 4 products and a couple with one each, but yes, in principle, I like to try to choose a niche in which I can "add a second product later", if possible: I think it's a good idea. My overall experience with it so far has been something like getting 35% extra sales for 10% extra work.

I would have thought that it's a good strategy to specialise in few niches (about 2, 3) and promote many products within those niches, as it's easier to become an expert in fewer fields (say weight loss and fitness only instead of weight loss, fitness, alternative energy, background checks, dog training, antiviruses, guitar playing, languages etc etc) so I infer you prioritise entering markets with products that can actually pass your 10-point criteria list, right?

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by andr3w84

I infer you prioritise entering markets with products that can actually pass your 10-point criteria list, right?

Right.

And mine are really niches, not "markets". Real niches are kind of slightly easier to become an expert in, I think? Weight-loss, fitness and alternative energy, to me, are not really niches. (Besides which, I'm skinny, ill, and like sports cars and nuclear power, myself). I do have one "bigger niche", though, in which currently I have 4 products, and there'll always be new products, and they'll always be marketable to the same list.

[andr3w84]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Right.

And mine are really niches, not "markets". Real niches are kind of slightly easier to become an expert in, I think? Weight-loss, fitness and alternative energy, to me, are not really niches. (Besides which, I'm skinny, ill, and like sports cars and nuclear power, myself). I do have one "bigger niche", though, in which currently I have 4 products, and there'll always be new products, and they'll always be marketable to the same list.

You are right. Weight-loss, fitness and alternative energy are indeed markets (the first two quite large in fact). Anyway, rephrasing my comment above, it was apparent to me that it'd be a better strategy to focus on several niches within a single market (i.e. fat loss for working mums, fat loss for new mums, fat loss for seniors, no-diet fat loss, and so on), instead of focusing on more distant niches. What's your opinion on this?

Cheers

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by andr3w84

it was apparent to me that it'd be a better strategy to focus on several niches within a single market (i.e. fat loss for working mums, fat loss for new mums, fat loss for seniors, no-diet fat loss, and so on), instead of focusing on more distant niches. What's your opinion on this?

I hear you and of course completely see the logic of "related" rather than apparently "unrelated" lists, and I have one market like this, myself.

I suspect different things work for different people, and maybe we also look at it slightly differently. In a sense, my opinion has kindly been given by Bgmacaw in this thread, who pretty often saves me from typing stuff out!

[rvrabel2002]

6. Sales-page looks to me as if it will convert my traffic well (obviously subjective and not entirely reliable, but as a copywriter I like to think I can guess pretty well, and I can tell whether it's "professional copy" or "home-made copy" - and I don't care about anyone else's traffic so "overall conversion rates" aren't relevant to me, not that they're available anyway).


Wish I would have seen this thread this time last year. Would have saved me alot of frustration. I would say I probably went against every rule you followed here, and never made a dime. Now I know why...

Quick Question about the statement above, how do you tell the difference between "professional copy" and "home-made copy"? What sorts of things do you look for? Everything else in your 10 points is obvious in and of itself, but this part I can't grasp.

Also, do you ever direct link to an offer? Or do you send them to a review page first? Im guessing you do reviews to "warm up" the potential customer, but how do you think the conversion rates compare?

Not even sure if your still following this thread, but i figured i would give it a shot.

Rob

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by rvrabel2002

Wish I would have seen this thread this time last year. Would have saved me alot of frustration. I would say I probably went against every rule you followed here, and never made a dime.

Well, so did I, when I started. So did many of us, I'm sure. Nobody was born knowing how do affiliate marketing. The annoying thing, in a sense, is how much misinformation there is "out there" which purports to inform and educate and actually ensures it's unlikely that most people will succeed.

Originally Posted by rvrabel2002

how do you tell the difference between "professional copy" and "home-made copy"? What sorts of things do you look for? Everything else in your 10 points is obvious in and of itself, but this part I can't grasp.

It's inevitably the most subjective and "impressionistic" part, I think. I'm afraid my answer's unlikely to be helpful, really. But I've read a lot of copywriting books myself, done some copywriting (including Clickbank-type sales pages), and have just gradually built up a picture of what will convert. Reasonably reliably, I hope.

In a way, it's easier for most people to identify specifically the negatives rather than the positives, perhaps, and the matters covered in the third point might help there, a bit? No ridiculous hype or deceptive tactics on the sales page (nothing obviously non-FTC-compliant, no phony urgency/scarcity, nothing clearly deceptive/dishonest, no credibility-losing claims, no income-claims, no cancer-curing claims, no deceptive crap about "as seen on Yahoo/MSN" which people will rightly ridicule).

Originally Posted by rvrabel2002

Also, do you ever direct link to an offer?

I don't; no.

Originally Posted by rvrabel2002

how do you think the conversion rates compare?

My guess is that for most people, most of the time, there isn't enough of a conversion-rate with direct linking even to measure it meaningfully. I suspect there's no comparison at all. (Talking about CB products here, of course, not necessarily CPA stuff).

Specifically, I think there's one huge mistake to avoid, which is to try direct linking first and "on the basis of its early results", decide which ones are worth creating a little "review-site" (or whatever) for. This is completely fallacious. I believe that some people assume that if something brings in a sale or two by direct linking, then it's going to bring in a lot more with a review-site, and vice-versa. I'd almost be more likely to assume the exact opposite, myself: that the ones that can make any sales on their own aren't going to make any more with a review-site, whereas the ones that bring in nothing by direct linking might be the ones that really need a review-site and could do very well with one.

Originally Posted by rvrabel2002

Not even sure if your still following this thread, but i figured i would give it a shot.

Sorry - my answers are probably of no real use at all.

[Capricorn]

Thank you Alexa for sharing so much valuable info. I've been on Clickbank & tried to promote some of the products a few months ago and have virtually done exact opposite of your 10 steps process - because I was told to do so aaahhh...Esp. in terms of the gravity (always use high gravity as a selector!) LOL. Now I know why nothing ever converted.

Since then I've moved to CPA and am just starting out, but one thing that I have found is that your 10 steps process relates very much to CPA offer sales pages. So many thanks for posting it :-)

[arnold55]

I go to the vendor spotlight and see how many others are subscribing. If there is only one or two I go to another product in the chosen market. In my opinion (in most cases) the more subscribers the better. The second thing I do is look for an affiliate page. This makes my job a lot easier. If it is a well promoted product the vendor will have email letters, articles and other useful tools.

george michaels
"arnold55"

[willoh]

Whoa Alexa, that list puts things in a whole new perspective! Thx for sharing

[rawstyle]

Beautiful post by an even more beautiful internet marketer. Thank you for this, I was fooling around direct linking to CB and using blog articles...but I think I will print that 10 point list out...with your permission of course
Imagine that, making a living with CB products!

[vastcosmos]

Thank you for the information. I am just starting out (again) and your ten points are well taken. I had just selected for, my next campaign, four products based on gravity.

Thanks. I will start over. I don't pretend to understand gravity but your post is well taken.

thanks

Jim

[mcmahanusa]

Thanks, Alexa, for that very helpful post.

I'm technically-challenged, marketing-challenged, and am trying to master walking and chewing gum at the same time, and I need the best input possible.

Your methods seem to be very carefully thought-out. Nice job!

[LindaC]

Very good info Alex. I have purchased e-books that did not contain as much information as you have provided within this thread.

And, in my opinion...your 10-point checklist for CB product selection is among the best post I have read on any of the forms in some time.

My Best 2 U,

LindaC

[JohnMcCabe]

Alexa, you are a dangerous woman - a hottie with brains and the ambition to use them. Well done...

I had pretty much written off CB and such in favor of physical products for affiliate marketing, but your checklist makes so much sense I may have another go at it.

Thanks...

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe

I had pretty much written off CB and such in favor of physical products for affiliate marketing

If that's one of the physical products you're holding in your avatar, you're doing a great job anyway, John. Hoping that nobody will interpret this as straying into politics at all, you might be interested to know that Durbin asks Obama to appoint carp czar - Chicago Breaking News

[Bruce NewMedia]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

6. Sales-page looks to me as if it will convert my traffic well (obviously subjective and not entirely reliable, but as a copywriter I like to think I can guess pretty well, and I can tell whether it's "professional copy" or "home-made copy" - and I don't care about anyone else's traffic so "overall conversion rates" aren't relevant to me, not that they're available anyway).

7. Good product (I don't promote anything without seeing and assessing it myself, obviously)

Alexa, I like your checklist alot. Thanks for sharing it.

Numbers 6 and 7 are particularly important to me. How the sales page looks can make all the difference, of course. I find many CB pages to either be way too 'slick' or so amateurish that they can't be read without snoring. Hitting the 'sweet spot' in sales page copywriting is hard, and most on CB don't come close.

Also, buying the product and seeking a little support tells me a bunch about whether there's any 'there' there. I've sent an email after purchase and waited a week for an answer....now why would I want to promote that?
_____
Bruce

[jafris]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

7. Good product (I don't promote anything without seeing and assessing it myself, obviously)

8. Good vendor reputation/attitude/behaviour (I'll contact them first, one way or another, and if I don't get a reply I won't promote their product, because I can imagine what their after-sales behaviour will be like if they won't even reply to a prospective business associate).

Hi Alexa,

that's a complete paradigm shift from what I have been taught; that is, minimum gravity should be 100?

For readers sake, would you like to post some links of the products that you have selected. A one or two could be taken as benchmarks for of us.

Thanks & Regards

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by brucerby

How the sales page looks can make all the difference, of course. I find many CB pages to either be way too 'slick' or so amateurish that they can't be read without snoring. Hitting the 'sweet spot' in sales page copywriting is hard, and most on CB don't come close.

Yes, I completely agree. When you're looking round for something new to promote, you can plough through huge numbers of sales pages dismissing most of them very quickly indeed. But to me, that's a good thing, because there are 12,000+ products there, and I need to get the numbers down to something pretty small, so the more quickly I can reject them, the better.

Originally Posted by brucerby

Also, buying the product and seeking a little support tells me a bunch about whether there's any 'there' there. I've sent an email after purchase and waited a week for an answer....now why would I want to promote that?

Yes, again I agree entirely: one wants to know that the vendor's ok, as well as the product, though I suspect there's an overall correlation between the two, to some extent, anyway.

Originally Posted by jafris

For readers sake, would you like to post some links of the products that you have selected.

For my competitors' sake, you mean? Please excuse me if I "politely decline", Jafris ...

[jasonl70]

I agree with most of what alexa says. well, we have disagreed in the past
about opt-in forms. I have been burned before, but it was because I didn't opt-in first myself and made sure that the vendor wasn't going to give me problems. But I certainly uderstand Alexa's reluctance.

Also, what I look for depends on how I plan on marketing.

If I'm want to rank for product name searches, then I look at the competition
in the serps.. I also want the product to be somewhat popular, otherwise there
won't be much searching going on

If I'm promoting to my list, it needs to be a really solid product (and it goes
w/o saying that I either bought the product, or was given a review copy). Burn your
subscbribers, and I doubt they will ever buy through you again. I've had plenty of
success here promoting products with low gravity.


No matter how I promote, I look at the quality of the sales page. And by quality,
I'm referring to the copy - not fancy graphics. Good copy has a way of making me
want to buy the product, regardless of my personal interest in the niche!

I also like to be able to get in contact with the product owner. If I generate a lot of sales for someone, I like to be able to start up a relationship with them so that they can do some promoting for me if I decide to do a product launch

[wwwBaron]

2. No leaks on the sales page: (no opt-in, no "free trial", no "contact the vendor here" etc.)

Hey Alexa - While I agree with you about the opt-ins, the "contact the vendor" is actually required by ClickBank:

"Customers must be able to reach you if they have a question about your product prior to purchase. Please include an email address, a link to your email address, or a contact us link on your Pitch Page."

I would have removed the "Contact" link on my pitch pages if it weren't for this directive from CB. So don't hold that against me!

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by wwwBaron

I would have removed the "Contact" link on my pitch pages if it weren't for this directive from CB. So don't hold that against me!

Fair enough: good point and thanks for mentioning it. I won't hold it against you, just as I'm sure you won't hold against me my preference to affiliate with some of the many thousands of vendors who have either removed it after their sales pages have been approved, or never had it there in the first place and still got approved anyway.

This is, I think by pretty common consensus, an altogether lower, far more trivial and less concerning class of "leak" than an opt-in, though.

[reillymary56]

@Alexa

I have read you list and I am curious about one thing. When choosing a clickbank product is it best to create a website with your own domain to promote the product or would the results be just as good/better writing articles and publishing them?

Since your last piece of advice I have been going through click bank searching for a product I can write about, just wondering what's the best method on how to promote it.

Thanks

[thegabrieljibril]

i pay close attention to the sale, i prefer products wirh $20 sale and above,
i also pay attention to the refund rate,this is important,i have made $500 selling
products and got like $400 refunded,how annoying can that be?

and also pay attention to the recurring commissions,those csan add some extra money
you know.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by reillymary56

@Alexa, is it best to create a website with your own domain to promote the product or would the results be just as good/better writing articles and publishing them?

These are not either/or alternatives, really. Typically, you wouldn't get far writing articles and publishing them without creating a website/landing-page (it doesn't need to be a full-sized website: a one-page bloggy-type site will do, to start with, and you can add articles to it as you go). The articles should go on your own little website first, and after being indexed there, go to article directories: all very clearly explained in this thread, among others.

"Direct-linking" (i.e. linking from the articles' resouce-boxes to your hoplink), though not impossible, is (at best) a very poor second-best method of promoting Clickbank (or any other) products as an affiliate, because it deprives you of the two essentials for producing realistic affiliate income: (i) the ability to build a list, and (ii) the ability to pre-sell effectively.

There are one or two Warriors (I think literally one, or two) who sell Clickbank products this way, and do ok, but it's certainly not something I could manage, myself.

There are many other ways of promoting Clickbank products, though, without writing articles: through PPC advertising, and so on. But to the best of my knowledge, these other ways also all work better with some sort of "site" in-between the ad and the product's sales page.

[JohnMcCabe]

Originally Posted by Ngwu Ogonnaya Precious

Then you will definitely hate the IM niche because these are their major characteristics and how will someone buy a product where he or she can't reach the vendor through customer service?

I don't see it happening, if you are afraid of loosing the affiliate commissions then here is a news flash.

Clickbank uses cookie system, so each time a visitor clicks on your affiliate link, your clickbank id will be cookied into his computer and if he visits the site another time without your affiliate link then you don't have to worry because on the payment process, you will be listed as the affiliate.

Here's a return flash, smart guy...

There are so many ways for that cookie to be lost, deleted, overwritten, whatever that it bothers a lot of us.

Including some vendors who think it's clever to

a) put their own affiliate links in their follow-up emails and/or
b) encourage people to buy through their own affiliate links.

They don't care who or if anyone gets a commission or a back-door discount, as long as they get theirs.

Whether the loss is deliberate or accidental, it's still commission we've earned and lost.

[Derwin]

Before choosing products, use few good keywords for searching.Then you will get an idea. It is your own idea that how you want to sell and promote the product. You can design and use your own website, or create a free blog to promote your product.Read the comments of all the members and then decide about your plan.

[JayKing]

Amazing! I've just joined WF a few hours back and already I'm learning things I never expected could help so much!

p.s. in those 4-5 hours I've been here, I've already thanked Alexa thrice for sharing her clear insight and honest views and experience! Thanks Alexa, you rock!

[JDE]

Alexa, thank you VERY MUCH for your 10-point checklist for CB product-selection. It has really helped me to focus on products that will convert, and stay away from the IM niche, which I learned a long time ago to stay away from. There is so much cr-- on Clickbank. Sure you may sell a lot of IM programs, but one may also spend a ton of $$ getting traffic to it, only to slip further into the red as the massive refunds start to pour in.

Would really appreciate anyone else's additions to Alexa's list.

Thanks

[chriscubos]

Hi Alexa, your post and replies to other queries have been very enlightening and encouraging. I'm new to affiliate marketing and I see that most of what you're written is opposed to what is normally being taught, even on some ebooks that I've read. I'm still on my experimenting stage to see what works best for me but I'll try to follow some of your advice up there. Thanks for sharing!

[MilesT]

Thanks for the good tread everyone. Bookmarked.

[MilesT]

Originally Posted by MilesT

Thanks for the good tread everyone. Bookmarked.

... and by 'tread' I mean "thread"

[jbsmith]

Alexa's list is - of course - a terrific way to assess candidate products to promote - but even then, in my experience with dozens of CB, CJ and other affiliate products - you still want to have a method to quickly test conversions.

If you are more established then you have a list that you can test on, if you don't then it means systematically buying or generating that traffic quickly around some solid keywords so you can test conversion.

There have been situtations where the product would have passed all the criteria (minus #6 which is one of the areas many people cannot make a correct decision) and still failed in trials, while others where they broke the rules (high gravity, affiliate links, opt-in first, etc... and conversion was very good).

Finally, a very important factor is how much of a relationship you have built with your market - cold affiliate marketing is tough, but if you look at the niche as a longer-term opportuntiy to help those within your niche, you create a relationship, give them some good content, then they will buy pretty much anything you recommend (which means a much greater responsibility on your part to only market the highest quality products).

For example, if you operate in the fitness niche and you plug your prospects into a weekly program of tips, techniques and strategies on fitness, hold a free teleseminar with a guest expert, provide a case study or two and THEN recommend a high quality product you will see your sales explode...

Jeff

[Rayson14]

How about this product? Do you think this will convert sales?

Welcome to Government-Records.com

Is this professional Looking?
This has 100 gravity on click back If Im not mistaken...

[sme]

Amazing thread and great advice by Alexa. Thanks a lot.

[Lauryn]

Alexa's got some kick-butt advice in just about every thread I happen to peruse.

[malaika]

Now I know why I never made any significant amounts of money with clickbank. Let me go at it again. Will post a review of my attempts here after 3 months.

[yours2u]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

In my first 4 or 5 months as a Clickbank affiliate, I earned very, very little. The two things that made a huge and dramatic difference to my income were (a) not touching anything with a vendor's opt-in on the sales-page, and (b) staying well away from high gravity products.

That's my theory in a nutshell. Excellent list and comment - thanks

[Haphiza]

There are some excellent posts on this thread. Since I am just trying to learn about affiliate marketing I have found some very good advice here which I can use.

Thank you all
Haphiza Baboolal