Is it worth promoting products with a very low gravity?

This is so true. Many people tend to concentrate too much on gravity, almost to the exclusion of all other factors, when it comes to selecting products to promote. This is actually a great opportunity for us to do some research on "untapped" products with lower gravity scores that might turn out to be excellent products that were missed by the "herd" of affiliates - these untapped products could be great moneymakers for us, as there is next to no affiliate competition when it comes to promoting them!

Paul

Sure ...

The 10,000 sales, of course, are theoretical only: it's pretty artificial to envisage that a product could literally have one affiliate only who sells 10,000 copies. But that would indeed be the effect, if it happened. The increase in gravity is the same maximum of 1 point whether s/he sells 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000 copies of the product.

And of course the vendor's own sales (i.e. non-affiliate-referred), if any, aren't included in the gravity figure at all.

Gravity measures the number of affiliates who have each made 1+ sales, and that's all it measures. Ok, it measures it a funny way, with each affiliate's maximum 1-point contribution to the overall score tailing off progressively over an 8-week period, but it still measures the number of affiliates rather than the number of sales.

Low gravity doesn't matter. Indeed. Low gravity isn't a reason not to promote a product.

High gravity can be another story. For some of us, high gravity very reasonably and realistically rings some risk/alarm bells. As I've explained in this post, which is where my "illustrative examples" live.

I'm not suggesting that all high gravity products are going to be hard to convert, of course (much though some people here like persistently to misquote me as having said exactly that!). Simply that the possibility is raised, and that there can be good and specific and valid and logical reasons for that.

To me, the slightly strange thing about gravity is the number of people who think that gravity represents some sort of arcane formula, the details of which will never be known, when in reality it's always been reasonably well explained and defined (by Clickbank's standards, anyway), and it's just so many people's conclusions about it that are so bizarrely erroneous.

To be fair, though, Clickbank could of course easily explain it just a little bit better than they do, perhaps even by giving a couple of examples like the ones I've given in some older threads here (as they do - on other pages - on the subject of commission payments).

Including products I've promoted in the past but don't still promote now, products I've promoted steadily for a long time and products I've started promoting only fairly recently, I've promoted over 25 Clickbank products now, over the last 2 years. In all that time, products with a gravity figure between about 2 and about 7 have consistently been the kindest to me, and products with a gravity figure above about 50 have consistently been the hardest. I accept that many people reading this will, perhaps not unreasonably, comment (even if only to themselves) that 25 is a very small number out of 13,500, and that we're talking about only one person's limited experience, here.

So - in summary: gravity isn't actually meaningless to me, but I have a great deal more sympathy with and respect for the proposition that one might want totally to ignore it for product-selection purposes than the distorted and extremely misguided perception that one should deliberately aim to select high-gravity products.

The latter suggestion, to me, is precisely as "logical" and "reasonable" as article marketers using spinning and mass-submission software because they imagine that they'll "avoid a duplicate content penalty and get a better quality backlink from a spun article than they will from a syndicated one". The two situations are, indeed, examples of exactly the same phenomenon so prevalent in the murky world of internet marketing: in both cases, a misguided decision has been made on the basis of a fundamental misapprehension about the "information" underlying it. This is my story and I'm sticking to it.

Gravity is totally meaningless to me, I guess because I don't really understand Clickbank's algorithm. If a product fits one of my niches, I'll buy it and if it checks out ok I'll develop my own SEO optin sales page for it. Most of the time the sales pages and affiliate tools are completely worthless IMO. The more popular products may have excellent promotional tools, but then you've also got lots more competition among other affiliates using these same promotional tools. If a product fits your niche, simply check it out and do your own promotions for it.

If you consider that ANY super affiliate under one affiliate account has only a "plus 1" influence on any gravity score, then yes, it is worth it. The only thing you will miss is the capturing of ready-to-buy visitors through search engine traffic. Most likely that kind of traffic won't exist for such a low-gravity product.