Doing reviews on CB products

You have no idea of how much the vendor is making off of direct sales though and the vendor could also have a dozen products that he is promoting with more in the pipe.

If it really is a good product and it converts then jump on it. Get yourself established for that product and freakin' run with it! Send him 1000 hops, make a bunch of sales and then ask him for a review copy or buy the thing yourself after you make two sales. If it's really that great then it will be a good investment in your business.

Exactly. I hardly want to promote, and put the reputation of my blog, behind a product with non-existent customer service.

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It's actually common for products with gravities around 5 - 10 to outsell products with gravities over 100.

Gravity is an indication of how much competition there is. It measures the number of affiliates who have each made one or more sales over the previous 8 weeks. Each affiliate gets, effectively, a “score” between 0.1 and 1.0 (according to when they made their last sale, but not according to the quantity they sold) and the total is the product's gravity figure. Sounds easy enough to understand? It isn’t.

Nearly all internet marketing guides make the howling mistake of advising beginners to promote only high gravity products. This has a hugely distorting effect on the market and its observed statistics. There's a big and constant turnover of new affiliates trying to sell high gravity products, failing, dropping out and being replaced by others repeating their experiences. This of course boosts those products' gravity figures further and further, because gravity measures the number of affiliates who (eventually) make a sale, not the number of sales made.

If there are two otherwise equivalent and equally good products, with otherwise matching statistical parameters, but one has a gravity of 15 and the other has a gravity of 150, my own instincts are to suspect very strongly that (other things being equal) both the conversion-rate and the numbers of sales are actually very likely to be higher for the lower gravity product.

So, I actually avoid high gravity products: the day I learned that (and a few other things) and started acting on it was the day I started earning some real money through being a Clickbank affiliate

I promote 15 different Clickbank products at the moment, and my two best-converting products, by far, out of all those, both have single-figure gravities. Some people think that's a “coincidence”. I think they’re wrong.

I stay away from high gravity products because (as Clickbank now, finally, advises affiliates openly on their site) the one thing you know for sure about a high gravity product is that it's going to be competitive to sell.

Here's a little example, which might possibly clarify the issues:-

Clickbank Product A

- Sales-page conversion-rate 2.8%
- Solid product from well-known marketer
- Product has almost no refund requests
- He has 20 affiliates of whom 10 are superaffiliates who sell huge numbers of the product
- Product is easy to promote and sell
- Sales numbers are therefore very high, but the gravity figure is obviously very low (maybe around 10)

Clickbank Product B

- Sales-page conversion-rate 0.2%
- Dreadful product from scammy marketer
- Refund request-rate is higher, of course
- Product had a "professional launch" with 100 "temporary affiliates" (accounts used once each to buy one product, privately refunded, and/or the figures were massaged in one of the other "customary ways")
- Product is obviously a complete and utter nightmare to promote and sell because the sales-page doesn't convert well
- Gravity figure starts out at about 110, and rapidly rises to 150/200 because gullible affiliates are attracted by the gravity figure, believing wrongly that it "validates the fact that the product is selling very well", and they all struggle and waste time/money, but eventually they obviously make 1 or 2 sales each anyway, and for this reason the gravity figure rises still further to 250/300 as the inevitable consequence of its self-fulfilling prophecy for the naive.

Obviously enough, product "B" is the high gravity product.

Obviously enough, product "A" is the one for which I want to be an affiliate.

These examples are in no way contrived. They're both realistic and common.

A product with 20 affiliates each making 1,000 sales will have a far lower gravity than a product with 500 affiliates, all attracted by the high gravity and struggling to make 1 sale each because the sales page hardly converts their traffic at all. But by the time they make 1 sale each, that boosts the gravity figure still higher. This is part of the explanation for the sometimes dreadful conversion-rates of the sales pages of the products with the highest gravities.

Key points:

(i) there's no correlation between the gravity figure and the conversion-rate

(ii) there's no correlation between the gravity figure and the number of sales: specifically, for various reasons, low gravity products can have enormous numbers of sales without this showing. High gravity products can (and quite often do) have comparatively low sales. This confuses a lot of people.

Here are more little examples of how the numbers work:-

- A product with 100 active affiliates each making steady sales will typically (but not necessarily) have a gravity score around 50 - 70

- A product with 100 active affiliates who all made their sales very recently will have a gravity score much closer to 100

- A product with 100 active affiliates who all made their last sale seven and a half weeks ago will typically have a gravity score of about 10

- A product with 100 active affiliates can't have a gravity figure higher than 100, however many copies they each sell

- If product A has 100 affiliates who each made one sale last week but have never made any other sales at all, and product B has 100 affiliates who have each made 500 sales over the last 2 months, of which in each case the most recent sale was last week, then these two products have the same gravity, though one has of course sold 500 times the number of copies of the other. (This difference will be reflected to some extent in the product's "popularity score", but not in its "gravity score").

If the five points above make sense to you, then you know how "gravity" really works.

Then you've repeatedly been given some seriously misguided advice on the subject, John. But so have most people.