Questions concerning Clickbank

You sound like you are on the right track. Yes the money is in the list. Join aweber.com and from there you can gain everything you need to make a list.

The problem with promoting products whose sales pages have a vendor opt-in is there being no guarantee that the vendor won't substitute his own affiliate link in any follow-up emails he sends to the prospective customer, thus overriding your own affiliate cookie and depriving you of your deserved commissions.

Some affiliates are prepared to do this, having first made the effort to check whether this is a practice the vendor engages in, but it's by no means foolproof way of protecting yourself. You cannot check every email the vendor sends, to every subscriber, all of the time.

The better option, according to many successful and professional affiliates, is to simply pass up on such products.

If there is a product / sales page you really like, you can, of course, ask the vendor to set up a second, alternative sales-page from which the opt-in form has been removed. In some cases, they will be only too happy to oblige.

Most customers will not purchase a product on the first visit to a sales page. If you don't capture their contact details so that you can follow up with them, you will be depriving yourself of the majority of sales that you could otherwise have made.

For Clickbank products, building a mailing list is pretty much a necessity.

There is no "maximum": what sites you can outrank is determined by the amount of SEO you're able and/or prepared to do. "Increase intelligence" is a pretty short, generic keyword phrase, though. You might want to start off by targeting some less competitive, more specific, long-tail keywords and gradually building up to the shorter ones in the longer term, as your website amasses more authority.

They're referring to sales pages which contain a means for the prospective customer to be directly in email contact with the product's vendor, with the potential for the referring affiliate to be cut out of the loop, i.e. a box into with the prospect can put his email address for a "free trial", "free information", "free video", "newsletter", "free report" or whatever else.

You don't have to avoid them: it's up to you.

But as you can see in many threads such as this one, for good and understandable reasons, very few serious affiliate will promote these products unless the vendor also produces a copy of the sales page without the opt-in (which is trivially easy for them to do).

Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't. It depends on the vendor. Unfortunately, they are entitled to send the prospective customer email containing hoplinks other than yours. Two things are for sure:-

(i) It's outside your control whether or not you get paid;

(ii) Contrary to what some people apparently believe, you can't reliably "judge it for yourself" by opting in yourself and seeing what sort of email links you get back from the vendor (this is explained in detail in the thread I've linked to above).

Given the ease with which vendors can give affiliates a choice of sales page, and the fact that there are over 14,000 currently active Clickbank products from which affiliates can choose what to promote, it's not easy for many of us to imagine how promoting a product with a vendor's opt-in on the sales page could ever possibly be a "wise" or a "sensible" thing to do.

That's putting it very, very, very, very mildly indeed. In the case of Clickbank products, it's very difficult indeed to make steady sales without doing that.

Yes. (Nice easy one, there!).

You need to join an autoresponder company such as Aweber (one of the best, $1 for the first month, $19 per month after that, build as many lists as you want for one monthly price); they all have tutorials/instructions showing you what to do.

These are competitive keywords.

Personally, I've built the SEO aspects of my business mostly on longer-tail keywords than that. But it depends what your business model is, how important it is to you to rank well for competitive keywords, how much SEO you want to do, and so on.

One tip: you can almost ignore "page rank": it's barely significant at all. You can see this from how very common it is for lower-PR pages to outrank higher-PR pages. "Page rank" was last updated about 3 months ago, but the previous update before that was over a year ago. Nobody knows whether or when Google will update "page ranks" again anyway. They're not worth thinking about. Relevance is far more important.

Edited to add: oooh, Michael got in while I was still typing ...

I can help to answer question three, but i don't know much about how to add an email option to your site.
Some sites invest a lot of time and money in their site which means they can outsource article writing and link building, these guys are usually focusing on very popular terms such as 'buy viagra' or 'buy engagement rings' and have thousands of backlinks.
You should focus on keywords with little competition (maybe your main competitor having around a hundred - two hundred backlinks), but being a fairly popular search term and have the ability to sell your clickbank product on the site.
Bare in mind that some keywords have variations that focus on your product and are fairly popular with low to medium competition.

For the phrase 'increase intelligence' the main competitor (rank number one) has 250 backlinks, it's up to you whether you feel you can build more than 250 backlinks than him, this phrase has around 6,600 searches per month.

Great, all my questions have been answered. This will really help me.

One more thing I'm struggling with at the moment when I'm doing keyword research:
I know I should aim on long-tail keywords but these give me very low [exact] monthly searches on the google tool, where as general, shorter keywords keywords usually are searched more in the [exact] brackets.
Is the [exact] really important? My current site I'm building has 12k broad searches and only 900 [exact] ones. What are general numbers I should aim at, how much [exact] and how much broad search? And if I have to decide between low [exact] but low competition and good broad search what should I do?

It seems all vendors on Clickbank are thrusting their sign up for a 'free reports' so they can rob the affiliate who may be spending quite a bit of money With Google Adwords to get eyeballs to these offers.

That's the reason I gave up Clickbank - it seems to be full of scammers.

As for the Google Adwords campaigns - the 'long tail' is not worth chasing for nobody is searching for those terms and you will waste your time waiting for eyeballs.

The big money is to be made by those marketers with balls! Put your money on the generic terms where all the searches are for - and watch the serious flood of traffic come in in! (With a lot of orders!)

My advice - stay away from Clickbank.

I would like to hear some more opinions about that.
I learned that I should aim for those long tail keywords, which have less competition but also less [exact] matches.

Because you can loose commissions that should be credited to you. For example, you drive traffic to the vendor's page, your traffic interested with "free" whatever the vendor offers. Your traffic gives their email address, vendor later sends promotional email with his own hoplink, your traffic buys from that link, commission that should be yours goes to the vendor, not you.

When you have email list, you won't loose contact with the people that may buy something from you in the future. You can also promote different product with the same niche.


You can but it may take a long time