Is this Clickbank strategy workable?

That's potentially going to give you a better chance, but I still don't know anyone who sells numbers worth talking about of ClickBank products without list-building. You need to establish a relationship with potential customers, based on credibility, respect and trust. Clearly you can't do that with one article and a link to a sales page/hoplink. I suppose it could (just about) be argued that you have a chance to do it, or at least to start to do it, by having them visit a content-rich, value-packed, useful, helpful, interesting website. But I can't even sell them that way, myself, without a list.

It would be a silly approach, in my opinion, to go to all the trouble of doing that and not opt them in and build a list.

How do you keep people returning regularly to your site, without having a list? (Very few people buy a ClickBank product at their first visit to a sales page, so you have to be able to do that!).

How do you make repeated sales to the same customers, as an affiliate, without a list? (That's where most of the money is, in affiliate marketing!).

All that can ever bring you is search-engine traffic, though?

I've been doing this for 4 years, in 8 different niches, and would absolutely hate to try to build a business based on selling ClickBank products to SEO traffic. For me, it's invariably the worst-converting kind of traffic there is. :p

Not to mention the most precarious kind, of course ...

This hasn't been my experience at all.

To be honest, my instinctive reaction to your proposed strategy is that you'll barely make any sales at all with it (I know I wouldn't, and I know several people who've tried it and literally not made a sale at all, at the various points at which they've discussed it with me), but I try to cultivate the habit of "toning down" what I say here and being less outspoken than comes naturally to me.

Let's not get confused here between "ClickBank products" specifically and "affiliate products" in general, though. I'm referring to something like "informational e-books at $37/$47/$67/$97" when I say "ClickBank products" (that being the kind of thing I typically sell, myself). I'm not suggesting that what I've said above applies (for example) to Amazon products (which I also sell, now, and they're a whole different ball-game, of course. I know that it is possible to sell Amazon products without list-building. I still think it's generally far from an optimal approach, though, myself).

On your site, ok. Well, you've done well, then. Just think how well you might do by building lists.

Well ... ok ... at $25/$30 average commissions (I'm pulling a number out of the air, here, with no idea what you're selling), that's about one sale per week, isn't it?

Yes, I hear you. (You're by no means alone, there!).

They have advantages and disadvantages.

I have some experience with them - not a huge amount, at all.

The great advantage is that if you find something that works well, it tends to be scalable, at least up to a point.

They suit people with patience and an enthusiasm for "detailed analysis", certainly.

Not a major aim of mine, though to be honest I have astonishing rankings (they astonish me, anyway, because I do so little "aimed at SEO" but these days the value of backlinks on quality, relevant sites, which you get through article syndication, can certainly be dramatic).

Surely a very good aim, here? Because you're dealing with some highly targeted traffic that way, without having to do the targeting yourself? But surely you'd want to keep as high a proportion of that traffic as possible, having attracted it to your site? I struggle to see any sense at all in not list-building, if you're doing that.

I don't even know enough about "social media traffic" to discuss it productively; sorry. I may be biased, but I certainly don't instinctively think of it as being "highly targeted traffic for 30-40 health niche products" ...

But I imagine I might get some traffic to these pages by way of adding the reviews to an already pretty established site. But I am worried that if people come directly from the search engines to a review page, the user might just hit the back button since they will probably want to land on a content page, not review. What do you think?

But then again, in most cases, the products I review will be about products that are very targeted to some of highly trafficked pages and therefore the review will not be standalone page but rather linked to from the at end of the content page. And any direct traffic to the review page will be a bonus, but I do suspect people who go to

So I am thinking the best way to review the product is not to mention the product until the middle and towards the end of the review. If people coming on from search and rightaway notice its a review of a product, the chances of exiting the site is high.

Yes.

(It's not exactly something I'd do, myself, but it's undeniably list-building.)

I don't know the answer to your PPC question. Would like to see others' replies to it, though, since I ought to know it, and am interested, but can only guess, myself - which doesn't help anyone.

They both apply only to recurring billing products and exclude the initial sale in their calculation.

Average % rebill is just the average commission rate earned on the rebills.

Average rebill total is the average total amount of money earned, per customer, by affiliates, from rebills (from which you can estimate for how long the average customer remains subscribed, which is a hugely important thing to be able to estimate).

Be careful, though: these figures can sometimes be a little misleading, if the rebill price has changed during the period over which they were compiled. In these cases, they'll often include some at one price and some at another, with no way of knowing how many of each contributed to the "average".

Not very much, on its own.

Four posts that might help:

Gravity High or Lower - Which Sells Best & Why?
Understanding Clickbank Gravity
Clickbank and gravity
Clickbank gravity - is there a sweet-spot here?

Choosing products with high gravity scores was one of the reasons I earned nothing for about 4 months when I started. I started earning when I changed my mind about that. "Just saying".

Selecting the product

Probably, yes. It's possible that there's only one affiliate who rarely sells one, and last made a sale a month ago (that would give a gravity of 0.5). But that isn't necessarily a reason not to promote it. You won't have much competition, perhaps, which can be good? It depends why it hasn't really been generating sales of late?

It's also possible that the vendor regularly sells thousands of copies without an affiliate being involved at all: those don't count toward the gravity.

For the record: gravities are not percentages: it's just a "number".

My reviews probably average around 800+ words.

Yeah, people have short attention spans but when the review is written more personally, then they'll want to read the whole thing.

Personally, meaning, instead of writing a review just like the salespage, you write I liked how the product helped me with this and after so many days using the product it did this, etc....

Call to action

But I also make most of my reviews half personal review and half sales page. All the boring stuff my personal story with the offer and some of the features are in each review, but I also highlight what I want them to see. (look at a good sales page you'll see what I'm talking about) you need to make sure you add some form of "call to action".

E.G. if the offer has a free trial, I'll add an image that just flat out says try wp theme for free today, or something along those lines.

Another thing I do is in the middle of my review I add an affiliate link to my offer but my anchor text will say, click here to watch video, or something similar. The visitor see these call of action images or links from the corner of their eye right when they land on my review, and they just have to click on it usually before they ever even start reading my review.

I put a call to action on top and at least one more at the bottom.

Interesting. This may also actually be a good way to advertise your site, not just for getting sales. I have never used Fiverr, but how about paying someone with significant Twitter followers to twit about site for $5?