$400 Per Month ClickBank Blog - Success After Years of Failing!

I have to say I've studied the IM arena on and off for a long time. I knew what to do to make money online but could never apply myself to do it.

I then broke it down (chunked it down to be précise) into a set of steps that I would follow. When I had these steps (really - they're goals) completed I felt that I should start making money.

I want to share with you guys how I did it.


Step 1 - Pick a Niche and a Product


I selected a ClickBank product with a HIGH price tag. This particular one costs upwards of $100 and has a steady gravity that seems to hover in the low to high 20s.

Why did I select this kind of product? I figured the competition isn't much, the niche isn't super competitive and there were about 100+ searches for the product name every month (exact match searches - don't be fooled by the broad match ones!!).

Well, I'm starting out here and I don't have the budget to do high PPC style campaigns. I researched traffic options and figured my best bets would be SEO & forum traffic. The niche I selected had a nice selection of forums which weren't being advertised on.


Step 2 - Setup my Blog

Good God - talk about information overload and losing focus. Picking a niche and product was EASY. Finding a worthwhile wordpress template was a nightmare. I ended up buying a $99 theme and probably wasted TOO much time trying to figure out Wordpress.

Lesson learned for the newbies - save yourself a lot of time and just stick with the default 2011 theme or download Cordobo Green Parks. Both are free, both are great for blogging and you dont' want to get distracted.

1) I published a total of 5 articles on the blog around my niche and one of them was a straight up product review of my ClickBank product.

2) Each article is about 1,000 words wrong. The product review article was over 1,200 words. I did this with no distractions and was very careful with grammar, writing style and all that. I credit Alexa Smith's posts around here on article length (although she's writing from the standpoint of syndication) to push me to write longer articles.

Step 3 - Get Traffic

I then started getting backlinks. My backlinks were exclusively the following:

- Social Bookmarking packages
- High PR blog comment packages
- Publish to EZA

I purchased the link packages off the Warrior Forum and another Internet Marketing forum.

I published to EZA in hopes that I would get syndicated. I largely got syndicated by auto-blogs. I had two legit websites pick me up which was nice!

Step 4 - Ignore the Warrior Forum!

I don't post here too often but it's too addictive and I'm a sucker for WSO's. Thankfully, Internet forum addiction worked to my benefit here. Why? Because my niche actually had 2 very high traffic forums that I could start posting on.

So I also started posting on a few forums in my niche every day. After I built up a few a friends and added some value I added a link back to my blog (not an affiliate link!! just a link back to my blog in my signature file).

This was the best part - if I had downtime at work I'd just socialize on forums. Simply chatting away online was a purely 100% whitehat link building method for me.

Step 5 - Test, Test & More Testing

In about two weeks my site was indexed and ranking on page 1 of google for a few of the terms. The product term (which is where most of my money comes in from) was on the 2nd page.

I paid for more links until I was in the top 3.

I watched Google Analytics very carefully and WebMaster tools. I noticed I was ranking for a few other terms that I hadn't thought about and so I started linking for those too.


Step 6 - Revise, Revise Revise! It's All About the Pre-Sell!!!

I noticed finally I was getting about 5 hops a day even though my site was getting much more traffic than that!

- I went out to the product site's affiliate tools page and grabbed some of the smaller banner ad sizes and embedded them into each of the five blog posts.

- I created a few more obvious text based call to actions (see my signature file for an example) also on the site.

- I added a big fat side banner.

All in all my site didn't look spammy but it became more obvious that I was advertising something.

I started getting more hops. I literally went from 3-5 hops a day to 30+ with these changes.

All along I was still tweaking my rankings and doing more forum posting while I was at work.

Within a 1,000 hops I made 1 sale! I know that sucks as far as conversion goes - but it was my $$ online.

I emailed the product owner and he was kind enough to review my site. He quickly pointed out that my pre-sell was crappy. I was selling very hard and even he was a little annoyed with me with my approach. He felt I should be converting at least 5x, possibly more if I had been building a list.

That's when I realized it's all about the pre-sell.

This is an expensive product and people want an excellent review. I looked at my review and actually made it more grounded in reality. I took out all the hype and instead wrote a more in-depth review (now up to 1,500 words).

My review pointed out the following:

- product weaknesses
- product caveats
- strengths of the product
- who sells it, who the payment processor is
- i even disclosed i'm an affiliate for the product!!

In Summary

Right now I'm sending about 6-700 hops a month and closing about 5-7 sales per month. This is a high priced product and it's get a one time offer so I'm making between $3-$500 a month.

And this is without a list (guess what I'm doing next!).

Anyway - this is my thanks to the forum.

I hope this information helps people.

If you've been failing at Internet Marketing for a long time just write down your plan and model your plan of attack against what I've got in this post. It just might do the trick.