Warning this article is long! You might want to print it out first!
How to make some moohlah with clickbank!- An introduction to clickbank, what is it?
- Using it to make money, the basics?
- What products should I sell?
- You've got an idea of what you want to sell, let's use adwords to sell it properly (it's really not as scary as you might think)
- Advanced adwords
But before I go on I want you to know that I'm here to help so here's my personal email address: eazimoney@gmail.com
Use it to ask me questions about clickbank or anything else marketing related, but do not enter it into your spam cannon, please have respect.
Ok, An introduction to clickbank, what is it?
What I'm about to tell you is common knowledge and can be found out pretty much everywhere, but this is an all in one course, so you might as well find out here. The site we're talking about here is www.clickbank.com it is a revolution to the internet and has made many people a good few bucks, some people, like myself try to use it to make an actual living, at the moment I make around about $50 every 2 weeks, I'm just messing around, trying to figure out how to make money from it, I want to make $200 a day. Now I'm not saying the sky is the limit with this program, but it can certainly, with not too much effort bring $80,000 a year, I would say that is enough to live off well. Below is the complimation of what knowledge I have gathered, yup all 4000 odd words of it.
So anyway I still haven't said what it is.
Imagine you have a product you want to sell, lets say you've created a spyware remover and you want to sell it for $50.
The trouble is, lets imagine, you're not great at selling your product.
This is where clickbank comes in. Clickbank is an organisation made up of at least 100,000 people who know how to sell things.
So what you'd do is ask if anyone in clickbank would want to sell your spyware remover for you. And then you'd offer to give a 70% commision or 50% (the choice is yours) to anyone who sells your product.
That's what clickbank is. Clickbank is a place where product creaters come to get items sold. It is also a place where people like me and you will go to look for products to sell and thus recieve commission on.
Now I would thouroughly recommend that you go down to www.clickbank.com right now and get to know what it's all about. A good place to start is to click on 'promote products' on the left hand side. Once you've clicked it you'll see a number of different product categories, click on one and you'll a see 100's of products that you can sell for a commision under that category. Soon I'll be showing the best ways in which to sell these products. But before you can go on you must signup for an account with clickbank, it's completely free and they don't ever give away or sell your information to anyone. To signup click this link https://ssl.clickbank.net/signup/
That concludes the introduction, next I'll show you the basics to selling a product.
Using clickbank to make money, the basics.
By now you should have got yourself familiar with clickbank, you should also have an account. This part is really for the beginners in the field, if you are already familiar with clickbank you may skip this bit.
So to start making money you need to go to www.clickbank.com and click on promote products, now browse for a product to sell, you'll learn more later about which are the best products to choose but for now just choose a product within a field that you know well. That way you'll know where to sell the product. Once you've found a product that you think is of value, something that you think people will value (don't just pick any, pick one that appeals to you, if it appeals to you it will appeal to others) click on the percentage number next to the item listing. A popup window should appear asking you to enter your clickbank nickname, this is the same name you use to login. Then it will generate a hoplink with your nickname in it. I suggest you copy and paste this hoplink into a word document with a little description underneath to tell you what it is.
Next you need to go out and sell it, I'm going to tell you a few simple but effective and free ways to sell products, but it requires a little effort.
Go out and find a forum that is based on the same topic as the product your selling, now if you've picked a product within a topic you know lots about you may already be registered with a forum, hopefully you're an active poster and have helped a few people out on the forum gaining yourself a reputation in that particular topic. If not, you need to make sure that you do become an active member of some kind of group. Then in every post that you make make sure to leave your hoplink in your signature with a little description next to it. You can do this in your emails too, where ever possible. Overtime your link will be all over the place and you will make sales after a number of months. But whatever you do, do not simply stick a big advert in the middle of a forum, people will just ignore it and you will probably be banned from the forum.
You could also try making a blog like this one with a review of the product, even better review more similiar products and then compare them, in each provide your hoplink so that you get commission from the sale if they buy after clicking on your link. If you do choose to sell this way, make sure your blog is helpful (like this one :P) otherwise people will just go on to the next blog and just skip yours. A good idea is to tell a few friends in similiar based forum to publicise your new blog, if you have some good friends and a bit of a reputation, some will link to your blog, bringing in more visitors. To even further publicise your blog, search for blogs like your own and leave a post commenting on their blog and then leave a link to your blog.
There are numerous ways to get your link out, another favourite way of mine is to use an advertising tool like this http://www.instantbuzz.com/r/?eazimoney, instantbuzz is a great way to sell your products, check the site out and see what you think, if you you're going to sell products using this tool you should sell products that are marketing related, since most users of the tool are marketeers. If you don't understand what I'm saying you really need to go take a look. Once you understand instantbuzz take a look at this site http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm it will help you in deciding what headlines to use.
Anyway there's the basics of selling, if there's anything on your to do list it should be to go and take a look at those sites and get to grip with them. If you think you'll be confident in choosing a good product and selling it go ahead right now. If not you should stick around and read the rest of this blog, next I'm going to share with you some more in depth core principles in choosing your product, plus I'll be including a link to a free great tool, in fact I'll be providing a link to 2 great tools!
What Product should I choose?
Hello again, everybody. Today in my free time I shall take the time in informing you of what products you should choose. There are plenty of products on clickbank to choose from, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will sell. There are a few criteria you should consider when choosing a product:
- The clickbank rank
- How long the product has been on the market
- How attractive the site looks
- The price of the product and how much commision you'll earn
- How much people are willing to spend in order advertise the product
- Summary and recommedations
The clickbank rank
Clickbank ranks products in its directory by popularity, the most popular ones being at the top. Popularity is defined how much success other affiliates have had selling the product. So if you choose the top product it is likely that you'll make a profit because that particular product is popular. However because of this it is also likely that many other people will already be selling the product which means you'll have to put with a lot of competition. It is usually best to choose the 2nd or 3rd product down in the listing, so the product is quite profitable and you won't have to put up with as much competition. You'll find out why competition is annoying later.
How long the product has been on the market
If a product has only come out recently that means you have less competition because less people have started to sell the product. And it also means there's plenty of people to sell to who haven't already bought the product. The problem with picking recent products is you don't yet know how popular they are, how well they sell. So to determine which new products are working I use a piece of free software which can be downloaded here.
www.affiliatesalert.com
The site may ask you to enter your email and name to get the download, however it is an extremely useful product, well worth it.
With affiliates alert you can find products that have only recently come out. The feature I like the most is the ability to see how a particular product has ranked on clickbank in the past. This allows you to work out wether a product has been selling well. A full set of instructions is available on the website, check it out, its free and is and absolutely top quality product.
How good the site looks
If you click the main link on a product description when looking for a new product to promote you should see the website that is associated with the product. You will be sending visitors to buy off this site, so you need to make sure that the site is nicely laid out and easy to navigate. Basically it has to look and feel nice. If the site is ghastly, then you will find that many of the hard earned visitors you send to it will leave before they've even had a good look at the product no matter how good it is!
The product price and commision earned
This is a very important part of choosing your product. If the product is overpriced nobody will buy the product (It's a good idea to look at the prices of other similar products on the market) however if the product is too cheap you will earn very little commision. You may endup spending more on advertising than you'll earn in commisions. Knowing what price is right can only be aquired by trying out the whole 'clickbank game' for a while, overtime you will pick up this knowledge. But as a general rule of thumb I find people are willing to pay about $30-$40 for a digital product, as for commision, you want to be earning at least $20 a sale, because if you choose to pay for advertising anything below $20 is unlikely to bring in a good return on investment.How much advertisers are willing to pay in advertising costs
If you could see what your competitors were spending on advertising a particular product you could learn 2 things:
- If the prices are too high and you do not have the budget to compete, then you would know not to enter that particular market. But on the other hand if others are spending lots on advertising a particular product, they must also be earning a good profit from the product, otherwise they would not bother paying such high advertising costs.
- If the prices are low, then you would know that you could afford to advertise the product. Though this could indicate that the product does not sell particularly well and thus advertisers are less willing to put all their money into it. But this is not always the case, sometimes you can find a real gem - low advertising costs and high profits.
The next thing I'm going to tell you is great! You can see how much your competitors are spending on advertising! Go to:
http://www.technobloggie.com/googleSearchEstimates.php
type in the keyword that is related to your product and see how much advertisers are willing to spend on keywords related to your product!!
Summary and recommendations
- As a rule of thumb, only choose products that give $20 or over in commision - read the site and look at the price. Would you be willing to pay the price? If it's too high your visitors will be put off.
- Is the site of reasonable quality, if it's ugly don't promote it, it is likely your visitors will leave before they've even read through properly.
- Use affiliates alert to see how products have ranked in the past on clickbank, those that are increasing are the ones you want to get in on quick before the market becomes saturated.
- To start off you should go for products that require a low advertising budget, if you're only just beginning you don't want to spend a tonne of money and then realise you should of chosen a different product!
- Finally - recommendations... I started off selling spyware removing products and they were successful in bringing me an income on a low budget, the market may have changed by now, but I think spyware removing products are a good start :)
You've got an idea of what you want to sell, let's use adwords to sell it properly (it's really not as scary as you might think)
Ok this is the big leap where everyone just seems to decide to give up at - Why? Because you will have to spend money to advertise.............What is adwords? (skip if you already know)When you perform a search within google you will see a list of websites on the left, whilst at the same time you will see the smaller boxes on the right, those boxes are adverts from website owners who have specifically paid to have there site displayed there in order to recieve hits. It is a great way to advertise because, should you choose to advertise using this method, your advert would only come up when certain keywords are typed into google. For example you could control it so that you could display an advert for a spyware remover only when users types keywords to do with spyware removers, and so each visitor you get is targeted.
Reason why people get scared of using adwords
I think the main reason why people are scared of using adwords is they think they'll have to spend a tonne of money whenever someone clicks on there ad. Let's clear this up. You set a daily budget in the control panel of how much you want to spend, this can be as little as 10p a day or as big as £1,000,000 a day. The point is you never have to pay more than you can afford, so if you're on a shoestring budget, you don't need to worry about having to pay for every single click you get, as soon as your budget ends for the day, your ad is taken off the net. It is also important to remember that you can stop an ad from running anytime you like.
So with everything cleared up lets put up your ad and make some real money! You need to go to http://www.google.com/ads and click the adwords link, from here you can signup for account and put up your first ad, you'll need to provide them with a debit or credit card number as well as all your address details so they can bill you. You needn't worry about security, google will never give away, sell or rent any of your details. However there is one thing that you do need to be aware of, google will automatically take money from your account every 30 days, to check your current billing invoice you just click the 'My Account' tab and the click billing.
Creating your ad
If you haven't already done so click the 'Campaign management' tab and then click the 'keyword-targeted' link next to create new campaign. Next you will be prompted to enter a campaign name, make sure to enter a memorable name, I normally type the name of the product I'm promoting, then I normally put this same name into the ad group name. Then choose the options that suit your product best. Click continue and choose the countries that you want to target the advert towards, normally the english speaking countries.
Now write you're ad. Here's some advice from: Karon Thackston
How To Write Little Tiny AdWords Ads That Bring Giant-Sized Profits
There are two primary factors to succeeding at Google AdWords. The first is getting the right keywords. The second is writing little tiny ads. Neither is all that easy, but they can both be done.Mark Twain said it best. “If I would have had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” The point… it takes much more skill, and much more time to write short copy than long copy.
Let’s go through the process together and I’ll show you a few tricks of the trade that have brought me AdWords click through rates of 7.1%, 8.0%… even 25%.
Step One – You would be very wise to either use a benefit or an end result in your headline. In order to do this, you’ll have to be aware of the difference between features and benefits. Start by making a list. I’ll use the example of an online shoe store.
Here are a few features:
- huge inventory
- wide selection of sizes
- discounted prices
- free shipping
And here are the benefits associated with those features:
- hundreds of styles to choose from
- hard-to-find sizes in stock
- save money
- free shipping (costs nothing extra)
Step Two – Know what your customers are looking for. YOU may feel that one benefit outweighs another. However, your customer might feel differently. Be sure you understand what is important to your customer before writing your headline and your ad. You have no room to waste so it is vital that you find a so-called nail and hit it right on the head.
Step Three – Work in your keywords. There tends to be a greater click through rate on search results that use the exact keyphrase the surfer types in. The same holds true for Google’s AdWords program.
While the following have by no means been researched, we’ll assume that some optimum keywords for our shoe store are: women's shoes and sandals. We’ll want to include these in our ads.
Step Four – Start big and narrow it down. Begin by writing a few sentences or a paragraph about what you’d like your customer to know. Perhaps:
You’ll find everything you’re looking for in one place! Hundreds of styles to choose from including hard-to-find sizes in stock. You’ll save lots of money because our regular prices are far below that of other stores. Plus shipping is always free – regardless of the amount of your purchase. Check out our excellent selection of women's shoes and sandals.
Now, go back and take out every word that does not absolutely need to be there. You probably came up with something like this:
Everything in one place! Hundreds of styles, hard-to-find sizes. Prices far below other stores. Shipping free. Women's shoes and sandals.
That’s a LOT smaller and still gets the point across. However, it is still too long for AdWords. Your headline must be less than 25 characters (including spaces). Your copy can only be 35 characters per line. (You get two lines.) Now is the time to begin rearranging words to create an ad that will match Google’s guidelines, include your keywords, and draw a crowd to your site.
Here are a couple I came up with:
100s of Styles-Low Prices
Big savings on women's shoes. Plus
free shipping! All sizes in stock.
Discount Women's Sandals
Latest styles at deep discounts.
All sizes in stock. Free Shipping!
Step Five – Test, test, test! Put them up and give them a go. See what happens. Believe me, Google will notify you quickly if your ads aren’t performing. Those that get lower than a .05% click through rate are immediately “disapproved.” You are notified that your ad has been pulled and that you need to make changes.
Use the information in the AdWords campaign section to track the results. I’ve heard countless tales of those who have changed one little word and gone from a .07% CTR to a 5.0% CTR. If your ad is pulled, make simple changes to start with. Swapping out the word “savings” for “discount” or “big” for “huge” can be all it takes to catapult you to the top of the list.
When you write extremely short copy, remember to stay focused. There is not enough room to sell the customer within your copy, but there IS enough room to pique their interests. Use the limited space you have to punch up the biggest benefits or end results your customers are looking for and you’ll see bigger returns on your AdWords investment.
About The Author
Most buying decisions are emotional. Your ad copy should be, too! Karon is Owner and President of Marketing Words, Inc. which offers targeted copywriting, SEO copywriting & ezine article services. Visit her site at http://www.marketingwords.com/ today, or learn to write your own powerful copy at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karon_Thackston
Now thats what I call advice!
Having written your ad, you need to pick your keywords, google has plenty of keyword suggestion tools to help you out so use them! However do not just add every single keyword google suggests, you should only focus on those that are closely related to the product you are promoting, that way the visitors you recieve are more likely to buy. If you choose less targeted words then your visitors will also be less targeted. You do not want to have to pay for visitors that are unlikly to pay for your product.
Next you will be asked for a daily budget an a maimum bid per click. Since this is probably your first time, you need to pick a low daily budget, when I first started my budget was just £2 a day, basically don't spend more than you can afford, only spend what you are willing to lose, because chances are you won't make any sales for a while. Take this budget as an experimenting budget, it is a starting platform for you to learn how to market products on google adwords until you become successful and confident enough to increase it further. As for bid per click - start low again, if google tells you that some of your keywords are inactive for search you may need to increase your bid, but only do this if you value that particular keyword as being extremely targeted to your product, otherwise you may have to pay more than you really need to. AND THAT'S IT! WAIT FOR THE SALES TO COME IN. But make sure to check your account everyday, if you're not getting the results you want, you may need to change your adwords further until you get a high conversion. Read on to find a few more tips on increasing the power of adwords.
Advanced Adwords It is a good idea, once you've played around with the clickbank game, to optimise an adword campaign to bring in maximum profits.Think about it, why do you click a link when you search for something in google. It most likely that you clicked it because the title contained the phrase you were searching for. So in order to increase clickthru rates within your google adwords campaign, you need to include the main keyword in the title. So what you need to do is create a new group within the campaign of a product your promoting, each ad group will contain only 1 keyword though the actual ad will be different for each. Try to alter the ad so that it includes the main keyword in the title. This way you'll be more likely to get higher clickthru rates because you are in effect giving the searcher what they want.Good Luck to making money with clickbank! If you have any questions email me at eazimoney@gmail.comLucas
