Written by: Allen Baler, Guest Author

There’s no question that ClickBank vendors face increasing challenges these days, including:

• Higher refund rates, even if your product is solid
• More competition and “copy-cat” products
• Higher traffic costs, as well as the risk of getting “Google slapped”
• Super affiliates demanding higher commissions and bonuses

Smart ClickBank vendors are addressing these challenges by taking advantage of a relatively new, under-the-radar feature in ClickBank; the ability to offer their customers physical products such as DVDs, CDs, or printed books.

These “hard copy” versions can be offered as an upgrade, upsell, or even included free with every digital order.

Why Should ClickBank Vendors Offer Physical Products?

Many vendors think that physical products are too complicated to set up, are too expensive to produce & ship, and require too much administrative time.

The truth is that physical products can significantly improve an info-publishing business’ bottom line and is usually well worth the effort!

Based on our experience in developing and managing the physical products programs for top ClickBank vendors over the last 2 years, vendors offering physical products have increased net profits as much as 28%, cut refund rates to as low as 1.5%, and have increased customer satisfaction. These results have had a powerful impact on these vendors’ overall bottom line.

Here are the top 5 benefits we have seen with ClickBank vendors that have implemented physical products:

#1) Significantly lower refund rates
How many times have you had a customer refund because they were having trouble downloading your product? Or had a customer ask for a refund because they were confused because they saw a “virtual product shot” of a book or CD on your sales page and thought they were getting something physical, not a digital file? Offering a physical product component to your offer can eliminate both problems and will significantly reduce your refund rate.

#2) Higher perceived value among prospective customers
Your digital products might be state-of-the-art and contain great information, but for most of your customers there is significant perceived value to receiving something tangible in the mail that they can actually hold in their hands. This allows vendors to build the value and legitimacy of their products.

#3) Differentiation from the competition
By offering physical products, you offer greater value to your customers than your digital-only competitors. Discerning customers who are shopping and comparing offers will often decide to buy from you because you offer “more bang for the buck” than a competitor who only has a digital product.

#4) More money per visitor
Physical products work great as an upsell or post-sale purchase! Conversion rates can be as high as 30% and top vendors who push a significant volume can add many thousands of dollars in incremental income with their physical products. Increasing your profit per visitor enables you to afford higher bids for traffic and test “slap-free” traffic sources.

Here’s a tip that can jump-start the sales of your new physical product: offer your new physical version to prior customers who bought the digital version with a discounted price for a limited time. A couple emails is all it takes to get a nice surge of sales and we’ve seen these promos convert as high as 40%.

#5) Easier to attract super affiliates to promote your offer

Adding more money to your bottom line through physical products means you can offer higher commissions to your affiliates and offer bigger bonuses to attract super affiliates. Also, your lower refund rate will attract the smart affiliates who recognize the huge impact of refunds rates on affiliate ROI, especially for those affiliates who drive paid traffic.

How Do You Get Started Offering Physical Products?

OK, hopefully you are starting to see the benefits, and now you want to learn more about how to actually implement it.

The truth is that adding physical products to your digital info-publishing business does require set-up work plus ongoing maintenance. Creating, producing and shipping a tangible product can be a very different experience from the all-digital world most ClickBank vendors are used to operating in.

Here are the 3 steps to get started offering physical products:

Step 1: First you’ll need to create your physical product, such as artwork and files for CDs, DVDs, layout for a printed book, etc. It doesn’t hurt to spend a little extra time and money making sure everything is polished and professional, for example by designing a nice cover or including an informative insert. Remember, this product represents you and your business! Use the highest resolution artwork and video/audio files as possible since production specs for physical printing and viewing videos on TV need much higher resolution than for the web.

Step 2: Next you’ll need to produce your physical products. You can do it yourself which is a good option when starting out, or there are companies out there that can produce CDs, DVDs, and printed books at relatively low cost. Start with small initial production quantity so you avoid inventory risk and cash flow problems of investing in a lot of product upfront. You will also need to decide how you are going to package and ship your physical products to your customers. Again, you can do this yourself or there are companies that can handle this for you.

Step 3: Finally, you will need to set up your customer service process to incorporate the physical product aspect of your business. You will need to be able to communicate with your customers about their shipments, send them tracking information as well as set up a process for handling product returns and refunds.

The good news is that ClickBank has been making the process easier for vendors by recently adding tools and features to support “shippable media” products. This makes a lot of sense as ClickBank benefits directly from lower refunds, more successful vendors and happier consumers.

Here’s The Bottom Line…

Top ClickBank vendors have proven that offering physical products yields a significant boost to their business by increasing profits as much as 28% and cutting refunds as low as 1.5%.

No, it’s not a magic pill. Yes, it does take some extra work.

But the results can be well worth it.

So if you own a digital product and want to add incremental sales and cut your refund rate, consider developing physical versions of your products now!

About the Author

Allen Baler is the owner of Reboot Fulfillment, a company that since 2008 has designed, sold & shipped over 200,000 physical product shipments as the strategic partner of top ClickBank vendors. To learn more, watch the video presentation on how to increase profits with physical products.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I talked about why it’s a good idea to become an information product vendor, and how to get started in the process. In this final installment, I’ll answer one of the biggest questions new vendors have:

How do I attract affiliates to market my product for me?

The challenge is to find affiliates, to let them know about your product, and convince them to promote for you! The single biggest thing you can do, is to NOT “release” your product until the affiliate resource section is completed. The affiliate resource section contains all the tools you create (or have outsourcers create for you) that help your affiliates promote your product.  These include banners, graphics, email copy, Adwords ad text, keywords, and much more.

The best way to figure out what you should be doing here is to see examples. Sign up to be an affiliate for best selling ClickBank products and see what they provide their affiliates with. One place I can recommend is our affiliate resource site (www.blueprintaffiliates.com). Signing up there will show you several affiliate resource sites and examples of tools for many different products.

Not having a solid affiliate resource section is the single biggest mistake we see product creators make. They focus so much on building their product that they leave the affiliate resource section for last, or they launch their product without it thinking they will “get to it later.” You only have one chance to grab that affiliate’s attention, so make sure you put your best foot forward when you do get that chance. That means having everything set up and making their job as easy as you can right from the first time they see your product and consider promoting it.

Another great strategy for getting affiliates is to give them something that they can give away for free to their audience, such as a free mini report that they can edit and give away, which includes their own affiliate link to your product. Potential affiliates LOVE this kind of thing, as it gives them valuable content to give to their traffic sources. People are always on the lookout to provide value to their audience, and if you can help them with that, they will consider promoting your products.

Track down potential traffic sources and find out what they’re promoting and why. Go to the places where your traffic will be. For example, let’s stay with our organic gardening theme.

Do some searches and find the top organic gardening blogs or forums, etc. Look at what they’re promoting to monetize their sites. Contact all of these people, and keep in mind that you must be relentless here! Find cool ways to catch their attention.

Once you have their attention, pitch your product. Tell them why they should be promoting YOUR product instead or in addition to the ones they currently are. You must sell affiliates just like customers. Remember what I was saying in the beginning—it only takes a small number (sometimes 1!) of super affiliates to really make a lot of money, so this is time well spent.

Here’s a trick to catching people’s attention. EVERYONE Googles themselves at some point. If you’re trying to reach John Smith because he runs the top organic gardening blog and he can reach your target audience quickly, bid on his name in Adwords.

When he Googles himself, have the ad come up and say “John Smith, you should tell your readers about this!” or something like that and send it to a page you’ve created on your site that is an “invitation” for him to promote. Some kind of variation on this theme can be fun and WILL get someone’s attention. Please do not do this for my name

Often you can find “complimentary” marketing opportunities. Let’s use that home theater example. Reach out to the product creator of the best selling home theater information product and let them know about your new 3D product. As I described, this is a product that would be of interest to this person’s audience and is not a directly competing product, but is complimentary. There are often MANY of these kinds of opportunities to be found.

Finally, tell everyone on affiliate marketing forums and blogs that you’re launching your product. Put it in your signature. Just get it out there!  Do everything you can to get it in front of as many potential affiliates as you can.

One last tip: send an email to everyone that buys, asking them if they’d like to get the product they just bought for free. All they need to do is sign up to ClickBank as an affiliate and get two others to purchase the product, and they’ve paid for their copy! You can build a small army of low volume affiliates this way.

Hopefully these little pearls of wisdom will go a long way towards helping you on your journey from affiliate to vendor! Best of luck to you!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed why moving from affiliate to vendor, or doing both at the same time, is a great idea. I also discussed how to pick a topic or niche. In this part, I’ll answer a couple of other common questions I get asked.

Don’t I have to Be an “Expert”?

This is something I talk about often with our customers who are starting a search engine management consulting business. They feel very insecure, as they think they have to be the most knowledgeable expert in this field in order to begin marketing their services. That’s simply not true.

In order to be valuable to someone (a customer), you simply need to possess information that they don’t. That’s it. Not ALL the information, or the LARGEST resource of information, or anything like that. Knowing more than your potential customer and being able to present that information to them creates the value.

This can even be true when you are less of an “expert” than your potential customer. Let me give you an example. I’m a complete home theater nut. Projectors, TV’s, Pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, sound formats, Blu-ray, etc.

I consider myself an expert on all of these things. However, I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on the latest home theater craze: 3D. It would be VERY valuable for me to have someone prepare a report (an information product!) on the various standards, equipment, and integration techniques for this technology. This is called information or content aggregation, and it’s essentially a research project. It just requires going through all of the available information online and in print, etc., and aggregating (summarizing) all of the content out there in one cohesive package. This would create a highly valuable product for an expert like me, and could easily be researched and created by a non-expert.

Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself?

Information products are excellent candidates for outsourcing. You can outsource the entire thing, or just the pieces you want help on. There are many people that make a full time living online creating information products for people. These are people that truly enjoy research and writing and the whole creation process, rather than trying to find ideas and markets and trying to sell their own products. The key is to find out the parts of information product creation that you enjoy and that you’re good at (very often the same!). These are the steps to do yourself, and the others are perfect for getting others to do them for you.

How do I outsource ?

The first challenge is to find a place where there are contractors waiting to do work for someone like yourself. There are several options, but we find the best overall place to go is Elance. The quality is very high, and there are plenty of choices there.

When picking someone to work with, I recommend you pick a person that specializes in creating information products, and someone that has a portfolio of examples you can examine to determine their quality level. This is not to say that someone completely new wouldn’t be able to do a good job, but you have to ask yourself if you have the time to risk your project to a complete unknown. Usually, it’s better to pay an experienced person a bit more to lower your risk.

One thing everyone wants to know about is cost, so I’ll give you an example. We recently outsourced a whole information product that required a lot of research (50 page ebook and a 1000 word sales script) for about $750 USD. This will give you some idea of the cost. It’s incredibly reasonable, and only takes a few sales to make your money back.

The biggest thing to focus on during the outsourcing process is managing expectations. The key is to ensure that you know what you want, that your outsourcer knows what you want, and that he/she can deliver what you want in the timeframe specified at the appropriate cost. This is harder than it may seem!

If you spend a LOT of time upfront specifying what you want, you can typically be successful in managing expectations.

Here are the things to focus on:

Deadlines – Make sure that the work can be completed in the timeframe by which you need it.

Chapter titles and summaries – This may seem like you’re having to do a lot of the work, but it’s time well spent. It doesn’t have to be the final version of the product, but the more you can give your outsourcer about what you expect, the better the whole process will be. You can be clear that they can still exercise their creative powers (that’s one of the reasons you’re hiring them) and make changes, but it’s a starting point for both of you to work from.

Voice, tone and style – In some markets, a casual or fun tone and writing style is important. In others, you need a more serious one. Make sure your outsourcer knows what you’re looking for.

Overview of the audience – Give your outsourcer as much detail as you can about the potential audience. This will only help them as they craft your product.

100% original content – Make very clear that you need original content. Research from sources is just fine, of course, but the finished product MUST be their own work product.

Specify font size, margin size and spacing (and/or just use word count) – A 50 page document can be a very small amount of content if the fonts are huge and lots of spacing is used! Ensure that you’re getting the amount of content you’re paying for.

Table of contents/Index – Do you want or need these?

Check in regularly – Don’t wait until the product is completed to check on progress. Request regular updates over the life of the project and check each chapter as it’s done. This will ensure that you’re on the same page.

Revision policy – Ask and make sure you understand what the creator’s revision policy is. What if you don’t like what’s being done? How many times and what scope can you change and still stay at the same price point?

These are the biggest things to get correct up front and to track during product development. In order to help, here’s an example (PDF / Word) of the product spec sheet that we use to communicate back and forth with outsourcers.

These tips on getting started and outsourcing should help get you on your way to creating a great product, but check back tomorrow for the final part, when I’ll talk about how to get affiliates to promote your product!

Update: Part 3 is now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

When I first started out in Internet marketing, my focus was on affiliate marketing. Specifically, I was really concentrating on marketing ClickBank products. I was able to make a wonderful income doing this, and became one of the top affiliates for one of ClickBank’s best sellers. At that time, I was making this product owner approximately $1 million dollars per year.

That was wonderful, as I was making that too (with a 50% commission split), but as I found out that I was only the 4th (!) largest affiliate for this product owner, something occurred to me. I was working VERY hard, and wouldn’t it be nice to be the product OWNER and have 100’s or 1000’s of “me’s” running around and promoting my product instead of just benefiting from my efforts ? How about if I just had the top 4 affiliates of this vendor? It was a pretty compelling question, and one that set me out on a journey to become a vendor as well as an affiliate.

Fast forward to the present, and my company has sold 10s of millions of dollars of our own information products over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE affiliate marketing and I do it every single day… but having your own products is a very special feeling and a nice distraction and diversification from the “daily grind”! The information product market is enormous (by many counts approximately $4 billion dollars) and ClickBank themselves have a healthy 10% or so of that market. This makes them the ideal place to launch your information product business.

We teach a lot of folks how to build information products, and when people are just starting out they seem to share a lot of the same challenges:

• What topic or niche do I pick?
• Don’t I have to be an “Expert” ?
• Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself? How do I outsource?
• How do I attract affiliates to market my product for me?

I think giving advice on these four large “problem” areas is a great way to help you start to move from affiliate to vendor.

What topic or niche do I pick?

Information products are pretty simple. First, you identify a market or a niche. These are groups of people who share a common interest. For example, organic gardening. That’s a group of folks who are all interested in a very specific activity. The goal of a marketable information product is to simply find out what that group “needs” and deliver it in the form of an ebook, videos, software, or some combination of these digital products.

So, in my organic gardening example, perhaps we could create an information product that educates and makes recommendations with regard to the proper fertilization techniques for organic gardening. The idea is that you find a market, you find out what the market wants or needs, and then you deliver it in the form of an information product.

So what constitutes a great market? In a perfect world, I would say it’s three things (you don’t always have to meet ALL of these conditions to have a successful information product).

First, you want an “evergreen” market.  An evergreen market means that it won’t be going away anytime soon. The classic example of that is weight loss. For the foreseeable future, everyone will want to continue to try to lose weight.

Second, you want a market where there are searchers online looking for information. This can be determined by looking at Google’s external keyword tool and the volume of searches for the main and related keywords. In our example, we could input “organic gardening” into the tool and see that there are plenty of people looking for information out there.

Finally, we’d like to see a market where there is the potential for people to buy multiple products or multiple related products. This means that as you continue to build your list of customers, it is more valuable as you could sell them more items over time. People interested in losing weight is the perfect example market. It’s evergreen, there are plenty of searches, and people will typically invest in multiple products and related products.

We know what a perfect market looks like, but where do we find ideas? I’ll tell you my biggest “secret source” for finding ideas . The “Dummies” books and the “Idiot’s Guides” books. There are THOUSANDS of titles that have been created for these two franchises. Each of these thousands of books cater to a market that is perfect for an information product.

These companies have already done the market research and the analysis to determine that there’s a great market for  these kinds of products. All you have to do is find one that interests you, and then decide on your particular “slant” on how to enter that market. For example, perhaps you found organic gardening (that’s a great market and there are Dummies books for that), and after some brainstorming and checking existing material and online search volume, your topic will be “organic gardening to feed a family of 4,” or you could go with our fertilizer example from earlier. That’s the way to use these resources for ideas that can blossom into a great information product.

In the next part of this series, I’ll answer the common question “Don’t I have to be an expert?” and talk about how and why you should outsource. Be sure to check back tomorrow for much more info!

Update: Parts 2 and 3 are now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

We’re back from another great trip to New York City for Affiliate Summit East, and I’m happy to report that this show just keeps getting bigger and better!

We met with thousands of affiliates and vendors from all over the world, including many top ClickBank clients that made the trip from places as far away as Israel and Australia. We also met some new vendors with products that we hope will be great additions to the ClickBank Marketplace!

ClickBank's Booth at Affiliate Summit

As always, the highlight of the Affiliate Summit shows is the opportunity for networking, and this show was no exception. Besides the thousands of people at the Meet Market and on the trade show floor, the many parties were a hotspot for meeting potential business partners. On Monday night, we hosted a private party at the beautiful Peninsula Hotel for a group of our top affiliates and vendors. It was exciting to see so many hugely successful Internet marketers in one place, sharing ideas and forming the basis for new partnerships. Thanks to everyone who came to the party!

Another aspect of the show that I enjoyed this year were the educational sessions. Unfortunately you always have to make tough decisions about which sessions to attend, but I was very glad I saw Clay Collins (an information product creation expert) and Scott Stratten of Unmarketing speak. They both brought really interesting perspectives to the Internet/affiliate marketing space, and were entertaining at the same time. Jeremy Schoemaker also held a great session on Facebook advertising, which is becoming more popular all the time, and our own Dush Ramachandran held an interesting and informative session with Frederick Vallaeys of Google’s AdWords division to discuss the “Google Slap.” There were many other interesting sessions this year—the content of the sessions keeps getting better and better with each show.

Even though it was a fast and furious few days in New York and I’m glad to finally get some sleep, it was another amazing experience, and we can’t wait to see many of you in January for Affiliate Summit West!

We’re very proud to present SocialPromote, a fast and easy new way to share the ClickBank products you like with your friends and earn affiliate commissions at the same time.

When you visit the ClickBank Marketplace, you’ll now see the option to “Like” any product in the Marketplace. Make sure you’re logged in to your ClickBank account, then click “Like.” Your Facebook friends will see in their news feed that you like the product. The best part is that the link they see contains a HopLink with your affiliate ID automatically embedded, so if any of your friends visit the site and buy the product, you’ll get the same affiliate commission as if you posted a HopLink manually!

It’s incredibly easy, and is a great way to share the products you love and get rewarded for it. If you haven’t tried it yet, log in to your account and visit our Marketplace to try it now! We plan to add more social sharing services to SocialPromote in the future. If there are any services you’d like to see included, please leave a comment and tell us which ones you’d like to use.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Today, ClickBank made a few changes to our Marketplace sales statistics in an effort to help affiliates better understand what they can expect to earn by promoting a particular vendor’s products. Several of these changes consisted of simply changing the name of the statistic, though we also added one new stat and removed another. This post will summarize the changes.

• Avg $/sale: This stat was previously called Total $/sale. This stat has been updated to reflect the total amount an affiliate can expect to earn from promoting this vendor’s products, including initial sales and rebills in the case of a recurring billing product. As always, this amount is just an average and is not guaranteed.
• Initial $/sale: This stat was previously called Avg $/sale. It represents the average amount an affiliate earns from the first sale of any product. For one-time purchases, this represents the total amount an affiliate can expect to earn. For recurring billing products, it represents the first sale but not any subsequent rebills. This number takes into account refunds, chargebacks, and sales tax.
• Avg Rebill Total: This stat was previously called Future $. It is only shown if the vendor offers a recurring billing product. This stat shows the average amount an affiliate earns on all subsequent rebills of a recurring billing product, and does not include the initial sale.
• Avg %/sale: This stat shows the average commission rate earned for all sales of a vendor’s products, including one-time purchases, rebills, and upsell purchases. Since vendors can offer different commission rates for different types of products, this number may not exactly match the commission rate you earn on any given sale.
• Avg %/rebill: This stat is new. It is only shown if the vendor offers recurring billing products, and shows the average commission rate earned only on rebills.
• %/refd: This stat has been removed from the Marketplace. Based on feedback from affiliates, we decided this stat was no longer necessary.

For more information on what all of our Marketplace sales stats mean, please see Finding Products to Promote in our Help Center.

Developers: We’ve updated the ClickBank Datafeed to version 2 to represent these changes. You can access the new datafeed here. The old datafeed will be accessible temporarily, but will eventually be removed. Please change to the new datafeed as soon as possible.

Written by: Chris Jones, Guest Blogger

Over the 4 years that I have been involved with ClickBank, I have seen countless products, niches, and services all trying to compete for market share.

If I could give you one piece of advice to maximize your affiliate marketing efforts, it would be this:

Stand out from the crowd, be unique, and the profits will follow.

This has never been more vital than it is today. Over the past 3 years the Internet has changed substantially—“Web 2.0” sites have become very popular, YouTube has become a major player both for entertainment and for Internet marketing, and there are more people online than ever before. To get people’s attention these days, your affiliate marketing efforts have to be truly special.

Here are 3 things that can help you stand out from the crowd with your product or service:

Design:

As mentioned above, the days where you can just have a blank page of text, a few pictures and a Buy Now button are over. Focus on making your site design fit the niche you are in, and work on making the design look really professional so potential customers trust you.

A good way to ensure your design will resonate with your audience is to learn from the best in your niche. If it is a gaming site, for instance, then check out some of the biggest game companies on the web and follow suit. Make sure your images, colors, and even fonts are in line with what visitors to gaming sites would expect.

Video:

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, many of the most successful ClickBank vendors and affiliates have started using video on their site, and there’s a good reason for it.

Video can improve conversions ten-fold if executed properly, so make sure you have a professional video made that focuses on the benefits of your products.

Some of the most profitable sites on ClickBank now use a simple video on their main sales page. If you’re not taking advantage of video yet, you’re missing out.

Product/Service:

Even though there is a lot of competition in any given ClickBank category, and especially the largest ones, the top products find a unique angle or selling point that helps them stand out. Make sure that you put some thought into what makes your product or service different from all the others in your niche.

Is it a totally new technique? Do you provide better support resources? Really cool tools or bonuses? Make sure you’ve got something unique that will resonate with buyers. If your product has a unique selling point, it can do very well!

Conclusion:

The final point that I wanted to recommend in this blog post is to be yourself! There is no one like you in the whole world and your product/website should reflect that.

Of course, don’t ignore learning the basics of skills like copywriting, web design, and video creation, but when you are using them, make sure to add a little bit of your personality so you stand out, and you’ll see your conversions improve.

About the Author

Chris Jones has been a Clickbank Vendor for 4 years and co-owns DUBTurbo with NC Media. For in-depth tutorials on how to get started with ClickBank, visit the NicheChoppers Forum.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

We have a new episode of Affiliate Marketing Today for your listening pleasure! In this episode, Dush Ramachandran and I discuss the benefits and challenges of going international with your affiliate marketing efforts, and give lots of advice on how to get started in the process.

We discuss things like how to find partners to work with, licensing English products for translation into foreign versions, the differences between translation and localization, and much more!

Listen now

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

A common fear among Internet marketers these days is the dreaded “Google slap.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to Google significantly lowering the Quality Score of AdWords ad/advertisers, or banning them from advertising on AdWords outright.

Since Google slaps can be a big concern for ClickBank affiliates and vendors, we’ve made a concerted effort to work with Google to identify what causes them to lower the Quality Score of particular ads or landing pages. Now we’d like to share what we’ve learned with you so you can ensure your advertising and landing pages meet Google’s quality guidelines and maintain a positive Quality Score.

We’ve condensed the information we’ve learned directly from Google into the following videos, which discuss topics like the purpose of Quality Score, what goes into Quality Score calculation, specific techniques and page elements that Google frowns upon, and what to do if you’ve been “slapped.” As we learn more about this issue, we’ll continue to share it with you. Feel free to leave comments with questions or concerns, and we’ll try to get them answered for you.