Archive for October, 2008

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

There’s an interesting article on MarketingSherpa touting the benefits of “nano-niche” marketing. Just about everyone involved with online marketing is well aware of the need to market products to well-targeted niches, but this idea takes things one step further and states that if you really want to stay recession-proof and get ahead of your competitors, you need to get laser-focused.

Tapping in to a highly motivated audience with little competition, and taking steps to gear your message towards them, can result in extraordinarily high returns on your investment. We talk a lot about the Long Tail here at ClickBank, and this idea is a perfect example of making the Long Tail work for you. You don’t need to drive a lot of traffic or spend a lot on advertising if you can achieve much higher conversion rates on the small amount of traffic you do have.

Nano-niche marketing is a perfect fit for affiliate marketing, since all that matters is how many visitors you convert into a sale, not your overall number of visits. Needing to drive huge amounts of untargeted traffic to your site is the old way of making money online. It used to be the case that using impression-based ad networks or programs like Google Adsense was the only way to make money, but that model doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of Internet marketers out there. In fact, at the recent BlogWorld conference I attended, these old monetization strategies were referred to several times as “webmaster welfare,” and the same experts instead recommended affiliate marketing and creating and selling your own products as the best ways to monetize a blog. The same holds true for just about any other type of website.

My recommendation is to take MarketingSherpa’s advice and start spending time identifying and targeting “nano-niches” in your area of expertise. The time you spend marketing to people in these ultra-focused niches will bring a much higher return on your efforts, giving you more time and resources to dedicate to finding other profitable niches. It’s time to think small!

Internet’s largest digital products retail network now transacts business in 4 languages, 13 currencies

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – Oct. 28, 2008 – In an effort to significantly expand the moneymaking capability of affiliates and product publishers using its powerful online sales platform, ClickBank, a world leader in online retail of digitally downloadable products, now enables commerce in French and German and accepts payments in 13 global currencies.

ClickBank’s upgraded transaction platform enables all interactions between the customer and ClickBank to be conducted in English, Spanish, German or French-including the order form, confirmation page, customer service emails, phone support and customer service pages on ClickBank’s Web site.

ClickBank’s international e-commerce capability has been further broadened to accept payments in the Australian dollar (AUD), Canadian dollar (CAD), Swiss franc (CHF), Danish krone (DKK), Euro (EUR), British pound (GBP), Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Japanese yen (JPY), Norwegian kroner (NOK), New Zealand dollar (NZD), Swedish krona (SEK), United States dollar (USD) and South African rand (ZAR).

“As a global enterprise with clients and customers worldwide, providing the ability to transact sales in multiple languages and currencies is critical for continued international growth,” said ClickBank CEO Bob King.

ClickBank began its platform globalization effort in March with the implementation of Spanish language transaction capability. Industry statistics estimate that 102 million Internet users worldwide speak Spanish and 118 million users worldwide speak French or German.

Since it began offering Spanish language capabilities, ClickBank’s Spanish language sales have grown 20 percent month-over-month on average. More than 400 products have been created and approved for the Spanish sales platform.

In 2007, ClickBank’s revenue grew 26 percent to more than $300 million, and the company is on track to achieve another year of double-digit revenue growth in 2008.

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

As you have probably heard by now, ClickBank offers the ability to sell recurring billing products. The main benefit of recurring billing products, of course, is the ongoing income they provide.

Do you have a good idea for a recurring billing product, but aren’t sure how to get started?

Recently, we released a ClickBank Recurring Billing Publisher Guide. The PDF includes detailed instructions and screenshots to help you get started. The following key questions are addressed in the guide:

• What is ClickBank Recurring Billing?
• Why use ClickBank Recurring Billing?
• How does recurring billing work?
• How do I implement recurring billing?
• What does the customer see when purchasing a recurring billing product from ClickBank?
• What do I see when someone purchases my recurring billing product?
• How do affiliates find recurring billing products in the Marketplace?
• How am I notified of my recurring billing sales?

We’re working to expand our educational materials. Please leave a comment if you have an idea for a future topic or if you have any feedback about this guide.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

In the spirit of our earlier blog post about using video to promote your business, we’ve taken our own advice and plan to regularly release new videos on topics such as how to get started with ClickBank, how to take advantage of advanced ClickBank features and techniques, and much more!

Our first video walks beginners through signing up for a ClickBank account. We plan to translate this video into other languages soon, to help recruit more ClickBank publishers and affiliates in other countries. Feel free to share and embed this video wherever you’d like, since helping people join ClickBank is good for all of us!

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

In my job, I speak to our largest publishers and affiliates pretty much every day. Just the other day after a conversation with one particularly successful publisher, it struck me that there is a common thread that runs through all successful publishers.

While their businesses may be different and the areas of their specialization may be diverse, they all have very similar habits. As I continued my conversations with these publishers, I jotted down the common habits that distinguish these successful people, and here they are for your enjoyment and edification:

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Posted by: Shelly Spafford, Senior Customer Service Representative

Most affiliates understand the need to run effective promotions in order to make sales. However, many affiliates may not understand how the information they can gain through the use of Tracking IDs can help them promote products more successfully. In this post, I’ll explain what they are and how they can be a huge help to your business.

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Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

We’re excited to announce that ClickBank now has an official Facebook page. We’ll be sharing ClickBank news, posting exclusive content like helpful tips, posting videos, and more. If you’d like to get involved in the ClickBank community, please visit our Facebook page and become a fan:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ClickBank/33610049417

We hope to see you there!

Our Director of Marketing, Bob Dunlap, recently wrote an article for Electronic Retailer Blog about monetizing blogs through affiliate marketing. Check it out here.

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of Operations

A ClickBank client recently asked me about the tools we use to monitor and secure our systems so that he could learn more about monitoring and securing his own systems. So today I’m writing about some of the simple tools ClickBank uses to secure our servers and how those tools might benefit publishers and affiliates.

First, I think it is important to understand what parts of your technology are integral to your core business and what parts should be outsourced. At ClickBank, we use external outsourced data centers for many of our services. We want to focus our energy on providing innovative solutions that support your business, not building world-class data centers. Many ClickBank clients already outsource their Web services, because creating and promoting great products is their core business. A service provider can offer uptime guarantees, redundant network connections, and much more. These options can make your Web site significantly more complicated if you manage them yourself.

You should make sure that you always have multiple copies of your Web site code, both on and off the Web servers themselves. A disaster with your service provider doesn’t have to be a disaster for you. In addition, your Web site should also be protected from DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. You or your service provider should invest in tools that inspect your Web traffic. Web servers like Apache (with modEvasive or modSecurity) have the ability to handle or dynamically block traffic that doesn’t meet requirements. For example, if you receive 1000 requests in a row to your Web site for pages that don’t exist, the IP address requesting those pages should be blocked.

Regardless of whether or not you outsource facets of your Web site, you should monitor it from at least one external source. In addition to extensive internal monitoring, ClickBank subscribes to several external Web-monitoring services. These services include:
· http://www.alertra.com
· http://www.internetsupervision.com
· http://www.site24×7.com
· http://www.siteuptime.com

There are many others as well. These services often offer free monitoring at low levels (every 30 minutes to 1 hour) from a single location. Any downtime is automatically reported to you via email or text message. Paid subscription services often offer higher monitoring rates from various locations around the globe. Some services allow you to monitor content on the page. This enables you to make sure that your Web site is not hacked or modified without your knowledge. Other services like www.dnsstuff.com allow you to check the completeness of your Web site domain, the associated DNS entries, and potential email blacklists. It is important to make sure that the rest of the world views your Web site the same way you do.

Finally, for publishers, it is extremely important that you protect your product download itself. ClickBank allows each publisher to use the ClickBank Proof of Purchase to ensure that every purchase of your product is legitimate. A description of how to verify the Proof of Purchase, along with the code to perform this action, is available at:

http://www.clickbank.com/publisher_tools.html#Publisher_Tools_7

We work hard at ClickBank to build and maintain a secure and stable platform for our clients and customers. I hope that some of these tips help you to do the same.

Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager, Client Account Management

As many of you are probably doing, I recently called my investment advisor, Paul, to see how my investments were performing. Knowing that the news would not be good, I had prepared a little “survival kit” for myself to get through the rest of the evening: a funny movie, a pizza, a cold beer, and a shot of tequila just to take the edge off after the conversation. So there I stood, teeth gritted, shot in hand, prepared to hear the worst. But just as I was getting ready to tip back the shot glass, I got a surprising answer to my question. “Not as bad as they could be,” said Paul. I set the shot down, wiped the sweat off my brow, and started breathing again. Paul went on to explain that because my portfolio was diversified, I was doing OK. Yes, it had gone down, but it was still performing better than the market.

That got me thinking about our affiliates and the different strategies I’ve seen people use to be successful on ClickBank. The one I’d like to talk about today is the single-niche strategy. Many affiliates choose to focus their marketing efforts on a single area of expertise. This is a great strategy, as long as that niche continues to perform well on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, not all products do. In my experience at ClickBank, I’ve come to recognize 3 types of products: One Hit Wonders, Peaks and Valleys, and Consistent Performers.

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