Archive for the ‘Strategies for Success’ Category

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

At Affilorama we specialize in helping our members get buyer-converting traffic. One of the most important ways to do this is learning what keywords to use. We want to share some lesser-known techniques for building a highly-optimized keyword list, including some novel ways to catch extra traffic. You’ll learn methods that will help you find keywords your competitors are missing. Follow these steps and you should be on the right path to affiliate success.

Step 1: Know who your target is

Start by thoroughly researching your target market. The better you know your buyers, the more effective your keyword list. Here are some ways you can do that. As you research, note down potential keyword phrases you could target.

• Visit forums related to your niche
• Join special interest groups (online or offline)
• Subscribe to competitor newsletters
• Read up on the industry

Once you’ve done your background keyword research on your chosen niche, it’s time to start seriously drawing up your keyword list. From this list you can build out the structure of your campaign.

Step 2: Brainstorm keywords

On a blank sheet of paper note down all the keywords you gathered from your research. Let your mind freewheel and try to capture as many as possible.

Your list can be as broad or as narrow as you like – anything from single words to five- or six-word phrases are worth recording. For example, in the dog training niche you could have a broad keyword like “dog obedience” and a narrow phrase such as “Walking a Chihuahua on a leash.”

This brainstormed list is a great starting point – now let’s convert it into a killer list with some advanced techniques.

Step 3: Fragment your list the easy way

Since there’s a lot of search engine competition for popular keywords, one of the best ways to make headway is to “fragment” your list into a much larger collection of keywords you can target. To help fragment, or expand, your list, use the following tools.

• Google Keyword Tool
• Traffic Travis SEO Software (Traffic Travis queries all major search engines, not just Google, to get its results)
• Affilorama Keyword Suggestion Tool

Using one of the keywords you noted down earlier, enter it into either of these tools and it will build a list of similar phrases that actual searchers have used, along with their search volumes.

This can be a great way to find some variations of keyword phrases that you haven’t thought of to add to your existing list. Google’s keyword tool will also give you an idea of how competitive a phrase might be, so you can decide whether the competition to traffic ratio is worth trying to rank well on it.

Step 4: Smart ways to uncover effective keywords

Another way to expand and add variety to your keyword list is to try these different methods. With a little lateral thinking you can often uncover some largely untapped, yet high value, traffic.

• Misspellings – If you check the search volumes for “loose weight” you might be surprised how much traffic this misspelling gets. Try to think of similar common misspellings in your niche.
• Product or Author Names – Adding a product or author name to your list can help you target searchers nearing the end of the purchase cycle.
• Immediate Words – One of the main reasons people turn to the internet is to solve a problem. When they want a problem solved they want it done now. Even tomorrow is too late. So add some immediacy to your phrases by adding words like “stop,” “fix,” or “now.”
• Money Words – Target the buyers by using words they are likely to search on such as “get …” “review …” or “buy …” No surprises there.
• Information Words – Not everyone who goes online is planning on buying but that doesn’t mean you don’t want them visiting your site. The power of your sales copy could easily lure their credit card out of hiding, or if you have a tool to build a mailing list, you can contact them again in the future. Try adding words such as “how to…” “free guide…” or “homemade” to catch this type of traffic.

After assembling your keyword list, it’s important to identify the intent of the visitor that has searched for the particular keyword and group them into different traffic types.

Step 5: Focus your aim by sorting your list

It’s important to think about the intent of your visitors and the types of keywords they will use. Linking your keywords with specific visitor types will allow you to concentrate and strengthen the focus of your sales pages.

Divide your keywords into the following three types of visitors:

• Buyers – This is the highest quality traffic you can attract, since they are right at the end of the purchase cycle and very close to buying. Unfortunately it is also the lowest volume. Words that buyers use include the money words mentioned above, as well as product or author names.
• Product seekers - This segment has more traffic but it is lower quality, since they are not as close to making an actual purchase. They know about the niche and are thinking about buying a product to improve their experience but they don’t really know what products are available. Words found in this group are similar to information seekers but will tend to be more about solving an immediate problem and recognize the need for help. For example, in the dog training niche, they may be searching for a “dog training book,” “fix Doberman behavior problems,” or “training collar.”
• Information seekers – While this is the lowest quality traffic it is also the highest volume, meaning it’s easier to get plenty of these types of visitors. The keywords assigned to this type will be the most general, or broad. Group your information-based words (see above) in this category, including any phrases that relate to information on how to solve a problem.

The first two are your most valuable; in particular, you should focus most of your energies on attracting product seekers. This has the best combination of traffic and potential buyers.

Shorter, broader phrases often have more competition, so don’t be afraid to target the long tail keywords that are more focused and have less competition. For example, in the dog training niche, you could focus on a specific breed or a well-known trainer like Cesar Millan.

With experience comes the natural intuition of recognizing “money keywords.” Spend time studying the search engine results for the keywords you are targeting. Monitor the traffic you are attracting to your site with the use of statistical tracking. Refine, tweak and experiment.

What types of keywords do you find work best to target your buyer traffic? What methods do you use to unearth good quality keywords? I’d be interested to know what works best for you.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Last week, I attended the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. It’s a great event for learning about the latest advances in online marketing, and is filled with people who are serious and passionate about learning the best methods for achieving online success. Although only a small portion of the event and sessions are geared towards affiliate marketing, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about writing, selling, expanding their sphere of influence, and who wants to make some great networking connections.

While there were a lot of nuts-and-bolts marketing tactics taught at the learning sessions at BlogWorld, there was a recurring theme that popped up in several presenters’ speeches and panels: the importance and power of cultivating relationships.

Without exception, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with your customers (or potential customers), clients, partners, industry peers, or anyone you’d like to work with, can be the difference between success and failure.

Why You Need to Work on Relationship Building

For a lot of new affiliate marketers, when they first get started, they jump right in to things like writing articles, creating ads, building landing pages, etc. While this is of course very important and necessary, I believe that spending a significant portion of time trying to build relationships can have a far greater long-term impact on potential success.

I’ve met and spoken with quite a few of ClickBank’s top-performing vendors and affiliates, and nearly all of them have connections with other top people in the industry. Some have collaborated on creating a product, some recommend products to their customers from vendors they know and trust, and some form “mastermind” groups to develop strategies and offer each other assistance. Almost no one gets to the top alone, without having received significant help and advice from other people at some point.

Not only is the advice and help you can receive extremely important, but having strong relationships can create opportunities and open doors you didn’t even know existed. It’s the same as it is for job hunting- it’s often not what you know, but who you know. You could end up getting invited to be an exclusive partner for a project, getting tipped off to a fantastic product to promote, or being introduced to other potential partners in your space.

Relationships are About Giving

At BlogWorld, author and marketer Chris Brogan discussed how the only relationships that really work are ones where both parties benefit. This is an extremely important point, and one where I think many people who are trying to create relationships with important people in their space run into problems.

If you’re new to a space, whether it’s affiliate marketing or any other industry with some established experts, immediately begging for help and going straight to the most influential people with requests for personal assistance is probably a bad idea. Best case, you might have someone take pity on you and give you a stock answer they’ve given to a thousand other people and then forget you completely. Worst case, you become a memorable annoyance to them and they do their best to avoid you altogether. Their first impression of you may end up being negative, and it’s hard to overcome this later.

How to Introduce Yourself Without Being Annoying

Instead of immediately asking for help, first become an information sponge and soak up all the information you can about a topic, whether it’s in books or on forums, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, or wherever. If you dedicate a substantial amount of time to just learning about a topic, without trying to first take action, it’s pretty amazing how quickly you can get up to speed and start really participating in the conversation and even helping other people.

Once you feel like you at least understand the conversation and are starting to form an opinion on the topic, starting contributing before you start making requests of people. If you follow an influential blogger in your space, start leaving thoughtful comments on their posts. Give your opinion on the subject, or offer up something you’ve learned in your research that could help others understand the topic better.

As a blogger, I can tell you that there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving comments on a post that show that someone has really thought about what you’ve written and is engaged with your ideas. If your comment shows me you’re really here to participate, and aren’t just commenting to get a link to your site, I’m far more likely to want to know more about you and listen to what you have to say in the future. I’m also a lot more likely to respond if you do ask me a question or make a request of me in the future.

This holds true all the way up from small bloggers to the most influential people in Internet and affiliate marketing. Before you can expect to get anything out of a relationship with people in your industry, you first have to show them that you’re willing to be authentic (don’t pretend to be interested just to get their help) and to give back to the community they’re a part of.

This is especially the case if you want to engage with someone who’s already achieved some success and is too busy to give significant time to every newbie who comes along. You’re going to really have to stand out as someone who’s worth their limited time. A great way to do that is by helping the same people they’re trying to help, and ideally, actually helping them too.

While I certainly can’t guarantee that you’ll develop a great relationship with the person or people you want to work with even if you do everything “right,” your chances of getting respect and becoming an influential person in your space will be much higher. For example, many bloggers and affiliate marketers who are now successful in their own right started out by commenting frequently on blogs or forums in their space. Even if the person you’ve approached doesn’t end up engaging with you, you may find that other people will seek you out and want to work with you, creating opportunities you never knew existed.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

As an affiliate promoting products through your own website, the CTR (Click-through Rate) from your promotional page to the vendor’s Pitch Page can be a key indicator of how well your promotions will convert into sales and commissions.

So what does it take to convert a visitor? What can change them from being a passing “tire-kicker” to an interested visitor – a visitor who takes the next step and clicks your affiliate link?

I want to share 6 high impact techniques for improving your promotional page’s CTR. These techniques are used and recommended by us at Affilorama, and have been reported as having a significant, positive effect on the CTR of our students’ sites.

Technique #1 – Know the fold

When something is referred to as being ‘above the fold,’ it means that it can be seen when the webpage first loads, so the visitor does not need to scroll to view it.

It is safe to assume that most screens are set to at least 1024×768 resolution (screen size) and it’s good practice to design your websites for that screen size. Set your screen resolution to 1024×768 and view through a common browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) with the default toolbars enabled to give you a rough idea where the fold is on your website.

Having high quality content above the fold that grabs people’s attention and holds it gives this content maximum opportunity to be seen and acted on. Never assume your visitor will scroll; in fact, most of the time if a visitor does not see what they thought they would find on the first visible screen load of the page they visit, they will leave straight away!

Technique #2 – Eye-catching header

A distinct and eye-catching header that is related to the theme of the product you are promoting will immediately catch the interest of the visitor and make them want to find out more.

It doesn’t have to be complicated; in fact, a simple, clean banner can have more impact than one that is ‘too artistic.’ Keep the file size down as well – you don’t want to keep visitors waiting while it downloads.

Technique #3 – Clickable advertising image

In a website context, the power of having images is that a visitor’s eyes are naturally drawn to them. Take advantage of this by not only having an attractive product image, but making it a call to action.

A call to action needs to be very specific. Don’t be vague or leave it to chance. Spell out what you want the visitor to do. If there’s room, include the benefits of completing the action. Many merchants actually have artwork you can use, so check the affiliates section of the merchant’s website first to save time.

Add your affiliate link to the image, making it clickable. Take this a step further by making it clear on the image that you want people to click it. So, for example, if the image doesn’t already say “Click here to get the best cure for panic attacks” then edit the image to add te text.

Technique #4 – A large text affiliate link

In addition to the clickable image, be sure to have a clear text link above the fold as well. It should be a bold, ‘hard-to-miss’ link that leaves the visitor in no doubt what they should do, making it a strong call to action.

For example, instead of an underlined “Panic attack cure” link, have “Click here to get the most popular guide to curing panic attacks.”

Technique #5 – An affiliate link at the end of your article

500 to 600 words is generally an ideal length for a single page of content: not too long for the human reader, but long enough to make sure it’s viewed as substantial content worthy of ranking by the search engines.

Ensure your article is well researched and written. If there are many spelling mistakes and/or grammatical errors you will fail to earn the trust of your visitor, which damages your authority on the topic you are writing about and substantially lowers your CTR.

At the end of your article, you should include a final push for the product you’re endorsing. A short, personal review works best, ideally with another clickable promotional image to the right. Having an affiliate link at the end is good for a number of reasons, but particularly because visitors are often looking for somewhere to go once they’ve finished reading the page they’re on.

Technique #6 – Focus on one product

Promoting several different products on the same page can sometimes leave a visitor confused, and a confused customer is likely to end their ’shopping trip’ abruptly and exit your site. To avoid this, focus the page on only one product and leave your visitors in no doubt as to how the product is the fix they’ve been looking for.

Use the ClickBank Marketplace to find a single product that is performing well, with a high gravity, payout, and a convincing sales page, to make sure that the extra clicks you get translate into actual sales and increase the size of your commission check!

Don’t forget to constantly monitor and test whenever making tweaks to your promotional pages. Keep notes on what you did and how your CTR was affected for future reference.

Do you have any additional techniques to share that have worked well for you? Have any of the above techniques helped improve your CTR? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

So, your page has been a success, you have some good rankings and you’ve decided to give the product its own full-blown website. Now comes the delicate task of directing that traffic to your new site. This is a strategy I use, and it works well for me. There are many ways to do it, but by following this strategy I minimize the disruption to my hard-earned rankings.

• Build the new site with a number of articles, each optimized for their own key phrases.
• Build external links to your site as usual.
• Wait a week or two.
• Assuming you are using a fresh domain, and depending on the extent of your link-building efforts, you will most likely be in the Google sandbox, and will be indexed, but not ranked for much.
• Put up an identical copy of your original product testing page that has been hosted on your other site. This time around, integrate menu and site links into the page and theme it with the rest of your new site. I recommend linking to all key pages on your new site from this page.
• Use a 301 redirect from the location of the test page on the old site, to the location of the test page on the new site.

This method ensures that approximately 70% or more (in my experience) of the PageRank or “Link Juice” from your original pages is passed on to the new page. You should see your old page fall out of the search results and your new page replace it. Additionally, the internal pages linked to from this article are given a boost as well, resulting in your new site gaining good search rankings at a much faster rate than without this boost.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

A common promotional technique used by many affiliates is to build a website based around an interest they have and promote related products in that niche, relying on organic search rankings and in-bound links for traffic.

Keeping the products that are being promoted relevant to the site content ensures that visitors to the site already have an interest in the product. This typically results in a much higher conversion rate than promoting unrelated products.

But following this strategy means that if the affiliate wishes to promote a product in an entirely different niche, a new site must be built from scratch – and a new site takes time and resources to build. It takes even more time for this new site to receive organic search traffic and to build links.

When you stumble across one of those truly exceptional opportunities to pair a high-quality product with what you believe is a hot market, there is no question that you have to act quickly.

This leads to the following question:

What is the most effective way to bring an untested product to market as quickly as possible?

The following tactics can be used to test a new product on an existing site, which lowers your costs and can lead to quicker results.

• If you have a number of sites, pick the site that is most closely associated with the new product. Think about the demographics of your sites’ audiences and how the new product could potentially fit into their lives. For example, if you were looking at promoting an eBook on “recipes for make-at-home, home cleaning products”, an existing site on dog training would be more complementary than a site on how to conquer World of Warcraft due to the demographic profiles. Use your judgment to match the new product with a similar demographic and appropriate existing site.
• Research three to four key phrases with a minimum of three words each using Google’s External Keyword Tool, and find the lowest competition/highest search count you can get away with. Take into account factors like how often your website is updated, how much “weight” you have in the search engines (PageRank) and how many external links you have pointing at the pages on your site. Generally speaking, the stronger these factors are, the higher the competitiveness of the key-phrases you can target, the faster you’ll have your new page ranked, and the more likely it is you’ll see a top 10 ranking.
• Build a promotional page on your existing site. This page could be in the form of a “Special Review,” a report on the new product, or simply an article on what the product you are promoting is about. Optimize this page to rank for the previously researched key phrases. This page should have obvious and well-featured links to the product you are promoting. Do not integrate this page into your existing site, and be sure to remove your standard menu from this page. However, include links to your homepage for those visitors that have reached this page from an internal link, and are not interested.
• Link to this page from within your site. The link should be visually featured as something different and unique, making it stand out and allowing the standard site visitor to identify it as somewhat unrelated to the theme of the current site. If a visitor is genuinely interested in the product, they’ll click.
• Build some links to this new page from external sources. Between 10 and 20 PageRank 1+ related links is ideal! This step is essential for emphasizing to the search engines that this new page is worthy of being taken seriously.
• Optional: Supplement with paid traffic. This may take the form of Google Adwords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, or one of the many other paid search networks. Bear in mind that bigger is not always better. Some smaller networks have decent search volumes and much lower bid prices. In some cases, click-through and conversion rates are even better! This step is not essential, but it does allow you to begin seeing some results faster. If your return on advertising investment is positive, continue to tweak your campaign and leave it running even as your organic listings start to appear. A special note for those using Google Adwords: You may want to add links pointing to internal pages on your site to avoid being “slapped” -be sure to spend time researching and use good judgment.

Depending on a number of factors, you should start to see your organic rankings appear anywhere from as little as a few days to a number of weeks.

Continue to refine and test this single page for as long as you need to draw a conclusion as to whether it is profitable and worth pursuing.

Tomorrow’s Part 2 will discuss how you can move your product promotions over to a new, more relevant website without losing the promotional “juice” you’ve been creating!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

At the end of last month, ClickBank introduced the first phase of Vendor Spotlights, a powerful new tool to help ClickBank vendors communicate with affiliates like never before. Vendor Spotlights are featured in the Marketplace alongside your Marketplace listing, and allow you to create a profile that shows affiliates the following information:

• Sales statistics
• Customer-facing advertisements, to give affiliates more info about your product and what sales messages they should use
• Recommended vendors (such as other accounts you own, or other vendors you would recommend)
• Your affiliate resources page (if you have one)
• A product image

The most exciting part of Vendor Spotlights, though, is that you’ll have the ability to post announcements about your products. For example, you could tell affiliates about upcoming products you’re releasing, changes to your existing products, special promotions you’re running, or tips on promoting your product.

If you’re a vendor with an approved ClickBank product, you can now create your Vendor Spotlight listing by visiting My Spotlight under the Account Settings tab in your account. Vendor Spotlight profiles will be added to the ClickBank Marketplace on September 21, so we highly recommend that you create your listing (and a first announcement) now! Vendors with Vendor Spotlight profiles will have a distinct advantage over vendors who don’t, so don’t delay!

For more information about Vendor Spotlights, see our Help Center article.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Succeeding or failing as an affiliate marketer can often be traced back to the products you choose to promote. At first, selecting a product to promote seems simple enough. You sign up with ClickBank and choose from any of the thousands of products available from over 12,000 vendors, then create a HopLink and slap it on your website – done!

But then, a couple of weeks down the line, you begin to wonder why you haven’t made any sales. You start to get a sneaking suspicion that maybe you should have spent more time choosing the right product to promote!

Understandably, the sheer selection of products on offer at ClickBank can be completely overwhelming to a newbie. How do you know if a product will sell well? What about competition? What do all the numbers mean?

Although there is no 100% watertight method for finding a profitable product, there are a few things that go a long way to increasing your chances of success.

Here are six research steps we recommend for finding a profitable ClickBank product to promote:

1 – Brainstorming a niche – The first thing you need to do is think about what market you’d like to work in. Choosing a market related to your hobbies, skills, passions and experiences is an excellent starting point (after all, you’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about it!). Are you a cat lover? Have you had experience with a particular health problem? Did you ace languages at school? Do your friends come to you for relationship advice? Having an existing knowledge of a niche can be a big advantage when you come to marketing it, because it’s much faster and easier to write persuasive and credible copy for your sales pages when you know what you are talking about.

So, have a scroll through ClickBank’s Marketplace and create a shortlist of niches you think you could effectively promote. Of course, ultimately you need to choose a profitable market over one that you simply like talking about, so these next steps will help you whittle your list down.

2 – Understand your customers – Let’s say you added ‘playing guitar’ to your niche list in Step 1. If you wish to pursue this idea further, then it’s very important that you understand (1) who in this niche is buying, and (2) what they are buying. The easiest way to delve into the minds of your market is by browsing forums related to your niche. This is a great way of finding out buyers’ needs, wants, and problems. For example, some people in the guitar market will be looking for free guitar sheet music; these people probably won’t be interested in buying something from you. Others want to learn guitar fast so they can participate in an upcoming performance; these people are much more likely to want to buy something to help them achieve that goal. Reading guitar forums will help you absorb what matters most to people interested in playing guitar, which in turn will help you choose the best products to promote to them.

Some other things to consider while you read: How can you target impulsive buyers in this market? How narrow is your niche? If it is too narrow you may find your target market is too small to make sales. If it’s too broad you’ll find it difficult to get your site ranked in search engines so prospects can find you.

3 – Selecting best-selling products - By now, you should have a good understanding of who your market is and what they are looking for. It’s now time to go back to ClickBank and search for some good products to promote that will meet their needs.

ClickBank uses a measure called ‘gravity’ to represent how well each product sells, based on how many sales have been made and how recent these sales were. We recommend focusing on products with a gravity of 30+, because these products have a proven track record of selling well for a number of different affiliates. Once you get below a gravity of 30, the chances of wasting your time pushing a white elephant start to increase.

A very high gravity (i.e. 100+) will generally indicate that there is a lot of competition in this niche. Don’t let that put you off. Competition is good because it means there’s lots of demand for products in that niche. It also means that there are potentially a lot of people with lists who you could form partnerships or JV’s (Joint Ventures) with.

I should point out that sometimes a low gravity product can still be worth promoting – it might simply be new, or an undiscovered gem. So while gravity is a helpful indication of selling potential, you shouldn’t reject an otherwise high-quality product solely because of its low gravity score.

4 – Multiple Products – Ideally, you want to find a market that has multiple related products being sold through ClickBank. The reason for this is that if there is only one product available for the niche, even if it sells like hotcakes, you’ll almost certainly have a hard time competing with existing affiliates who are well-established in the market.

The other advantage of multiple products is that it allows you to create a review page, increasing your chances of making a sale. For example, if you are selling a “learn guitar” product, by including a few other “learn guitar” products on the same page, visitors will feel they’ve completed the evaluation phase of buying and are now in a position to purchase.

5 – High Commission Percentage (65% or greater) – Let’s face it: you’re not going to get rich on $2 commissions. In order for your marketing efforts to be worthwhile, you need to promote high commission products – that is, products paying out at least $18 per sale. Keep in mind that from a seemingly high commission, you’ll need to deduct your advertising expenses (e.g. AdWords) as well as your time. Of course, if a product has a high dollar value, then a lower commission percentage will still be a good investment.

6 – Persuasive Vendor Pitch Page – Finally, don’t forget to take a long, hard look at the product’s sales page, since you will be relying on it to convert your HopLinks into commissions! Does it look convincing? Does it address the concerns of the market? Is it persuasive and credible, or does it sound over the top and unbelievable? Would you buy from a site that looked like that?

Choosing the right product to promote is the first stage of being a successful affiliate marketer, and if you do it right, you can drastically improve your chances of earning a good income. But even if you get off to a good start, don’t just set up your offer page and forget all about it. Keep a close eye on your ClickBank reports, and using Tracking IDs to see what pages and products are performing the best so you know where to focus your efforts and resources.

By following these proven techniques for finding good products to promote, you’ll be reaping the rewards of greater sales and bigger ClickBank checks!

Hope you enjoyed these tips for choosing a good ClickBank product to promote. Please let us know if you have any special strategies of your own!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Several times over the past few weeks, I’ve been asked what advice I would give to affiliate marketers who are just starting out and trying to learn the ropes. During my time at ClickBank, I’ve seen many affiliates go from knowing very little about what they should be doing to being extraordinarily successful. While every affiliate’s path to success will be different, as I’ll explain below, there are several general pieces of advice that I think can benefit every affiliate marketer. I hope they’ll be useful in helping you on your journey to affiliate marketing success.

• Treat affiliate marketing as your job- I can’t stress this point enough. While the ultimate goal of most affiliate marketers is to eventually make enough money to only have to work an hour or two a day (and there are many who do), one key to starting off well in affiliate marketing is to work as hard as you would at any other job. The most successful affiliate marketers start out by putting in long hours and doing lots of work on their promotional efforts, both in studying effective methods and actually putting them into practice. If you work 8 hours a day doing affiliate marketing, you’re going to be successful a lot sooner than if you only work 1 or 2 hours a day. Even if you’re doing affiliate marketing part-time, the more time you spend on it, the more successful you’re likely to be.
• Do what you’re good at- Affiliate marketing takes a lot of work, but one of the best parts of being an affiliate marketer is the freedom to choose how and when you work, what products you want to promote, etc. One of the best ways to avoid burnout, especially when you’re not yet making good money, is to choose promotional techniques that fit your personal style. Not everyone is a great writer, or even enjoys writing. If this describes you, you’re probably better off avoiding article marketing, which requires you to write large quantities of high-quality content. If you’re not the most social person and prefer anonymity, you probably won’t enjoy social media marketing very much. Since one of the main reasons for doing affiliate marketing is so you can work how you want to work, it’s important to figure out what suits your style and personality. Your work will be better, and you’ll be more willing to stick with it, if you’re enjoying yourself.
• Recognize that there are many ways to succeed as an affiliate- Since many new affiliates start out by reading books or following programs created by affiliate marketing experts, they think that these techniques may be the only way to make a lot of money and do well in the business. I’ve met many successful affiliates, and they’ve gotten to where they are today by many different paths. What works for one affiliate may not work at all for another, and there are always new tools, techniques, product niches, etc, being developed that can completely change the affiliate marketing game. Never be afraid to branch out on your own or try a crazy idea that you think just might work. Don’t be afraid to fail, because when you make mistakes you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t, making you more successful in the long run. There’s a lot to learn in the business, so the sooner you start making mistakes, the sooner you’ll start learning what works!

Besides this advice, I recommend reading our Help Center article Affiliate Dos and Don’ts, which offers some more specific advice for working with ClickBank and how to avoid common mistakes.

I’d also like to welcome comments from experienced affiliate marketers who have advice to share with beginners and can offer some encouragement or guidance. Please share your advice by leaving a comment!

Posted by: Matt Broich, Guest Blogger

Every successful ClickBank vendor knows that having a large number of affiliates promoting your product is the key to driving more sales. Unfortunately, many ClickBank vendors make mistakes when designing their Pitch Pages that hurt their ability to attract and retain valuable affiliates. The biggest mistakes vendors make when designing their websites include:

1) Accepting non-ClickBank forms of payment. Nothing upsets an affiliate more than losing a commission because the vendor accepts multiple forms of payment. Multiple forms of payment include PayPal (which ClickBank already accepts), a second non-ClickBank option for credit card processing, or a mail or phone-in payment option. ClickBank can only track affiliate HopLinks through the ClickBank order form. If an affiliate refers a customer and they end up mailing in their payment, the affiliate loses out on their hard-earned commission. Most affiliates check to see if a vendor offers multiple forms of payment before promoting their product, and might not promote the product if it does. I realize that vendors want to be customer-friendly by offering multiple forms of payment, but they may end up missing out on a lot of potential affiliate-driven sales.

2) Openly advertising the affiliate recruitment page. I often see vendors putting ‘Join Our Affiliate Program’ or ‘Webmasters Make Money’ links below the product order button or in their website navigation. This may upset some affiliates because a customer can easily view this link, learn they can sign up for ClickBank, get an ID, and receive a commission rebate. It therefore bypasses the affiliate commission. Instead, a vendor should bury their affiliate sign-up as a small text link in the footer of their sales page where it won’t be noticed as easily, and instead promote the page in their ClickBank Marketplace listing and other locations.

3) Presenting a poor design. Your website design should be optimized for the highest conversion rate possible, since affiliates want to feel confident that their efforts will regularly convert into sales. This requires: 

• Professional graphics. Vendors should present a clean, professional, fast-loading design with an attention-grabbing title. Invest in a professionally designed logo, header and footer graphics. Include a professional graphic of an e-book/software 3-D product box or, if you run a membership site, a membership “swipe card” graphic. These boxes and membership cards have been proven to drastically improve conversion rates.
• Well-written copy. Copy should be grammatically correct, conversational and free of typos.
• Minimal navigation. Sites that convert best have a single sales letter. If a vendor presents potential customers with a page full of links, it can prompt confusion or indecision. A page filled with links can overwhelm users so they don’t know where to start and may eventually leave without placing an order. A single page ’squeezes’ potential customers into either buying or not buying, without unnecessary distractions. To increase conversions, provide only one decision.  If you are a vendor who needs multiple navigational links, keep them to a minimum and be sure to make navigating your site easy.
• Multiple calls to action. Place text or graphical order links throughout your sales page. Vendors should invite people to order after a few paragraphs of sales copy. If there is only one order button at the bottom, conversion rates will be lower. Vendors shouldn’t overdo order buttons. They should be fairly aggressive, but never annoying or pushy.

4) Placing ads on site. Vendor Pitch Pages should not include third-party text or banner advertising on the sales page, such as Google AdSense or ClickBank HopAds. Affiliates aren’t going to send traffic to a vendor and risk losing that traffic to a user clicking a text ad or buying another ClickBank product through the vendor’s HopAd. 

5) Not offering upgrade products. Affiliates love vendors that offer upsell opportunities because it’s a chance to earn more money. Take two products that are comparable in every way, but one offers upsells and the other doesn’t; which one is the affiliate going to promote? When you offer attractive upsells, you will not only attract more affiliates, you’ll also attract more aggressive and active affiliates. 

Avoiding these costly mistakes can help vendors attract and maintain productive affiliates, which can have a huge impact on sales. Above all, it’s of the utmost importance to treat and respect affiliates like the valuable business partners they are.

Matt Broich is a seasoned ClickBank affiliate and vendor. He manages CBengine, a ClickBank Marketplace product finder and analysis tool that helps ClickBank affiliates find high converting products. Discover more: http://www.cbengine.com

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

ClickBank vendor Jeff Mulligan has created a very useful video showing how he increased sales for one of his ClickBank products over 22% by using a simple technique that only takes a few minutes to put in place. There are no tricks or gimmicks here: Jeff’s technique just increases customers’ willingness to buy by increasing their level of trust and making sure they know what to expect throughout the sales process.

This is especially important when you send customers to an order form that looks different from your main website. Although this video is specifically geared toward ClickBank vendors, there’s no reason affiliates who have their own website couldn’t try it too, by showing a screenshot of the landing page they’re sending customers to next. As Jeff states, you should always be testing. So if you’re an affiliate, give this technique a try and leave a comment to let us know if it helped your sales.

How to Boost ClickBank Sales Video