Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Even though a lot of marketers are turning to social media to ‘tweet’ their message, email is still a powerful way to promote your ClickBank products. With over 100,000 subscribers on our mailing list, Affilorama has to wield the power of this medium carefully. Emails that are overly promotional quickly turn potential customers into irritated readers who won’t think twice about hitting the delete button or, worse, reporting it as spam.

By providing value to subscribers we’ve been able to prove the ‘money in the list’ axiom true (we can’t release exact figures but sales improve around 300% with a good email newsletter) and we’d like to share a few secrets we’ve learned along the way that you can use to market ClickBank products or create newsletter collateral for your affiliates.

Beware of these 3 dangers!

Before we talk about what you should be doing to promote products using email, here’s a little checklist of things which can help you avoid being tagged as a spammer. Sure, they might be common knowledge, but they are important enough to be repeated.

• Beware of honeypots – Honeypots are a form of spam traps. Spam traps are specifically set up with the aim of catching spammers. They are email addresses “hidden” on a web page, but which can be found by address harvesting programs, commonly used by spammers. Unfortunately it can affect legitimate email marketers, too. In one case, a prominent email marketer lost 100,000 email addresses after a honeypot email address was added to their list by a competitor. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, choose an email service that offers a double opt-in option. This way any email address has to be verified with a confirmation email before being added to your list.
• Get familiar with the law – Laws on emailing people vary from one country to another so make sure that you are familiar with the legislation that governs electronic messages. For example, the CAN-SPAM act introduced in the US in 2003 dictates how businesses should follow certain protocols when sending emails to avoid prosecution. The FTC provides a good explanation of what it means for commercial email marketers, such as affiliates.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe – Sure you don’t want to actively encourage people to leave your list after you’ve worked so hard to sign them up, but if you make it difficult, complicated, or hide unsubscribe options, not only will you lose them mentally but instead of unsubscribing they’ll probably report you as spam. And make sure your process unsubscribes within a week (most email services do it automatically).

Enough of the ’shalt nots’, time to move on to some good ideas for getting ‘bang for your buck’ out of your email newsletter.

4 secrets of effective email marketing

I’ve picked 4 because it’s a nice even number, not because there are only 4. In fact, there are plenty more and I invite you to add your own in the comments, but for now here’s a quick rundown of four ideas that will get your email promotions off to a good start.

• Kick off with a fantastic subject line – Some people have to deal with so many emails that they often make a decision on whether to read an email based on the subject line – so think of it as your one shot at glory. Give them a great reason to read your email, such as “1-day 50% off sale” or “5 reasons why your dog doesn’t listen to you.” The better you know your audience, the more effective your subject lines will be.
• Remind them why they signed up – Sometimes people sign up in a moment of weakness. To keep them on your list, you’ll need to regularly remind them that it was a good choice. By listing reasons why it’s good to be a subscriber (exclusive offers, secret links to valuable resources, etc.) you’ll not only make them feel good about being a subscriber, they’ll actually look forward to your next newsletter and may even encourage their friends to sign up.
• Create valuable content – This point probably suffers from a bit of overuse but it can’t be stressed enough, particularly when you have a commercial overtone. Some successful email marketers will only send a sales email every 4^th or 5^th email – the rest will just be useful content that they give away for free. When promoting ClickBank products this should be easy, since you quite likely have good information on the niche from the merchant, PLR content, or your own research. This can easily be packaged into an email to give your readers value.
• Set an expectation for frequency – The key with frequency is to strike a happy medium. With email frequency, this is more about setting expectations, rather than a particular interval. For example, if you offer a free six-day mini-course then obviously your subscribers will be expecting an email a day for the next six days. Beyond that, a weekly email might be the right frequency, particularly if your emails are short, relevant, and to the point. The other extreme is not emailing them for weeks, then surprising them (not in a good way) with something out of the blue. By that time, there’s every chance they will have forgotten they subscribed in the first place!

Build, test and tweak!

As you spend time writing your emails, you may run into questions about whether to include direct links to the vendor or send people to your own website. Like other issues you may face with your emails, there’s often no right or wrong answer, and it may well depend on your audience. If they don’t click through to your website, then it may be better to try sending them direct to the vendor instead (remembering to track your HopLinks with a unique TID so you know how effective your emails are).

It’s all about testing to find out what works, and then tweaking so your emails hit their target.

Using email to promote ClickBank products is a great investment for times when organic traffic to your site drops off. This could be due to any number of reasons, from increased competition to poor ranking for an important keyword.

If you have a list to promote to, you won’t just be sitting back hoping buyer traffic will find your site – you will be proactively reaching out to them. Do it right and you’ll find it an effective way to increase your ClickBank sales.

So if you don’t already promote ClickBank products by email, what’s stopping you? Have you found a winning formula for writing effective emails that provide value to the reader but also promote your ClickBank products?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Posted by: Steven Clayton, Guest Blogger

Anyone who pays attention to SEO techniques knows that getting high quality, “do follow,” and diverse backlinks is the key to search engine optimization. The challenge, of course, is where to find places to get powerful backlinks.

Most people build their link building strategies around blog and forum postings. This makes sense and is certainly part of our plans as well. However, it stands to reason that Google also knows that most marketers who are using SEO tactics to rank their sites are doing this, and it makes sense that they will be looking for a much more diverse backlink pattern to award the highest rankings to.

With that in mind, I’m going to share the top 5 non-forum/blog backlink sources that we teach in Commission Blueprint 2.0.

1. Squidoo Lists

Squidoo.com is a great place to get links back to your site. Type the following into a Google search:

“add+to+this+list”+site:squidoo.com

You will be presented with a huge list of Squidoo lenses where you can add your site, with custom anchor text. Many of these have very high PageRank as well!

For extra credit, append +”keyword phrase” onto the end of this query, and you can target your links for relevance. For example, if you were trying to rank a fitness site you could type:

“add+to+this+list”+”fitness”+site:squidoo.com

2. Web 2.0 Profiles

Many Web 2.0 sites that allow you to create profiles and interact with others provide high PageRank, “do follow” links to the website listed in your profile. Some examples include www.linkedin.com, www.flickr.com, www.twibs.com, and www.zoominfo.com.

When creating profiles on these sites (which you could do for every niche you’re in) you’re able to list your website, which becomes a high quality backlink to your site.

3. Article Marketing for Links

Most marketers are familiar with writing articles to get traffic, but we write most of our articles for backlinks. If you’ve put a link to your site within the article (and let’s certainly hope you’re doing that!), every article that gets posted becomes a backlink (or even 2 or 3). The more articles that get posted, the more links you can build.

To get started, you simply have to write the article and submit it to a few article directories. I recommend: www.Ezinearticles.com, www.goarticles.com, and www.articledashboard.com.

There is absolutely no problem or penalty with submitting the same article to all three places (submit to Ezinearticles first, though, as they are the strictest with regard to unique content), and if you are accepted by all three and have 2 links in each article, your article will result in 6 high quality backlinks!

4. Relevant Lists and Resource Directories

There are many websites that function as a resource for people interested in a particular topic. For example, one site may maintain a list of top weight loss sites to visit. A backlink from pages like these can provide high quality, highly relevant backlinks. The relevance of backlinks is being talked about much more by Google lately, and it is assumed that relevance will play a larger role in site ranking in the near future.

The trick is to find these sites quickly and efficiently. We’ve found the following Google search queries to work very well:

“Keyword phrase” + “add url”

“Keyword phrase” + “add site”

“Keyword phrase” +  “add website”

For example, if you’re looking to build backlinks to a fitness-related site, you can search for:

“fitness” + “add url”

Google will return a huge list of sites that will allow you to add your web site, creating a backlink to your site.

One thing to watch out for is that many of the sites you’ll come across will ask for a reciprocal link (i.e., we’ll link to you if you link to us). These should be avoided. It’s worth the effort to sift through these sites to find ones where you can add your link without having to place a reciprocal link on your site, because these links are less valuable for SEO purposes.

Make sure to keep a list or database of all of these great link building sites/resources that you find, so you don’t have to search for them again the next time!

5. Easy EDU Links

I’ve saved my favorite and most unique tip for last. It’s commonly accepted knowledge that .EDU and .GOV backlinks are valued very highly when Google decides on your search rank position. Some people also know the “trick” to finding blogs and forums on .EDU domains, where they can leave useful comments that link back to their sites. If you don’t, here’s a great Google query to find .EDU blogs:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

We’re after something more valuable, though. How about a whole page on an .EDU domain where you can put an article or a whole blog post, as opposed to just a comment? All you need is a willing college student!

At many schools, college students are given web space they can use for anything they like. Of course, this web space is hosted on the .EDU domain. All we need to do is to get this college student to allow us to post our material if they like it. But how do you go about finding these students?

If you really think about it, you can’t possibly be many degrees of separation away from knowing someone who’s in college right now. Think about your circle of friends and family, and branch out from there. For example, even though I’m “older” (I have teenage children… sigh), I still have 3 cousins that are attending college right now. If I expand my reach further, friends of my parents have children in college. I’m also getting to the age where my friends are starting to have kids in college. In short, I can’t throw a rock into my personal network without hitting a college student!

All you have to do is approach these students in your network and ask for their help, or give them something in exchange, for the privilege of putting some content on their site. It’s as simple as that.

I hope these tips help you improve your search engine rankings and make you a more successful Internet Marketer!

About the author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of several best-selling Internet Marketing information products, including Commission Blueprint 2.0, Niche Blueprint, and SEM Business Blueprint. You can get more great advice and information on their blog.

Please note: Any opinions or strategies expressed here represent those of the author, and cannot be guaranteed to work by ClickBank.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission continues to make internet commerce a top priority. The FTC recent issued new regulations that govern the use of “endorsements” to promote products. Those regulations can be found at 16 C.F.R. § 255 or here. Note, the new regulations are effective December 1, 2009.

The new regulations cover all sorts of third party testimonials and endorsements—by consumers, experts and celebrities. If your promotions use customer or consumer endorsements, the FTC requires that the results described must be typical or, if not, you should “clearly and conspicuously” disclose that the results presented are not typical. Also, such customers should be “bona fide” buyers of your product, and not, for example, a fictitious person or your cousin who is doing you a favor. For expert endorsements, the person involved should have special knowledge that qualifies him or her to make the endorsement, e.g., if you use a doctor to sell a diet plan, that doctor shouldn’t be an eye doctor, but have special knowledge in the area of nutrition.

Also, the FTC requires all endorsements to disclose any “material connection” between the vendor and the advertiser. For example, if an affiliate runs a website offering an “independent review” of two products and gives a favorable review of one, they should disclose the fact that they are receiving a commission from the sale of that product. These rules also apply to third parties, such as bloggers, who receive a free product and are asked to do a review. Under the new FTC rules, not only should the blogger disclose he got the product for free but the vendor who gave him the product should make some effort to make sure that the blogger makes that disclosure.

Please review these new rules yourself and if you have questions, please ask your own legal counsel. ClickBank cannot and does not give legal advice to our vendors or affiliates, and our approval of your product does not constitute an approval of any specific marketing, promotion or endorsement used to sell the product.

Ramachandran draws expertise from working with 110,000 affiliate marketers worldwide

Dush Ramachandran, vice president of sales, marketing and business development for ClickBank, a top online retailer, will talk about the most promising growth strategies for affiliate marketers in the United States and Europe at two major affiliate marketing conferences coming up in December and January.

Participating in the Super Affiliate track at the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles on Dec. 3-4, Ramachandran will moderate a panel on the latest tips and techniques for super affiliates. He also will speak about best-practice growth strategies for affiliate marketers, along with fellow panelists Rosalind Gardner, author of the Super Affiliate Handbook, and Brian Norgard, vice president of the Fox Advertising Network.

ClickBank is widely considered to be a leader in national and international affiliate marketing with more than 110,000 active affiliate marketers working with the company to market its products and drive sales to an average of 26,000 transactions per day. Ramachandran is on the front lines of ClickBank sales and affiliate marketing efforts on a daily basis.

At Affiliate Summit West 2010 in Las Vegas, Jan. 17-19, Ramachandran will speak about “CPA Affiliate Marketing Opportunities in Europe.” Joining him for this panel discussion will Jim Banks, CEO of Global Direct Media, James Little of AffiliateFuture, and Matthew Wood, managing director and founder of Existem.

“Both of these conferences represent excellent learning and networking opportunities for affiliate marketers,” Ramachandran said. “Using real-life case studies, I’ll demonstrate how affiliate marketers can promote products most effectively in U.S. and European markets.”

With a roster of more than 22,000 affiliate marketers in Europe, roughly 18 percent of ClickBank’s 2009 global annual sales have occurred in the European marketplace. Ramachandran, who frequently is invited to speak at the largest and most prestigious national and international affiliate marketing meetings, serves on the advisory boards of Affiliate Summit and Affilicon, its international counterpart.

Ramachandran joined ClickBank in 2005. He is responsible for ClickBank’s sales and marketing activities and alliances with affiliate and vendor organizations worldwide. Ramachandran has held executive leadership positions with domestic and international firms such as Requisite Technology, Conceptual Technologies, Computervision Corp., Prime Computer, Inc. and Datapoint Corp. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore University, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Disclaimer: Please don’t take any of this as legal advice. I’m not a lawyer. I would always recommend seeking professional legal advice if you are unsure on any areas.

Nike, iPhone, Google, ClickBank – these words catch your attention because they are strong brands and are instantly recognizable. So why not use that to your advantage and include these names in your advertising? Could you get into trouble for using a brand name?

With a pretty decent AdWords spend each year, our own advertising here at Affilorama needs to be highly effective yet fully compliant. Let’s talk about some ways you can safely use trademarked brands in your advertising, and some dangerous pitfalls you want to avoid.

Vendors – Protecting your brand

If you’re a vendor, you know how important it is to develop a strong brand and look after your reputation. As your success grows so will the number of competitors, affiliates, and resellers interested in using your trademarked name(s). But the internet is a massive playground to patrol – how can you effectively monitor your brand?

• Register your brand – You can choose to register your brand for added security in key markets. For example, in the US you can register with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This can be a powerful asset to have when you need to prevent someone using your trademark without your permission.
• Google Alerts – A great way to monitor online activity that involves your brand name is to set up a free Google Alert.
• Traffic Travis PPC Analysis – Monitor advertisers who are using specific keywords, such as your trademarked names, using the PPC Analysis tool.
• Social Media search – Some social media sites are “walled gardens” and won’t appear in a standard Google search. This means you will need to perform manual searches on sites like Facebook.

What can you do if you come across what you feel is misuse of your brand?

• Is it misuse? – First, make sure your brand is actually being misused. Google has recently relaxed the use of trademarked names by advertisers, particularly in the US. It’s also possible that the use of your brand by someone else is actually to your advantage, in the form of free publicity.
• Contact the offender - If you are still unhappy with the use of your trademarked name, then the best course of action is to attempt to contact the offender directly and resolve the matter. Beware of “burning bridges,” as the offender may not have been misusing it intentionally and could be a powerful advocate for your product.
• Legal recourse – If the matter is still not resolved to your satisfaction, you can turn to a third party for assistance. Google has clear guidelines on its policies for trademark usage and ClickBank has its own trademark policy that all clients must adhere to.

Affiliates – Using trademarked names the right way

Using a trademarked name can be a very effective method of promoting a product, but done outside proper usage guidelines will only create problems. So what’s the best way to use a trademarked name?

• Work with the vendor – Cooperation and openness is the best policy to gain maximum advantage from using a trademarked name. A vendor can provide extra support and resources to boost your promotion. For example SaleHooReview is an affiliate website that promotes our popular wholesale directory service, SaleHoo. He contacted us and thus began a productive relationship that works for both parties, an arrangement that allows him to use our trademarked SaleHoo brand on his site and in his domain name.
• Avoid negative intent – Some affiliates have been known to use a trademarked name in a negative way, such as advertising a poor review of a product to grab attention, or to switch to a competing product. If you intend to use the trademarked name in a way that casts the vendor in a bad light, then expect to be challenged for its usage.
• Keep it ethical – Trademarked names are often used in a negative way to trick consumers. Counterfeiters are notorious for tricking consumers into believing they are buying the real thing by using names that closely resemble the original product name. Other unethical uses include impersonating the actual vendor and directly linking to their site with an affiliate link. Some of these practices are thoroughly policed and banned by Google.
• Check advertising guidelines – Google updated their policies in June 2009, relaxing its rules on the use of trademarked names in selected countries including the US and the UK. Trademarks can be used in your targeted keywords and AdWords ad copy if you sell or review a product. But just because Google allows it doesn’t mean the vendor will – it pays to check if they place any restrictions on using their trademarked names.

Vendors and Affiliates working together with Vendor Spotlight

There’s a certain synergy that comes from vendors and affiliates working together. Rather than a vendor spending their time hunting down the “bad guys,” they can focus on working with the majority of affiliates who are genuinely interested in promoting their products in a legitimate manner.

An excellent way to build bridges with affiliates is for vendors to create their own Vendor Spotlight. The Vendor Spotlight is a good way for vendors to communicate with affiliates, and potential affiliates, about what support and resources they offer affiliates, current promotions, sales trends, and other news and tips for selling more product. We use the SaleHoo Vendor Spotlight for keeping our affiliates informed of new material we add to the affiliates area on SaleHoo or special promotions that we run.

If you need to ask the vendor questions about use of their trademarked names, and seem unable to find a way to contact them, talk to ClickBank. They may be able to mediate on your behalf.

Using trademarked names when promoting ClickBank products can really boost your sales, increasing your profile and your commissions. But when the rules of fair usage are ignored, the resulting conflict is not good for anyone.

Do you use trademarked names or brands in your promotions? What’s worked best for you? Do you feel the policies on brand name usage are too relaxed?

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: Nathan Hangen, Guest Blogger

I need to get something out of the way…I am a Twitter fanatic. In fact, it would come as no surprise to me if my wife was spending every free minute she has in order to learn how to become a hacker so that she could take it down and have her husband back (I’m really not that bad, but you get the idea).

So considering that fact that I spend a lot of my time learning how to master the art of Twitter marketing and that I’ve even created my own Twitter products, what I am about to say might be a little too close to the bone…even for me.

However, the truth is the truth and if we try to hide from it, then we end up dying because of it. And here it is:

99% of the affiliate marketers on Twitter have zero idea how to market correctly.

Furthermore, many of those that don’t get it are teaching new users how not to get it too, leading to a cycle of spam, crappy auto-DM’s, and accounts that get suspended or marked as spam before they have even had a chance to flourish.

So, what are they doing, and why are they doing it? Let’s tackle the former first.

1. If you want to sell an affiliate product on Twitter, you cannot expect to be able to do it in 140 characters, and yet, that’s what many marketers try to do. Their Twitter streams are filled with blatant sales pitches, so much so that you start to wonder if there is a real person behind the curtain.

Look, if I don’t know who you are, I don’t know where you are linking to, and I don’t see anything but pitches in your Twitter stream, then I am not going to click through. If I do, if you get lucky, you will see me hit the back button before the page even finishes loading.

2. You cannot take over someone’s DM’s (Direct Messages) and have them send out spam on your behalf. Aside from the fact that it is extremely annoying, it takes advantage of people that don’t know any better. You are actually hurting your customer in the process. Hit-and-run business tactics are shameful and will not help you in the long run.

3. Creating a product that only teaches people how to make money on Twitter by promoting your “make money on Twitter” product is, well, just sad. Sure, you might make a few bucks, but what does that get you? Again, it is this type of short term thinking that turns Twitter into a madhouse and creates an environment where marketers are no longer trusted. At that point, you’ve ruined it for all of us. Thanks.

4. Perhaps the most blatant offender is the reply spammer, which is relatively new to the scene. These people reply to popular Twitter users with an affiliate link, and try to trick people into clicking. These reply spammers also try to trick the popular person’s followers, because at first glance, it looks like the Tweet is coming from them. Considering most of these tweets look identical, I simply click the block button and move on. Get blocked often enough and you’ll be suspended. Good luck getting your account back.

So Why Are They Doing It?

1. Most affiliate marketers on Twitter are doing this because they are too lazy to learn how to effectively sell affiliate products. You shouldn’t try to sell someone in a PPC ad; you bring them to your sales page so that your sales letter can do the selling. It’s the same with Twitter. To do this, though, you’ve got to be relevant, which means that not everything you say can be a sales pitch. When it is, though, it has to address the needs of your list. Sending out blanket replies just doesn’t work.

2. Sadly, many people buy systems that tell them that these methods work. To make matters worse, many of them use viral friend adders that help them get recognition and more marketers promoting their products. Eventually, regardless of how faulty the system is, it spreads like wildfire. Everyone gets caught, no one wins.

3. They aren’t interested in helping people. The last category is comprised of marketers that use the same tactics in other venues. They use software to generate new accounts by the dozens, so they don’t care if they get suspended. They aren’t interested in helping people…they simply want to make an easy buck.

So How Do You Sell on Twitter?

I’ve written about this extensively because it is a matter that I am extremely passionate about. I am tired of shady marketers ruining it for everyone and more importantly, I’m tired of seeing new people get taken advantage of.

So here’s the truth:

If you want to sell on Twitter, you have to build relationships and create targeted lists based on interests. Once you learn how to build these networks (which really is easy to do), you can link to relevant affiliate offers without having to worry about getting unfollowed or blocked. The key is to let the content, not a Tweet, do the selling. If everything you say on Twitter is a pitch of some sort, it won’t work. However, if you learn to be relevant and helpful, your random pitch will not only be noticed, but will be appreciated.

People love to buy…we love to consume great content. However, we have to be warmed up before we do it. On social networks, it’s the relationships that sell, not the message. It’s really up to you, though. You can spam people and make a quick buck (maybe), or you can build credibility and build a successful business. In my opinion, taking the latter route is much more efficient.

About the Author: Nathan Hangen writes about web entrepreneurship at NathanHangen.com, and about how to use social media to fuel your brand at Making It Social . Follow him on Twitter @nhangen.

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

If you’re a woman who’s making money as a ClickBank affiliate or vendor, we’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below with your ClickBank nickname. Or, if you’d prefer for it to remain private, you can send an email to blog[at]clickbank.com with your name, ClickBank nickname, and any info you’d like to share about your success with ClickBank. We hope to hear from many of you soon.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – (Oct. 27, 2009) – Serving more than 114 countries on 6 continents, ClickBank announced today that the company has taken great strides toward globalization of its platform in a continued effort to expand services offered to the company’s international markets.

ClickBank officials say they’ve taken a phased approach to this endeavor, starting with the translation of the order form and all customer related material such as receipt emails and customer service content into German, Spanish and French. Having completed that phase last year, the company moved onto phase two—translation of the entire ClickBank site outside the login into the same three languages. Work on this phase has just been finished and the new pages are live as of today.

“More than one third of the 26,000 transactions ClickBank processes each day are made from outside the U.S.,” said Dush Ramachandran, ClickBank vice president of sales, marketing and business development. “It is important that we continue to cater to international markets. The globalization of our platform is just one of the many benefits we offer our global vendors and affiliates.”

In addition to offering content in multiple languages, ClickBank has made significant improvements to its payment processing and accepts 13 international currencies including the Euro, the British Pound, and the Swedish and Danish Kroner

Posted by: Che Horder, Business Intelligence Manager

Recurring Billing

You have spoken and we listened.  We’ve made changes to our analytics tool that will help vendors and affiliates who promote recurring billing products.  Previously, it was not possible for you to differentiate between sales made through the ClickBank Order Form and rebills on recurring billing products you sell or promote.  This made the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion) difficult to work with when reporting on recurring billing products.

With our release on October 26, 2009, you will now be able to differentiate rebills from sales that occur on the ClickBank Order Form.  We have added two new fields in analytics called Initial Sales Count and Initial Sale Amount.  These fields represent sales made on a standard product and the initial sale of a recurring billing product.  These fields also replace Gross Sales in the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion).

Coming in the near future, we will also introduce new analytics reports designed to further inform our clients on their recurring billing promotions.

Vendor Tracking ID

Our October 26, 2009 release will also be the introduction of reporting by Tracking ID for our Vendors.  This feature has been, and will remain, available for our affiliates.