In the ultra-competitive affiliate marketing landscape, it’s a good idea to always be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to promote products. Somewhat ironically, a great new space for affiliate promotions is actually an advertising medium that’s been around a long time: television.

Up to now, advertising on TV was far too expensive and complicated for the average marketer. However, Google recently introduced Google TV, which allows practically anyone to create TV spots within their AdWords account and run them on national cable TV. One of the most amazing parts is the low cost- as low as $20 for an ad spot!

Considering the huge potential reach of television, this can be a great way to advertise your own product or separate yourself from other affiliates who are promoting the same product. And considering how powerful and relatively inexpensive video creation tools and software packages are today, it’s reasonable for almost anyone to create a simple TV ad they can test out.

If you’re not sure you’re capable of creating an effective TV ad, check out this Copyblogger post on the topic. It’s written from the perspective of promoting a blog, but the same idea applies to ClickBank products or affiliate websites. It has some great advice on making your ad compelling to viewers.

One important thing to remember is that if you’re an affiliate who’s using this service, you shouldn’t try to promote a basic HopLink, since advertising on TV requires that viewers be able to remember the website so they can type it in. HopLink URLs are too complicated for this purpose, so your best bet is to send traffic to an affiliate landing page, such as a review site, blog, or other content-based site, where you then recommend one or more ClickBank products to your visitors. Try to keep the URL of your site as simple and memorable as possible. If you’re a vendor and want to send traffic to your own site, you can just send people directly to your Pitch Page URL.

If you’ve been struggling to make AdWords work for you due to the level of competition or pricing, it’s worth checking out Google TV to see if it could be an effective new way to promote products. Some of the best strategies for affiliate marketing success are testing out new promotional techniques and being an early entrant into new marketing spaces before they get overcrowded and too competitive. Who knows- you could end up being the next advertising mogul!

Do you think TV ads could work for your promotional efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Advertising Strategy: Daypart Bidding
2. Why an Engaged Audience Beats PPC or SEO for Affiliate Marketers… and How to Get One!
3. New Advertising Opportunities for Publishers

Successful marketers have known for a long time that the more often you can get your product in front of potential customers, the more likely they are to buy. For traditional marketers, this has usually been accomplished by methods such as print, radio, or TV advertising.

In a move that should benefit affiliate marketers and vendors, Google announced yesterday that they’ve brought this same ability to remarket to customers to PPC advertising.

Basically, in your Google AdWords account, you can specify that you want to display ads for your products or site to people who have already visited your site from a paid click. Your subsequent ads will be shown to them in the Google Content Network, when they’re browsing other sites related to your product. This gives you a great opportunity to remind people of the benefits of your product, or offer them a reason to come back and check out your site again. It’s possible that the first time they visited your site, they just weren’t ready to buy, but after browsing around online, a well-written ad could be just what it takes to get them to come back and buy this time.

If you do AdWords advertising, be sure to check it out!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Avoiding the Google Slap
2. A New Advertising Frontier for Affiliate Marketers: TV Ads?
3. Advertising Strategy: Daypart Bidding

This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

With numerous opportunities to make money online available worldwide, one of the most popular methods these days is affiliate marketing. There are several approaches to affiliate marketing, but most marketers agree that the fastest way to start making money immediately is through Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. Unfortunately, this is also one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of money if you do not plan properly.

In this guide, we will take a look at three critical factors that every affiliate marketer must be aware of in order to successfully turn a profit using PPC marketing without the risk of losing a large amount of money.

Factor 1 – Discovering a Profitable Offer

Generating an exceptional profit using ClickBank is still highly possible at the moment. Having said that, there is such a large variety of products and niches that it might be tough to choose the most effective income generating products on ClickBank to advertise. So what’s the easiest way to determine which products are ideal to promote so that you can make the most money without having to waste your time.

Let’s take a look at a handful of tips that when followed should put you on the right track to uncovering some of the most successful ClickBank products.

1. Pay attention to exactly how well other affiliate marketers are doing in promoting the product

It’s possible to understand a great deal about whether or not a product is profitable by looking at the sales statistics of others. A product is without doubt selling very well if there are a high number of affiliates advertising it. ClickBank has a sales statistic known as gravity, which is a number that represents the percentage of online marketers successfully promoting a specific product.

You shouldn’t make a judgment based solely on gravity, but it is useful data that ClickBank provides and can be an excellent tool in selecting a income generating product to advertise. Choosing virtually any product with gravity between 10 and 100 is usually a great start.  If the gravity is less than 10, odds are it isn’t selling very well. Likewise, if the gravity is more than 100 it may be an indication that the marketplace is saturated, although that is not always the case.

2. Monitor products that are rising in popularity

To discover successful products, it is helpful to pick one with statistics that are climbing. Restrict your choice of products to roughly 10 and track them for at least a week or two. Should you note that other affiliates are choosing one product a lot quicker than the others, then that could be a successful affiliate product.

3. Estimate the return rate

One crucial factor you should consider when choosing the top ClickBank products is the return percentage rate. When return rates are high, then a product sales rate is not indicative of your potential success with a product since you will likely end up returning your earnings in the future. Virtually any product with return rates higher than 15% probably should not be considered, irrespective of sales rates.

The only way to truly gauge return rates is to promote a product for a while and keep a close eye on the return rate. However, if you want to get a rough estimate of the potential return rate before you start promoting a product, you can do Google searches for these kinds of phrases:

“What is your opinion about PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did you like PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did anybody buy PRODUCT TITLE?”

The results for these searches will often give you a good overview of the quality of the product and what the general customer opinion of it may be.

4. Examine the size of the market

After you have narrowed down the products a bit more by crossing out products with high return rates, you should then check out the market size. For example, suppose you have found four different niches. Use the Google keyword tool and research the variety of keywords for each niche and determine the search volume. Google Trends is also a useful tool for analyzing the developments of a niche immediately and over time. The best scenario is to find a product with few competitors and high demand from customers.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part 2, where we’ll discuss how to build a great landing page where you can send your PPC advertising traffic.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 3
2. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 2
3. The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Split-Testing Guide

We would like to invite you to participate in the pilot of this exciting new feature. To participate, you must use at least one of the following programs:

- Google Analytics

- Google AdWords

- Yahoo Search Marketing

If you use one of these programs and would like to participate, simply fill out the form below with your name, ClickBank nickname, email address, and which of the three programs you use.

Please note that only a limited number of respondents will secure a spot in the pilot, so apply quickly!

If you are chosen to participate, ClickBank will contact you via email with additional information regarding the pilot.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. ClickBank’s Great New Features
2. Coming Soon: Enhanced Reporting Analytics
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4

Many of our product publishers and affiliates turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Adwords, to help drive quality traffic to their sites. While there are many ways to improve the performance of PPC advertising, one of the most useful, but occasionally overlooked, methods is a technique called daypart bidding.

Daypart bidding, also known as Ad Scheduling in Google Adwords, is a tool that is offered by both Google and MSN’s AdCenter. It allows you to adjust your bids in a particular PPC advertising campaign, based both on the day of the week and the time of day. You can turn off campaigns completely, or boost your bid to double your normal bid or more. It’s quick and easy to use, and gives you a great deal of control over your advertising.

While this technique can be especially useful for businesses with specific operating hours, it can also be very advantageous for online-only businesses like ClickBank clients. Since ClickBank reports the time of day of every sale, it can be helpful to analyze what days and times deliver the most value for you, and then adjust your advertising bids accordingly. For some people, this may be during normal business hours, but depending on the product it could be late at night or on the weekend.

Once you’ve identified your “prime time,” you can adjust your bids to make sure your product or site is getting maximum exposure at that time. Likewise, if there’s a particular day or time that your site just can’t seem to convert, you can turn down your bids during those times to save your advertising budget for more effective periods.

One great thing about daypart bidding is that you can make use of it even if you don’t have any kind of Web site analytics installed. All you need are the PPC advertiser’s traffic reporting and ClickBank’s sales reporting to start improving your advertising efforts and getting the most return on your investment. To achieve the biggest improvements, though, you should combine ClickBank’s reporting with Web site analytics and testing to get a complete picture of your site’s traffic and sales.

If you haven’t already tried daypart bidding, give it a shot and see how much more you can get out of your budget!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. A New Advertising Frontier for Affiliate Marketers: TV Ads?
2. Strategy for Success: Create a Privacy Policy
3. New Advertising Opportunities for Publishers

If you’re an affiliate who runs your own site and promotes it through Google Adwords, improving your Quality Score can be the difference between an advertising campaign that’s mediocre and one that’s extremely profitable. One tactic for improving Quality Score is to make sure that your Web site has a privacy policy, and that your landing page directly links to it. Many affiliates skip over creating a privacy policy on their site, especially if they have created many different Web sites to feature different products.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to become a legal expert, BBBOnline has created a privacy policy template that you can modify to fit your Web site. You’ll just need to plug in a few details about your site, and add or delete certain sections of the policy to reflect your site’s details and marketing policies. Then you’ll need to create a link to the page, preferably in the site footer so it will be linked to from every page within the site. For 10 minutes’ worth of work, it’s one of the easiest ways to improve your site and get better performance out of your advertising efforts.

Even if you don’t use Google Adwords, having a clearly worded privacy policy can make your site appear more trustworthy to visitors, leading to higher conversion rates. One of the biggest hurdles to making a sale online is convincing nervous visitors that their personal information is safe with you, and a privacy policy can go a long way to reassuring them that they can trust you. It’s unknown whether Google rewards sites with a privacy policy in natural search results, but for the small amount of effort required, it’s well worth adding a privacy policy just in case they do.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Advertising Strategy: Daypart Bidding
2. Avoiding the Google Slap
3. Google Gives Advertisers the Power of Remarketing