Posts Tagged ‘affiliates’

Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager- Client Account Management

In my conversations with clients, I have found that most people search the Marketplace using the default “Sort by” option, Popularity. Popularity is determined by a publisher’s net sales over a recent timeframe and also rewards publishers who have many affiliates promoting them.

While popularity is a useful measure of a product’s earning potential for you as the affiliate, there are many advantages to using the other “Sort by” options available in the Marketplace as well.

High Gravity: Sort by ‘High Gravity’ if you are looking for products that have a proven track record for converting well. Gravity refers to the number of affiliates who have earned a commission by promoting a particular publisher’s product(s). Therefore, if a publisher has a high gravity score, it means that the publisher has lots of affiliates earning money by promoting their product. This, in turn, should be an indicator to you that the product sells well. The downside to promoting products with a high gravity score is that you will encounter lots of competition in promoting it.

Low Gravity: If you are looking for hidden gems and want to be one of the first to market with a product promotion, sort your Marketplace search by “Low Gravity.” This is a bit of a high risk/high reward option. Low gravity means little competition from other affiliates, so you may be able to spend less time and money promoting that product than with a high gravity product. If the product converts well, you can win big as one of the only affiliates promoting it. This is the high reward side.

However, low gravity also means that the product either hasn’t been tested by many other affiliates or has been tested by affiliates and hasn’t converted well. Either way, it’s possible that you could be spending your time and ad dollars on a product that doesn’t sell. That’s the high risk side of Low Gravity.

$ Earned/Sale: This is a great option for people who know they need to make a minimum amount of money on each sale in order to be profitable. If you know about how much you’re going to spend on promotion for each sale you earn, you can sort by $Earned/Sale and only promote products whose payout meets your minimum threshold for profitability. For example, if you know you are going to spend about $10 in advertising per sale, you may choose to only promote products that pay at least $20 per sale.

% Earned/Sale: This is similar to $ Earned/Sale, but it ranks publishers according to the commission percentage they offer on each sale. If you are looking for publishers that give a high percentage of the sale to affiliates, sorting by % Earned/Sale is your best option.

Future $ and Total $/Sale: Are you interested in earning recurring revenue from a single sale? Then subscription products are for you. Sort by either Future $ or Total $/Sale to find products that bill customers at regular intervals, such as bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. The higher the dollar amount, the more money affiliates earn from that product, on average.

% Referred: This “Sort by” option tells you the percentage of a publisher’s sales that are referred by affiliates. A high %Referred likely means that the publisher is established and has had time to grow their affiliate base. It also indicates that affiliates stick with the product once they start promoting.

Each “Sort by” option offers a different picture of ClickBank publishers and offers affiliates different ways to find great new products to promote. Try experimenting with different types of searches, and you could find the product that’s a perfect fit for your affiliate business!

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – Jan. 6, 2009 – ClickBank, a world leader in online retail of high-converting, digitally downloadable products, is attending the Affiliate Summit West. The conference will take place Jan. 11-13^th, at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nev.

Come meet with ClickBank executives at Table 47 at the Meet Market on Sunday, Jan. 11 from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

The Affiliate Summit West, the premier affiliate marketing conference of the year, provides an opportunity for affiliates, merchants and networks to attend educational sessions on the latest industry issues. The Affiliate Summit West presents an opportunity for ClickBank to meet its affiliates in person, receive feedback about its services and keep its affiliates up to date on enhancements coming in 2009.

“The Affiliate Summit West is an excellent opportunity for ClickBank to meet its affiliates in person and discuss the latest trends in affiliate marketing,” said Brad Wiskirchen, ClickBank’s chief executive officer. “We have a number of dynamic additions planned for our services in 2009.”

In an earlier blog post, I described the Ten Habits of Highly Successful Publishers. Through my conversations with our top affiliates, I discovered that they also shared many important habits that have led to their success.

1. Promote products that address specific needs: While most fledgling affiliates tend to focus on the Internet Marketing vertical expecting to make quick money, there is a wide range of products on the ClickBank Marketplace that cater to a huge variety of needs. Products that address a specific need or answer a particular question sell extremely well.

2. Promote widely: Many successful affiliates rely on a wide range of promotional methods-e-mail marketing, blogs, review sites, and pay-per-click advertising-since each type of promotional method works well with a particular demographic.

3. Promote seasonally: Successful affiliates tend to vary the products they promote based on the season. With New Year’s resolutions being made at the start of the year, a lot of people look for self-improvement products at that time, while in the summertime products relating to outdoor recreation tend to be more popular.

4. Persevere through hardship: Many novice affiliates tend to assume they cannot be successful if their initial attempts to promote products don’t go well. Nothing succeeds like perseverance. Stick with the effort and don’t allow early disappointment to deter you. Many of our most successful affiliates have attained success after disappointing early results.

5. Broaden your portfolio of products: In general, all products don’t do well at the same time. When some products are doing well, other products are not. Promoting a variety of products will allow you to benefit by smoothing out the peaks and valleys in the life cycle of each product.

6. Test relentlessly: Since your commissions depend on the links from your site to the publisher’s site working consistently, test everything and test regularly. Simulate a visitor’s journey from your site to the publisher’s site and then on to the ClickBank order form, and make sure that the order form displays your nickname as the affiliate. You should also test and tweak the language you use in your promotions to make sure it is compelling.

7. Make realistic claims for the product: Refunds are high when products don’t meet the claims made by the promotional material. By making extravagant claims for the product you may be able to get more people to buy the product initially, but this success is short-lived when customers end up refunding the product if it doesn’t measure up.

Our top affiliates generate several million dollars worth of business each year, even in difficult economic times, by adopting these seven simple habits. Perhaps now you can too!

Posted by: Michael Poston, Product Manager

Now more than ever, users are accessing the Internet with high speed connections, which invites the use of rich media. SOHO (Small Office Home Office) businesses have discovered the following sure-fire ways Internet video can improve their customer experience:

Product Demonstration
For years, publishers have looked for ways to clearly demonstrate their product and articulate its value proposition. This exciting new media allows you to quickly go through the whole process, screen-by-screen, showing the product “in action,” overcoming some of the limitations of words and pictures. Creating a video to demonstrate your product can be the tipping point that convinces a visitor to buy. For example, if you can show a technology-averse visitor that your product is easy enough for even a beginner to use, you’ll overcome one of their biggest objections to buying.

Confidence Building
Since the early days, when Internet purchasing was a new idea, customers have sided with companies they trust when making their purchases. Much of this decision is based on confidence, credibility, and being able to identify with the creator of the product/service. Video allows you to remove barriers by inspiring confidence and putting a personable face on the product, ultimately winning customer trust and closing more sales.

Problem Solving
Not only is it a good idea to use video to sell your product, but it will also pay dividends with customer service. For example, creating a video that walks customers through resolving a very common customer service request could save your organization money and time. Things that are difficult to describe with words and pictures are much easier to express in video format!

Marketing Materials
Lastly, if you upload product demonstration videos to YouTube or other video sites, affiliate marketers can use them to help promote your products by embedding them in their site, which will save you money on marketing. Publishers with products that can be easily demonstrated by video should start making videos available to their affiliate partners!

The time to wonder if video will change your business has passed; it is time to leverage this powerful new media!

Happy selling, friends!

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

Every time I go to a large department store, I think the seasons are coming earlier and earlier. The weather outside is a balmy 90°F and the fall fashions are already on the shelf. Almost before the ghouls and goblins of Halloween displays are put away, holiday music seems to flood the stores.

But when you think about it, seasonal marketing makes a lot of sense. Even on ClickBank, where a number of products have year-round appeal, there are products whose appeal is definitely seasonal. Capitalizing on these seasonal trends can be a very lucrative approach for both affiliates and publishers.

For instance, looking up searches on Google Trends for specific seasonal terms like ‘Halloween costumes’ or ‘Christmas ornaments’ shows not only the time of year when these searches peak, but also the top 10 geographic areas from which these searches originate. This knowledge allows affiliates to not only plan their spending on AdWords and SEO efforts, but also to geo-target their advertising by having their ads shown in specific geographical markets.

Just as an example, I looked up ‘ski fitness’ on Google Trends and found that, predictably, the searches started in middle of the last quarter of the year, peaked from around the end of the year to the middle of the first quarter of the following year, and remained flat at zero volume for the remainder of the year. The top four countries these searches came from were UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland. Doing a search on the ClickBank Marketplace for ‘ski fitness’ yielded a number of fitness products, including one that is specifically aimed at ski fitness.

So with a little forethought and planning, you could have a series of different promotions for each season, geographical area and topic of interest.

‘Tis the season to promote, it would seem.

Posted by: Jen Johannsen, VP of Operations

Early in August, I posted a blog entry about using some of the tools we provide that allow us to provide better customer service to your customers (”Help Us Help You”). Well, here I am again to announce the newest tool that we have added that will allow us to help you assist your customers more quickly.

Yesterday, our release included the addition of a field that will allow you to enter a Customer Service Web site. Input this information, and we will provide it to customers in notifications and via the order locator on the CLKBank.com page as an alternate source for technical support.

We envision this being used in different ways by different publishers. We know some publishers have a helpdesk URL that can be listed as the Customer Service Web site. Others may want to add their FAQ page that answers their customers’ most commonly-asked questions. Some may add a page that has a script that will allow customers to generate a new password, in case they lose the original password that was generated at the time of the purchase. I’m sure there are other ways it can be used, as well.

Just remember that if you list a Customer Service Web site under the “My Account” section of your ClickBank account, the URL will be sent to the customer in the email notifications that are sent out by ClickBank.

Our hope is that you can use this to help your customers as quickly as possible – and hopefully keep more sales!

Service provides greater flexibility for ClickBank users

BROOMFIELD, Colo.- Sept. 9, 2008 – ClickBank, a privately held online retailer for buyers and sellers of digitally delivered products and services, today announced the ability for ClickBank clients to receive payments for affiliate commission and sales via weekly direct deposit (ACH & XACH).

“During the past two years in our efforts to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, we have made a number of critical improvements to our services and offerings,” said Bob King, ClickBank CEO. “The latest improvement is weekly payments. With this offering our clients will have greater flexibility to manage their cash flow and reinvest into their businesses.”

In July, ClickBank introduced direct deposit into both domestic and international bank accounts. Now, direct deposit users can choose to be paid weekly, cutting the wait time to receive electronic payments and providing ClickBank clients faster access to capital.

“Direct deposit and shorter payment cycles will help many Internet marketers manage their cash flow and reinvest their ClickBank profits,” said ClickBank client Michael Rasmussen. “It’s not only a good business move for existing clients, it will bring in a lot of new ClickBank affiliates as well.”

To be eligible for weekly payments and direct deposit, a ClickBank user must have first received three paper checks within any 90-day period. Also, only accounts in the following countries qualify at this time: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States. The company is expecting to expand direct deposit to other countries in the future.

Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager – Client Account Management

There is a saying that goes, “You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” I don’t know who originally spoke those words, but I believe they could have been in reference to ClickBank’s refund policy.

In my 8 years with ClickBank, one of our most controversial policies has always been the refund policy. Our clients tend to love it or hate it. If they hate it, they hate it for one of two reasons: either (1) they think the refund period is too long or (2) they think it’s too short. We have a refund policy that allows for returns within 60 days to protect both our clients and our customers, but we hear from both publishers who think this is way too long, and those that want the refund policy to last 6 months, a year, or more! Obviously, there are different opinions about what is a “fair” refund policy length.

While not everyone agrees on what the refund policy should be, the one common denominator we all share is that we want to reduce refunds as much as possible. With that in mind, this post is dedicated to sharing a few tips to help you in that endeavor.

1) Be easy to contact

• Prominently display your customer service email address on your Thank You page.
• Provide your customer service hours and a time frame in which customers can expect to receive a reply from you.
• Realize that email is not 100% reliable, and take advantage of the area within your ClickBank account where you can add a customer service phone number. This number is not provided to customers after the purchase or on their sales receipt; it is only provided to them by our customer service staff if the customer calls or emails stating that they are having trouble reaching you by email.
• Coming soon- as of September 9^th, you will be able to list a customer service/help desk URL in your ClickBank account. This URL will be provided to customers on the order confirmation page and on their sales receipt.

2) Provide an honest description of your product on your sales page

• Set your customers’ expectations appropriately. Many people are still skeptical of digital products and of buying products through the internet. Make sure you tell them what they’re going to get as thoroughly and honestly as possible, so they feel they got their money’s worth and walk away satisfied.
• Explain which programs or software applications the customer will need in order to download your product. For example, keep in mind that not everyone has MS Word.

3) Provide impeccable customer service

• Autoresponders are efficient, but they are extremely impersonal, and they do not and cannot address each individual issue that a customer may have. While it’s a good idea to use autoresponders to provide customers with answers to frequently asked questions, you should also make sure to provide customers with a way to get answers from a real person if the FAQ doesn’t help them.
• Offer courteous, professional, easy-to-follow answers to customer service inquiries. You may answer all of your customer service email, but if the instructions are not written in a way that the customer can understand, they will say, “Forget it,” and ask for a refund.

Despite our best efforts, it’s highly unlikely that any of us will be able to please all of our customers all of the time. However, following these tips will help you help you please some of the people all of the time, and save a significant percentage of your sales from unnecessary refunds.

Posted by: Bob King, CEO

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Affiliate Summit East in Boston. I was on a panel discussing the State of Ad Networks, but that is not what I’m going to write about today. While reviewing the agenda for Affiliate Summit, I noticed a breakout session related to affiliate marketing and social networking. I attended the session with great anticipation that I’d learn something to help me “crack the code” on how ClickBank could participate in social networks and drive our business to even greater heights.

I was sorely disappointed, not because the speaker didn’t do a good job, but because he presented a lot of really good tactical ideas for individual affiliates to tap into social networks, but nothing to spark my awareness for ClickBank’s opportunity. (Maybe that’s my problem.)

Now I’m not totally ignorant of how social networking works, even though I’m the oldest guy in the company. I realize we probably aren’t going to be successful with a full frontal attack of advertising or calling the CEO of a social networking site and trying to cut a deal. I realize we have to participate for awhile and build our credibility with users. I know that blatant commercialization is a big no-no.

So here’s my dilemma. I’ve got to run a grassroots effort to spread the word about the virtues of ClickBank, but we run a pretty lean operation here. I can ask our employees to do their part, but there aren’t many of us. However, there are thousands of you out there; can you help spread the word about the benefits of ClickBank? I’m not asking people to spam the social networking sites, I just know that ClickBank can be a great help to the kinds of people who participate in social networks, just like it’s helped you and many others.

If you have any other ideas on how we could “crack the social code,” leave a comment and let me know. I’m always looking for great ideas on how to spread the word about ClickBank, and who knows better than people like you, who are out there being successful online on a daily basis? I look forward to hearing your ideas.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

One of the best things about working at ClickBank is looking through our huge catalog of products and seeing thousands of examples of people who are making their lives, and the lives of others, a little better by sharing their expertise. What makes ClickBank so special, even among affiliate networks, is that you don’t have to be a huge company or have a big inventory of products to participate. You just have to be an expert, and be willing to share that expertise with others.

You may be saying to yourself, “I’m not an expert at anything! If I was, I’d be out lecturing or already have a book written.” OK, so you might not be a whiz at financial planning or be able to write a 300-page book on car repair, but if you start thinking about your hobbies and interests, I’m confident that you can find your expertise. Do your friends go crazy over your special chocolate chip cookies and beg you for the recipe? Is your garden the pride of the neighborhood? Have you walked a family member through setting up a secure wireless network in their home, or removing spyware from their PC? Then you’re an expert!

The beauty of ClickBank is that we have many product publishers who make a nice modest income from sharing their expertise in areas like these, even when they’re selling their products for $20 or $30. Sure, they’re not necessarily going to retire on the money they make from them, but wouldn’t it be nice to make a little bit of extra cash by sharing knowledge you would normally give away for free? It’s especially nice when you know that your expertise is helping others and making their lives a little better.

Take a little time and think about what makes you an expert, and then take a crack at creating a product and selling it through ClickBank. With your knowledge and a huge group of affiliates looking to promote great products, you’ll never know how successful you can be unless you try!