Posts Tagged ‘clickbank’

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!

For those of you who are hooked on Twitter, you can now follow ClickBank! We’ll be tweeting on a regular basis with updates, interesting sites and articles we’ve run across, and more. See you there!

Follow ClickBank on Twitter!

Posted by: Greg Lems, VP of Information Technology

I’m in the midst of a long-overdue remodel of the second floor of my home. Although I hired someone to do most of the specialized work, I decided to tackle several projects myself to save money in these trying times.

One task that I learned would save a fair amount of money if I did it myself was carpet removal. However, while the main part of the work was very fast and easy, I quickly discovered that removing the hundreds of staples left behind was a much bigger chore than I had imagined! At first I thought I was in for hours of extra work as I started removing each staple by hand.

Fortunately for me, the contractor I had hired for other work saw what I was doing and stopped me before I wasted too much time. It turns out there’s a simple tool that carpet installers use to remove staples quickly and easily. After he showed me how to use it, all of the staples were gone within a matter of minutes, saving me hours of work and a lot of backache.

It got me thinking about how an enterprising ClickBank publisher could have helped me solve my problem earlier. Every successful ClickBank product solves a problem or addresses a need. In my case, I’m a relatively handy person, but need some specific advice on DIY home remodel techniques that save people money. If someone like my contractor, who has a lot of knowledge and advice to offer people like me, had created an e-book that addressed common remodel techniques that save money, I’d have bought it in a heartbeat. The time, money and effort it would have saved me would have been well worth the cost.

If you’ve always wondered what kind of e-book you could write and sell, think about what kinds of problems and questions you have the answers to that most people don’t. For example, most people don’t have the time or inclination to become a full-fledged contractor, but they’d love to take advantage of all the time- and money-saving tips that contractors have learned over the years.

Chances are good that if you faced a particular problem in the past and figured out how to overcome it, there are many other people who will face the same problem at some point and would gladly pay for the solution! Some of our most successful products address needs like this. Here’s a 2009 DIY project for you: think about your experience and knowledge, write it up in an e-book, and list it with ClickBank. Who knows who else you’ll help?

Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently conducted an extensive interview with ClickBank’s Director of Marketing, Bob Dunlap. In their discussion, Bob shared strategies he’s observed over the years for successfully creating and selling ClickBank products, particularly ebooks. If you’re thinking about developing a new ClickBank product, or want to know how to increase sales of your existing product, be sure to check out the Mixergy podcast.

This is part two of a three-part series by guest blogger and ClickBank publisher Scott Tousignant on using Twitter to increase your ClickBank sales.

Part Two: How to Get Started With Twitter

Step 1: Choose a Name (Twitter ID) and Update Your Avatar and Profile
You should decide whether you want to brand yourself, your persona, or your company’s brand on Twitter. Your decision should be based on who you intend to communicate with on Twitter. You may choose to have a Twitter account for your own name, where you communicate with fellow marketers, and have a separate account for your product brand that you use to communicate with your customers.

It’s important to edit your profile with useful information, such as your blog address and a short blurb about yourself explaining how you can help your target audience. Add a picture to your profile immediately. Using the default Twitter avatar can make you seem like a spammer. When you have an avatar that displays your smiling face, it becomes much more inviting to engage in conversation with you.

Step 2: Begin to Tweet
You can start off by mentioning that you are trying to figure this ‘Twitter thing’ out and then share a bit about yourself. Follow that up with some resourceful tips that would pique the interest of your target audience. It’s a great practice to ask questions in your tweets as well. The feedback you get from your followers will expose you to new ideas and tools you’d never have found on your own.

Step 3: Start Following People
When you follow someone on Twitter, all of their tweets will appear in your timeline.  You will see the discussions they are engaged in, as well as who they are communicating with. You should follow people who share similar interests with you. After all, you need something in common to talk about.

Use the Twitter search tool to find like-minded people to follow. Visit http://search.twitter.com and type in your area of interest. Let’s say that your niche is gardening. Once you type ‘gardening’ into the search box, a list of everyone that has been tweeting about gardening recently will appear. Within that list you’ll find potential customers, as well as other experts in the gardening niche.

In addition to following these individuals, I recommend that you click on their avatar and check out their profile. If they have a link to a blog or Web site, check it out to learn more about them. Then I recommend that you send them a tweet mentioning that you checked out their blog and really enjoyed their recent post, or something along those lines.

You can direct a tweet at someone in one of two ways. You can either direct message them, in which case they will be the only person that views your tweet. Alternatively, you can use the @ symbol and make your tweet public. For example, let’s say the Twitter ID of the person you are sending the message to is ‘gardenguru.’ Your tweet would look something like this: @gardenguru I’m looking forward to learning more about you. Your recent blog post was outstanding!

This tweet would be made public for everyone to see, and because you started off your tweet with the @gardenguru your tweet will appear in the replies section of @gardenguru’s Twitter page. The benefit of making your tweet public, rather than a direct message, is that everyone will see that you are indeed on Twitter to network and aren’t just a self-promoter.

Step 4: Engage in Conversation
When someone posts a question, comment, or statement in a tweet and you have an opinion, share it with them. If ‘gardenguru’ is looking for the best fertilizer to use for his watermelons, you should respond by tweeting: @gardenguru I’ve been growing watermelons for years and found brand x to be the best.

You have now become a resource for ‘gardenguru’ with one simple tweet! Also, other Twitter users will have viewed your useful tweet, making you more of an expert in their eyes.

One of the best ways to learn how to get the most out of Twitter is to follow people who are using it effectively and learn from the conversations that they are having. After you sign up to Twitter, feel free to follow my tweets by visiting www.Twitter.com/TheFitB and clicking on the follow button. Send me a tweet letting me know that you found out about me through the ClickBank community, and be sure to let me know how I can be of help to you.

In my next blog post, I will share the most effective strategies for promoting ClickBank products using Twitter without being seen as a spammer.  Be on the lookout for “Twitter Turn-ons and Turn-offs” soon!

Scott Tousignant of www.unstoppablefatloss.com harnesses the power of social media to help bring him closer to his goal of reversing the nationwide obesity trend by 2015. Connect with Scott by following him at www.Twitter.com/TheFitB

Posted by: Monty Sooter, CTO

Wow, the U.S. presidential election is over at last. The U.S. has a new president-elect and I can finally get back to focusing 100% on work, our customers can get back to surfing the Web for solutions to their problems, and we can all sell more digital products.

It has been 21 months since President-elect Obama kicked off his campaign and change has been constant for all of us during this time. I read an article the other day that talked about how a baby born when Obama launched his campaign is now walking and talking.  That is change those families can believe in.

I went back and reviewed what has happened at ClickBank over the last 21 months, and the following are some of the changes we have implemented:

• Recurring billing
• Supplemental Hops
• Hop analytics
• Publisher-requested refunds
• Lower initial payments and additional frequencies for recurring billing
• System status page
• Installment payments
• ClickBank Newsletter
• ClickBank Blog
• Instant notification service
• PayPal recurring billing
• ACH payments
• My Site and My Account page redesign
• Weekly ACH payments
• Customer service help URL
• Multi-currency capability
• Multilingual capability – Spanish, German and French

That is not quite as impressive as winning a presidential election, but unlike the U.S. economy, at least the ClickBank economy has continued to grow steadily.

It is a great time to be part of an Internet business. As we saw in the election, the Internet can fundamentally change how things work, whether that is a political process or figuring out how to sell your ideas.

Let’s keep working together to make sure we understand your needs so we can continue to deliver “Change We Can Believe In.”

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

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

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

We hope to see you there!

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of Operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Bob King, CEO

Have you seen the show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Sometimes I think our clients at ClickBank are smarter than the people in charge of our economy.

On Monday evening of last week I’d just gotten home, had a bite of dinner and settled into my easy chair to unwind after a particularly busy day. I was frustrated by the news that the U.S. House of Representatives had failed to pass any kind of rescue legislation to begin the turnaround and recovery of the U.S. economy. (I apologize to all of our global readers for starting this off in such a U.S.-centric way, but bear with me.)

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m mad about the greedy leadership of the financial institutions that are largely responsible for this mess. But we have to deal with them later. Right now we have to put some mechanism in place to restore credibility and confidence in the system, to make credit available to individuals, small business, and yes, big business too.

One more tirade and then I’ll get to my point. The mainstream media did a horrible job of explaining the whole picture of the bailout. They chose to sensationalize it as $700 billion right to the taxpayers, $2,000 to $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. What baloney. The assets sold off and managed, plus the government’s ownership and interest in the ongoing institutions, causes it to net out to much less than $700 billion. We are close to the economic abyss, so let’s all get real here.

ClickBank is responsible for the livelihood of its employees and tens of thousands of affiliates and publishers who depend on us for income. I’m happy to report we are rock solid, no debt, and continuing to grow. Consumers will continue to look for and buy informational products. All of you in the ClickBank community do an amazing job of developing and promoting those products. It seems you always adapt to the changing times and come up with products particularly well suited to the issues of the day. I’m seeing some interesting new products in the last few weeks providing information on how to prosper in these trying times. Keep up the great work!

Now if we could just get the U.S. Government leaders to be as creative and hardworking as you, we’d be well on the way to recovery.

Thanks for listening. I feel better already.

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!