Posts Tagged ‘clickbank’

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.site24x7.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!

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

This past weekend, Bob Dunlap, our director of marketing, and I had the pleasure of attending the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. The event has grown tremendously since last year. Attendance was great and many important figures from the blogging world spoke at the sessions. Sessions covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from blog widgets to SEO to using blogs for affiliate marketing.

One topic that many of the sessions addressed was how to more effectively make money from blogging. After attending several of these sessions, it became clear how mainstream blogs have become, and how they are an effective tool for anyone wanting to make money online, regardless of their niche. In fact, many of the speakers focused on how blogging in a niche is actually more effective for traffic generation and monetization, because niche visitors will be more motivated to buy a product you recommend, especially if you provide valuable content and information to them.

In addition to reinforcing the potential effectiveness of blogs, especially for small businesses who are looking to get more traffic and highlight their brand, many of the sessions talked about how bloggers can take advantage of social networking to drive even more traffic and increase visitor loyalty. We learned some impressive, often free, tactics for achieving this, and plan to share them with our ClickBank clients in the months to come.

If you haven’t already created a blog to highlight your product or products you promote, you’re missing out on the ability to communicate directly with your target audience. There’s no better time to get started, and soon you can be marketing more effectively than ever, often without spending much money at all. If you already have a blog and want to find out more about how you can use ClickBank in conjunction with your blog to dramatically increase your profits, check out our ClickBank for Bloggers page.

In addition to being able to help our ClickBank clients more effectively use blogs to boost their business, we’ll be using what we’ve learned to improve the ClickBank Blog and make it as useful as possible for our readers. Please comment and let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of in the blog. We hope to see you next year at BlogWorld 2009!

Posted by Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

If you’re a ClickBank publisher who wants to generate residual income from one of your products, or an affiliate who wants to promote products that will keep paying you commissions every month, ClickBank Recurring Billing products open up a huge range of possibilities for you.

Although you can sell or promote almost any type of product that involves repeating payments, we’ve put together a list of some of the most common types of recurring billing products:

* Memberships and subscriptions – There’s almost no limit to the kinds of membership sites you can create, but some ideas include stock photography or ringtone download sites.

* Software updates – Allow your customers to stay up to date with the latest releases of your software products, like spyware and virus removal.

* Higher-priced items with installment payments – Increase conversions on more expensive products by letting people make several smaller payments. You define the payment schedule and amounts.

* Newsletters and online news sites – Provide customers access to the latest news, rumors and strategies in your area of expertise, such as stock trading, fitness or online marketing.

* “Exclusive content” – Provide access to white papers, special reports, or any other kind of high-value content that’s just too good to give away for free.

* Web hosting/domain services – Now that establishing an online presence is easier than ever, selling web hosting services and domain names to people who want to get their name or product out there can be extremely profitable.

* Online communities/forums – Let people with similar interests, like small business owners or day traders, congregate and share ideas in a moderated online community.

Like any product innovation, there are many other creative new ways to use the ClickBank Recurring Billing service, so take a look at our recurring billing page and see how you can make it work for your business!

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!