Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, ClickBank Senior Customer Service Representative

This is part one of a five-part, five-day series about how publishers can attract more affiliates.

As many successful Internet marketers already know, ClickBank’s extensive affiliate network can be a powerful force for taking your product’s sales from mediocre to massive. Unlike most advertising and promotional efforts, ClickBank only pays out commissions to affiliates on your behalf for completed sales. This makes our affiliate program much more cost-effective than other traditional methods of product promotion. For example, when you place a paid advertisement in a search engine, you have to pay for the cost of the ad even if the clicks you get generate little or no sales. With our affiliate program, you are only paying for marketing costs when you’re actually making money.

To really succeed as a ClickBank publisher, you need to get as many affiliates promoting your product as possible. In this five-part series, I’ll show you some of the best techniques for becoming an affiliate magnet!

Tip 1: Take Advantage of the ClickBank Marketplace

ClickBank provides all new publishers the option of being listed within our ClickBank Marketplace: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace

The question is, with the ClickBank Marketplace containing over 15,000 products, what can you do to obtain the most exposure and make your product attractive to affiliates?

The first thing that most new publishers don’t realize is that the majority of the Marketplace audience is comprised of affiliates, not consumers. So rather than have your Marketplace title and description tailored to consumers, you should use it to describe what makes your product appealing to affiliates.

Do you have a high commission percentage, a high payout or a Web site containing useful affiliate tools to help them promote your product? Be sure to list features like these in your Marketplace description so that affiliates can quickly see why they should promote your product.

To edit your Marketplace title/description, you’ll need to log in to your ClickBank account, click the “Account Settings” tab, the “My Site” link, and the “Edit” link under the “Marketplace Information” section, then modify your Marketplace description as needed.

Be sure to click “Save Changes” when finished!

Check back tomorrow for the second tip on becoming an affiliate magnet – creating an affiliate tools page.

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: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

In my job, I speak to our largest publishers and affiliates pretty much every day. Just the other day after a conversation with one particularly successful publisher, it struck me that there is a common thread that runs through all successful publishers.

While their businesses may be different and the areas of their specialization may be diverse, they all have very similar habits. As I continued my conversations with these publishers, I jotted down the common habits that distinguish these successful people, and here they are for your enjoyment and edification:

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Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager, Client Account Management

As many of you are probably doing, I recently called my investment advisor, Paul, to see how my investments were performing. Knowing that the news would not be good, I had prepared a little “survival kit” for myself to get through the rest of the evening: a funny movie, a pizza, a cold beer, and a shot of tequila just to take the edge off after the conversation. So there I stood, teeth gritted, shot in hand, prepared to hear the worst. But just as I was getting ready to tip back the shot glass, I got a surprising answer to my question. “Not as bad as they could be,” said Paul. I set the shot down, wiped the sweat off my brow, and started breathing again. Paul went on to explain that because my portfolio was diversified, I was doing OK. Yes, it had gone down, but it was still performing better than the market.

That got me thinking about our affiliates and the different strategies I’ve seen people use to be successful on ClickBank. The one I’d like to talk about today is the single-niche strategy. Many affiliates choose to focus their marketing efforts on a single area of expertise. This is a great strategy, as long as that niche continues to perform well on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, not all products do. In my experience at ClickBank, I’ve come to recognize 3 types of products: One Hit Wonders, Peaks and Valleys, and Consistent Performers.

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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: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Every day ClickBank processes sales from hundreds of countries around the globe. I’m sure it’s no surprise that the majority of those sales come from the US and other English-speaking countries. Business from the major English-speaking countries continues to grow rapidly, but is certainly not the only source of opportunity. In fact, many European countries represent large and untapped markets for both product publishers and affiliates.

Here’s some recent data to consider:

Source:  ComScore

For comparison, the US had 190 million unique Internet users in June 2008 and the UK had 35 million.

Not only are these European markets large and growing, many are less saturated from a product and affiliate perspective than their English-speaking counterparts. These markets represent great opportunities to extend your reach, or perhaps even enter a new niche. A perfect example is the Spanish language market, which ClickBank recently enabled. As you can see, the Internet-using population in Spain alone is significant, before even factoring in all of the Latin American countries.

This chart also clearly shows the huge potential of the German- and French-speaking markets. As we add French and German capability later this year, this represents a great opportunity to enter these markets quickly and establish a strong presence for your business. Make sure you don’t miss out on the revenue potential these markets represent for publishers and affiliates who are ready to grow.

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Ever wonder why some products are wildly successful while others struggle? Not an easy question to answer, but successful products do share a number of characteristics. First and foremost, they all meet a specific need or solve a current problem for the prospective consumer. Additionally, they all deliver real value, are well positioned and marketed, and are priced right.

With ClickBank products, there is one other critical consideration — will affiliates promote the product?

Virtually all best-selling ClickBank products benefit from a significant number of affiliates actively promoting them. These affiliates risk their own resources, both time and money, to drive qualified traffic to products that convert and return a profit. These affiliates have a huge variety of products to choose from, so make sure yours gets their attention. Remember, affiliates are looking for products that sell to a specific niche, offer good quality and value for the consumer, convert well, and, last but not least, pay enough commission to earn the return on investment they require.

When you are new to ClickBank, you may be thinking “I can’t afford to offer 50% or higher commission to affiliates.” The real question you should ask is, can you afford NOT to? Here are some statistics that deserve careful consideration. Listed below are the average commission percentages for ClickBank accounts with affiliate-referred sales in 2007:

Top 10 selling accounts- 74% commission
Top 100 selling accounts- 69%
Top 1000 selling accounts- 60%
Average for all accounts- 55%

Commission offered to affiliates is not a singular determinant for product success. With that said, I believe this data speaks for itself. So remember, if you’re a ClickBank product publisher just starting out, or if you’re looking for ways to improve existing sales, take a second look at the commission rate you offer affiliates. Generosity is often rewarded.