Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

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.