Posts Tagged ‘marketplace’

With thousands of products currently in the ClickBank Marketplace and new products being added daily, finding just the right product to promote can be challenging. If this applies to you, then you’re in luck. The ClickBank Marketplace just got better! For your convenience, we have added advanced search options to the Marketplace page, making it easier than ever for you to find the perfect product to promote.

In addition to new product search filters, you can also select product attributes based on your requirements such as language, billing type, upsell and more, simply by checking a box. Click on the video below to see a demonstration of the new and improved Marketplace search capabilities.

Visit the ClickBank Marketplace now to start searching for your next profitable product to promote.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

ClickBank is very proud to announce the Beta release of our new Featured Marketplace! This complement to our current Marketplace is intended to showcase a wide variety of top quality ClickBank products, including top sellers, great new products you might not be aware of, and featured listings from a wide variety of established ClickBank vendors.

In the Featured Marketplace, you’ll be able to learn more about a vendor’s products before deciding whether to promote them, and every listing includes a link to the vendor’s Affiliate Tools page so you can get immediate help and guidance in promoting their products. It’s a great new way to learn about products and quickly get your promotional efforts up and running.

You can check out the Featured Marketplace here: http://www.clickbank.com/featured

We’d love to hear your feedback on the Featured Marketplace, so please leave a comment with your thoughts! Since this project is in Beta, we’ll be making regular improvements based on feedback and testing.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Today, ClickBank made a few changes to our Marketplace sales statistics in an effort to help affiliates better understand what they can expect to earn by promoting a particular vendor’s products. Several of these changes consisted of simply changing the name of the statistic, though we also added one new stat and removed another. This post will summarize the changes.

• Avg $/sale: This stat was previously called Total $/sale. This stat has been updated to reflect the total amount an affiliate can expect to earn from promoting this vendor’s products, including initial sales and rebills in the case of a recurring billing product. As always, this amount is just an average and is not guaranteed.
• Initial $/sale: This stat was previously called Avg $/sale. It represents the average amount an affiliate earns from the first sale of any product. For one-time purchases, this represents the total amount an affiliate can expect to earn. For recurring billing products, it represents the first sale but not any subsequent rebills. This number takes into account refunds, chargebacks, and sales tax.
• Avg Rebill Total: This stat was previously called Future $. It is only shown if the vendor offers a recurring billing product. This stat shows the average amount an affiliate earns on all subsequent rebills of a recurring billing product, and does not include the initial sale.
• Avg %/sale: This stat shows the average commission rate earned for all sales of a vendor’s products, including one-time purchases, rebills, and upsell purchases. Since vendors can offer different commission rates for different types of products, this number may not exactly match the commission rate you earn on any given sale.
• Avg %/rebill: This stat is new. It is only shown if the vendor offers recurring billing products, and shows the average commission rate earned only on rebills.
• %/refd: This stat has been removed from the Marketplace. Based on feedback from affiliates, we decided this stat was no longer necessary.

For more information on what all of our Marketplace sales stats mean, please see Finding Products to Promote in our Help Center.

Developers: We’ve updated the ClickBank Datafeed to version 2 to represent these changes. You can access the new datafeed here. The old datafeed will be accessible temporarily, but will eventually be removed. Please change to the new datafeed as soon as possible.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

At the end of last month, ClickBank introduced the first phase of Vendor Spotlights, a powerful new tool to help ClickBank vendors communicate with affiliates like never before. Vendor Spotlights are featured in the Marketplace alongside your Marketplace listing, and allow you to create a profile that shows affiliates the following information:

• Sales statistics
• Customer-facing advertisements, to give affiliates more info about your product and what sales messages they should use
• Recommended vendors (such as other accounts you own, or other vendors you would recommend)
• Your affiliate resources page (if you have one)
• A product image

The most exciting part of Vendor Spotlights, though, is that you’ll have the ability to post announcements about your products. For example, you could tell affiliates about upcoming products you’re releasing, changes to your existing products, special promotions you’re running, or tips on promoting your product.

If you’re a vendor with an approved ClickBank product, you can now create your Vendor Spotlight listing by visiting My Spotlight under the Account Settings tab in your account. Vendor Spotlight profiles will be added to the ClickBank Marketplace on September 21, so we highly recommend that you create your listing (and a first announcement) now! Vendors with Vendor Spotlight profiles will have a distinct advantage over vendors who don’t, so don’t delay!

For more information about Vendor Spotlights, see our Help Center article.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Succeeding or failing as an affiliate marketer can often be traced back to the products you choose to promote. At first, selecting a product to promote seems simple enough. You sign up with ClickBank and choose from any of the thousands of products available from over 12,000 vendors, then create a HopLink and slap it on your website – done!

But then, a couple of weeks down the line, you begin to wonder why you haven’t made any sales. You start to get a sneaking suspicion that maybe you should have spent more time choosing the right product to promote!

Understandably, the sheer selection of products on offer at ClickBank can be completely overwhelming to a newbie. How do you know if a product will sell well? What about competition? What do all the numbers mean?

Although there is no 100% watertight method for finding a profitable product, there are a few things that go a long way to increasing your chances of success.

Here are six research steps we recommend for finding a profitable ClickBank product to promote:

1 – Brainstorming a niche – The first thing you need to do is think about what market you’d like to work in. Choosing a market related to your hobbies, skills, passions and experiences is an excellent starting point (after all, you’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about it!). Are you a cat lover? Have you had experience with a particular health problem? Did you ace languages at school? Do your friends come to you for relationship advice? Having an existing knowledge of a niche can be a big advantage when you come to marketing it, because it’s much faster and easier to write persuasive and credible copy for your sales pages when you know what you are talking about.

So, have a scroll through ClickBank’s Marketplace and create a shortlist of niches you think you could effectively promote. Of course, ultimately you need to choose a profitable market over one that you simply like talking about, so these next steps will help you whittle your list down.

2 – Understand your customers – Let’s say you added ‘playing guitar’ to your niche list in Step 1. If you wish to pursue this idea further, then it’s very important that you understand (1) who in this niche is buying, and (2) what they are buying. The easiest way to delve into the minds of your market is by browsing forums related to your niche. This is a great way of finding out buyers’ needs, wants, and problems. For example, some people in the guitar market will be looking for free guitar sheet music; these people probably won’t be interested in buying something from you. Others want to learn guitar fast so they can participate in an upcoming performance; these people are much more likely to want to buy something to help them achieve that goal. Reading guitar forums will help you absorb what matters most to people interested in playing guitar, which in turn will help you choose the best products to promote to them.

Some other things to consider while you read: How can you target impulsive buyers in this market? How narrow is your niche? If it is too narrow you may find your target market is too small to make sales. If it’s too broad you’ll find it difficult to get your site ranked in search engines so prospects can find you.

3 – Selecting best-selling products - By now, you should have a good understanding of who your market is and what they are looking for. It’s now time to go back to ClickBank and search for some good products to promote that will meet their needs.

ClickBank uses a measure called ‘gravity’ to represent how well each product sells, based on how many sales have been made and how recent these sales were. We recommend focusing on products with a gravity of 30+, because these products have a proven track record of selling well for a number of different affiliates. Once you get below a gravity of 30, the chances of wasting your time pushing a white elephant start to increase.

A very high gravity (i.e. 100+) will generally indicate that there is a lot of competition in this niche. Don’t let that put you off. Competition is good because it means there’s lots of demand for products in that niche. It also means that there are potentially a lot of people with lists who you could form partnerships or JV’s (Joint Ventures) with.

I should point out that sometimes a low gravity product can still be worth promoting – it might simply be new, or an undiscovered gem. So while gravity is a helpful indication of selling potential, you shouldn’t reject an otherwise high-quality product solely because of its low gravity score.

4 – Multiple Products – Ideally, you want to find a market that has multiple related products being sold through ClickBank. The reason for this is that if there is only one product available for the niche, even if it sells like hotcakes, you’ll almost certainly have a hard time competing with existing affiliates who are well-established in the market.

The other advantage of multiple products is that it allows you to create a review page, increasing your chances of making a sale. For example, if you are selling a “learn guitar” product, by including a few other “learn guitar” products on the same page, visitors will feel they’ve completed the evaluation phase of buying and are now in a position to purchase.

5 – High Commission Percentage (65% or greater) – Let’s face it: you’re not going to get rich on $2 commissions. In order for your marketing efforts to be worthwhile, you need to promote high commission products – that is, products paying out at least $18 per sale. Keep in mind that from a seemingly high commission, you’ll need to deduct your advertising expenses (e.g. AdWords) as well as your time. Of course, if a product has a high dollar value, then a lower commission percentage will still be a good investment.

6 – Persuasive Vendor Pitch Page – Finally, don’t forget to take a long, hard look at the product’s sales page, since you will be relying on it to convert your HopLinks into commissions! Does it look convincing? Does it address the concerns of the market? Is it persuasive and credible, or does it sound over the top and unbelievable? Would you buy from a site that looked like that?

Choosing the right product to promote is the first stage of being a successful affiliate marketer, and if you do it right, you can drastically improve your chances of earning a good income. But even if you get off to a good start, don’t just set up your offer page and forget all about it. Keep a close eye on your ClickBank reports, and using Tracking IDs to see what pages and products are performing the best so you know where to focus your efforts and resources.

By following these proven techniques for finding good products to promote, you’ll be reaping the rewards of greater sales and bigger ClickBank checks!

Hope you enjoyed these tips for choosing a good ClickBank product to promote. Please let us know if you have any special strategies of your own!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

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 time frame and also rewards vendors 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 ‘Gravity’->’High to Low’ 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 vendor’s product(s). Therefore, if a publisher has a high gravity score, it means that the vendor 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 ‘Gravity’->’Low to High.’ 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.

Initial $/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 Initial $/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.

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

Avg Rebill Total and Avg $/Sale: Are you interested in earning recurring revenue from a single sale? Then subscription products are for you. Sort by either Avg Rebill Total or Avg $/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.

Each “Sort by” option offers a different picture of ClickBank vendors 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!

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, ClickBank Senior Customer Service Representative

This is the final post in a five-part, five-day series about how publishers can attract more affiliates.

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 show you some of the best techniques for becoming an affiliate magnet! Did you miss part one, two, three, or four?

Tip 5: Advertise

To further increase exposure of your product to affiliates, ClickBank provides a means by which you can purchase ad space within the ClickBank Marketplace, highlighting your product to hundreds of thousands of affiliates.

The Marketplace ads are three-line advertisements found on the right-hand side of Marketplace pages, under ‘Sponsored Links.’ You can see some current ads here:

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

The costs of Marketplace ads vary, depending upon how much traffic a particular page or category receives. More exposure means a higher priced advertisement.

All contracts are month-to-month, so clients may utilize the ad space as long as they wish without being locked into any long-term agreements. To check availability and add your name to a possible waiting list, visit https://www.clickbank.com/advertise.html. Select the location where you’d like to place an ad, fill out the form, and someone from ClickBank will contact you when a space becomes available.

Final Thoughts

Many publishers spend months, if not years, in product development. After so much arduous effort, why would you want to leave the success of your product to chance? No matter how great your product is, if you don’t do a good job of communicating that fact to the people who can help you promote it, it will never be as successful as it could be. So as you build the pitch page to sell your product, be sure that you work as hard on attracting affiliates as you do on attracting customers. By putting in the extra effort to make your product attractive to affiliates, you can become a serious affiliate magnet!

Good luck, and thank you for choosing ClickBank!

Posted by: Laura M., Advertising Manager

For publishers who are just starting out or want to expose their product to thousands of affiliates, advertising in ClickBank’s Marketplace has always been a great option. With that in mind, ClickBank is proud to announce the expansion of its advertising program to include Marketplace sub-categories. Now affiliates will be able to more easily connect with publishers who fit their niche.

On July 1, we added 160 new advertising slots on our “Money & Employment” and “Computing & Internet” sub-category pages (8 ads per sub-category). Throughout the rest of the summer, we will continually open up more sub-categories until all of them are available! The next sub-categories we will open up for advertising are “Home & Family” and “Marketing & Ads” on July 15. Make sure to seize this opportunity to get your product in front of interested affiliates, as spots in the Marketplace fill up quickly!

For details and pricing information, please visit:
http://www.clickbank.com/advertise.html