Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

As an affiliate promoting products through your own website, the CTR (Click-through Rate) from your promotional page to the vendor’s Pitch Page can be a key indicator of how well your promotions will convert into sales and commissions.

So what does it take to convert a visitor? What can change them from being a passing “tire-kicker” to an interested visitor – a visitor who takes the next step and clicks your affiliate link?

I want to share 6 high impact techniques for improving your promotional page’s CTR. These techniques are used and recommended by us at Affilorama, and have been reported as having a significant, positive effect on the CTR of our students’ sites.

Technique #1 – Know the fold

When something is referred to as being ‘above the fold,’ it means that it can be seen when the webpage first loads, so the visitor does not need to scroll to view it.

It is safe to assume that most screens are set to at least 1024×768 resolution (screen size) and it’s good practice to design your websites for that screen size. Set your screen resolution to 1024×768 and view through a common browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) with the default toolbars enabled to give you a rough idea where the fold is on your website.

Having high quality content above the fold that grabs people’s attention and holds it gives this content maximum opportunity to be seen and acted on. Never assume your visitor will scroll; in fact, most of the time if a visitor does not see what they thought they would find on the first visible screen load of the page they visit, they will leave straight away!

Technique #2 – Eye-catching header

A distinct and eye-catching header that is related to the theme of the product you are promoting will immediately catch the interest of the visitor and make them want to find out more.

It doesn’t have to be complicated; in fact, a simple, clean banner can have more impact than one that is ‘too artistic.’ Keep the file size down as well – you don’t want to keep visitors waiting while it downloads.

Technique #3 – Clickable advertising image

In a website context, the power of having images is that a visitor’s eyes are naturally drawn to them. Take advantage of this by not only having an attractive product image, but making it a call to action.

A call to action needs to be very specific. Don’t be vague or leave it to chance. Spell out what you want the visitor to do. If there’s room, include the benefits of completing the action. Many merchants actually have artwork you can use, so check the affiliates section of the merchant’s website first to save time.

Add your affiliate link to the image, making it clickable. Take this a step further by making it clear on the image that you want people to click it. So, for example, if the image doesn’t already say “Click here to get the best cure for panic attacks” then edit the image to add te text.

Technique #4 – A large text affiliate link

In addition to the clickable image, be sure to have a clear text link above the fold as well. It should be a bold, ‘hard-to-miss’ link that leaves the visitor in no doubt what they should do, making it a strong call to action.

For example, instead of an underlined “Panic attack cure” link, have “Click here to get the most popular guide to curing panic attacks.”

Technique #5 – An affiliate link at the end of your article

500 to 600 words is generally an ideal length for a single page of content: not too long for the human reader, but long enough to make sure it’s viewed as substantial content worthy of ranking by the search engines.

Ensure your article is well researched and written. If there are many spelling mistakes and/or grammatical errors you will fail to earn the trust of your visitor, which damages your authority on the topic you are writing about and substantially lowers your CTR.

At the end of your article, you should include a final push for the product you’re endorsing. A short, personal review works best, ideally with another clickable promotional image to the right. Having an affiliate link at the end is good for a number of reasons, but particularly because visitors are often looking for somewhere to go once they’ve finished reading the page they’re on.

Technique #6 – Focus on one product

Promoting several different products on the same page can sometimes leave a visitor confused, and a confused customer is likely to end their ’shopping trip’ abruptly and exit your site. To avoid this, focus the page on only one product and leave your visitors in no doubt as to how the product is the fix they’ve been looking for.

Use the ClickBank Marketplace to find a single product that is performing well, with a high gravity, payout, and a convincing sales page, to make sure that the extra clicks you get translate into actual sales and increase the size of your commission check!

Don’t forget to constantly monitor and test whenever making tweaks to your promotional pages. Keep notes on what you did and how your CTR was affected for future reference.

Do you have any additional techniques to share that have worked well for you? Have any of the above techniques helped improve your CTR? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. An Easy Way to Convert More Sales
2. Tips for Becoming an Affiliate Magnet: Part 1
3. 5 Killer SEO Tips to Get Backlinks

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.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Five Pitch Page Mistakes ClickBank Vendors Should Avoid
2. Important Changes to Product Test Process for Vendors
3. How to Create a ClickBank Pitch Page Using a Blog

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development and Marketing

Have you ever gone to the market or the grocery store early on weekend mornings, just after the fresh produce has been unpacked and stacked? Have you noticed just how full and red the tomatoes look? How crisp the lettuce leaves are? Just how desirable everything smells?

Your marketing plans are very similar. The fresher they are, the more likely they are to succeed. You probably built your site, wrote some articles, or developed your product a few years ago, based on the information you had at that time. The traffic started to build and sales came in steadily, but things have started to slow down now. You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with the way sales are being tracked. If you’re an affiliate, you may wonder why your traffic isn’t converting as well as it used to. The answer may lie in the freshness (or lack thereof) of your marketing mix.

The target market you aimed at when you first built your site or developed your product may have changed, and your message to them may need to change as well. The keywords that you used in your search advertising campaigns when you first started were probably converting well at that time, but may have become a bit stale by now. Consider re-investing in some research to determine which search terms in your space are converting well. You need to keep your marketing message and methods fresh to keep pace with the changing environment around us.

Even two years ago, widespread use of social media tools like Twitter to promote websites or products was virtually unknown. Today, however, it is a vital weapon in the arsenal of the savvy Internet marketer. So, for example, a marketing mix that does not include social media needs to be updated to take advantage of its popularity and reach.

Even products that were hot sellers six or nine months ago are not as hot today. When gasoline prices hit record prices last summer, the number of products that dealt with increasing fuel economy in cars skyrocketed, and their sales numbers rose to match the demand for them. Since gas prices have declined, so too has the popularity of these types of products. Today, with a global economic downturn well underway, the products that are doing well are those that enable people to weather this rough economic climate.

Constantly test and re-evaluate your product and your marketing strategy for freshness, and update any part of your mix that is becoming stale. You wouldn’t want your products or your promotions to suffer the same fate as last week’s produce, would you?

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Promote ClickBank Products Using Twitter: Part Two
2. 7 Critical Elements of Sizzling Salesletter Copy: Part 2
3. Sort Your Way to Success

Gideon Shalwick of Become a Blogger has created a very useful video showing beginning ClickBank affiliates how Hoplinks work, and how to add them to posts or pages using the popular blogging platform Wordpress. If you’re looking for a new way to promote ClickBank products, this video can help you start using a blog to expand your promotional efforts.

If you’ve wanted to create your own blog but weren’t sure how to get started, Become a Blogger’s tutorial videos will walk you through every step of the blog creation process. Be sure to check them out!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. How to Create a ClickBank Pitch Page Using a Blog
2. ClickBank Video: Create a Customer-Facing Ad
3. Protecting Your Hoplinks

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 timeframe and also rewards publishers 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 ‘High Gravity’ 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 publisher’s product(s). Therefore, if a publisher has a high gravity score, it means that the publisher 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 “Low Gravity.” 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.

$ Earned/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 $Earned/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.

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

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

% Referred: This “Sort by” option tells you the percentage of a publisher’s sales that are referred by affiliates. A high %Referred likely means that the publisher is established and has had time to grow their affiliate base. It also indicates that affiliates stick with the product once they start promoting.

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

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Seven Habits of Highly Successful Affiliates
2. Strategy for Success: Create a Privacy Policy
3. Tips for Becoming an Affiliate Magnet: Part 4

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!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Ten Habits of Highly Successful Publishers
2. Advice for Beginner Affiliates
3. Finding Affiliates to Promote Your Product

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

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Promote ClickBank Products Using Twitter: Part Three
2. Promote ClickBank Products Using Twitter: Part One
3. Follow ClickBank on Twitter

Posted by: Shelly Spafford, Senior Customer Service Representative

Most affiliates understand the need to run effective promotions in order to make sales. However, many affiliates may not understand how the information they can gain through the use of Tracking IDs can help them promote products more successfully. In this post, I’ll explain what they are and how they can be a huge help to your business.

Tracking IDs are codes you create of up to eight alpha-numeric digits that are added to the end of your Hoplinks, like this: http://affiliate.publisher.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=zzzzzzzz. In this example link, ‘zzzzzzzz’ is your custom Tracking ID. This ID can be anything you want, and it allows you to decipher which of your advertisements or promotions are the most successful.

I’ll give you an example: I am an affiliate with the nickname ‘nick’ and I am promoting a product whose publisher has the nickname ‘name’. I want to run a variety of ads in different locations for this publisher and I want to see which one is the most successful. Let’s say I am going to run an ad on the Web sites www.fakesite.com, www.unreal.com, and www.pretend.com; I only need to add Tracking IDs to the end of my Hoplink to be able to track the results from each Web site. The resulting Hoplinks, with tracking IDs corresponding to the Web sites above, would look like this:

http://nick.name.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=fakesite
http://nick.name.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=unreal
http://nick.name.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=pretend

In my account, on the Analytics page under the Reporting tab, I can see how each advertisement is doing. I can conduct a search by going to the Affiliate Reporting section on the Analytics page, choosing Tracking Codes in the “Report By” field, and a time period of my choice in the Period field. It’s important to note that the Analytics page only reports up to 30 days of Hoplink activity. When I click Go, I can see each of my Tracking Codes in the far left column, titled Code.  I can then see the following information, pertaining to the links I created above: Code, #Hops, #Sales, #Refunds, etc.

If I see that the code ‘unreal’ is creating many hops and sales, and that the code ‘fakesite’ is not creating many at all, I’ll know that the advertisement on the Web site www.fakesite.com is not doing well. I can then choose to put more focus and advertising resources into the www.unreal.com advertisement.

You can even run a variety of ads on the same site, and see what phrases or types of ads work best for each product. For example, if I want to run two differently-worded ads on www.fakesite.com, I can use the Tracking Codes ‘fakest01′ and ‘fakest02′.

Tracking codes enable you to understand your Hoplink activity, analyze your promotional efforts, and ultimately save money by not continually spending that money on advertisements that are not working well.

For more information about adding a Tracking Code to your Hoplinks, please visit:

http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html#hoplink_question_3

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