Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

So, your page has been a success, you have some good rankings and you’ve decided to give the product its own full-blown website. Now comes the delicate task of directing that traffic to your new site. This is a strategy I use, and it works well for me. There are many ways to do it, but by following this strategy I minimize the disruption to my hard-earned rankings.

• Build the new site with a number of articles, each optimized for their own key phrases.
• Build external links to your site as usual.
• Wait a week or two.
• Assuming you are using a fresh domain, and depending on the extent of your link-building efforts, you will most likely be in the Google sandbox, and will be indexed, but not ranked for much.
• Put up an identical copy of your original product testing page that has been hosted on your other site. This time around, integrate menu and site links into the page and theme it with the rest of your new site. I recommend linking to all key pages on your new site from this page.
• Use a 301 redirect from the location of the test page on the old site, to the location of the test page on the new site.

This method ensures that approximately 70% or more (in my experience) of the PageRank or “Link Juice” from your original pages is passed on to the new page. You should see your old page fall out of the search results and your new page replace it. Additionally, the internal pages linked to from this article are given a boost as well, resulting in your new site gaining good search rankings at a much faster rate than without this boost.

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. Affiliate Strategies: A Powerful Technique to Test New Products- Part 1
2. Choosing the Best Keywords to Promote ClickBank Products Using Search Engines
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

A common promotional technique used by many affiliates is to build a website based around an interest they have and promote related products in that niche, relying on organic search rankings and in-bound links for traffic.

Keeping the products that are being promoted relevant to the site content ensures that visitors to the site already have an interest in the product. This typically results in a much higher conversion rate than promoting unrelated products.

But following this strategy means that if the affiliate wishes to promote a product in an entirely different niche, a new site must be built from scratch – and a new site takes time and resources to build. It takes even more time for this new site to receive organic search traffic and to build links.

When you stumble across one of those truly exceptional opportunities to pair a high-quality product with what you believe is a hot market, there is no question that you have to act quickly.

This leads to the following question:

What is the most effective way to bring an untested product to market as quickly as possible?

The following tactics can be used to test a new product on an existing site, which lowers your costs and can lead to quicker results.

• If you have a number of sites, pick the site that is most closely associated with the new product. Think about the demographics of your sites’ audiences and how the new product could potentially fit into their lives. For example, if you were looking at promoting an eBook on “recipes for make-at-home, home cleaning products”, an existing site on dog training would be more complementary than a site on how to conquer World of Warcraft due to the demographic profiles. Use your judgment to match the new product with a similar demographic and appropriate existing site.
• Research three to four key phrases with a minimum of three words each using Google’s External Keyword Tool, and find the lowest competition/highest search count you can get away with. Take into account factors like how often your website is updated, how much “weight” you have in the search engines (PageRank) and how many external links you have pointing at the pages on your site. Generally speaking, the stronger these factors are, the higher the competitiveness of the key-phrases you can target, the faster you’ll have your new page ranked, and the more likely it is you’ll see a top 10 ranking.
• Build a promotional page on your existing site. This page could be in the form of a “Special Review,” a report on the new product, or simply an article on what the product you are promoting is about. Optimize this page to rank for the previously researched key phrases. This page should have obvious and well-featured links to the product you are promoting. Do not integrate this page into your existing site, and be sure to remove your standard menu from this page. However, include links to your homepage for those visitors that have reached this page from an internal link, and are not interested.
• Link to this page from within your site. The link should be visually featured as something different and unique, making it stand out and allowing the standard site visitor to identify it as somewhat unrelated to the theme of the current site. If a visitor is genuinely interested in the product, they’ll click.
• Build some links to this new page from external sources. Between 10 and 20 PageRank 1+ related links is ideal! This step is essential for emphasizing to the search engines that this new page is worthy of being taken seriously.
• Optional: Supplement with paid traffic. This may take the form of Google Adwords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, or one of the many other paid search networks. Bear in mind that bigger is not always better. Some smaller networks have decent search volumes and much lower bid prices. In some cases, click-through and conversion rates are even better! This step is not essential, but it does allow you to begin seeing some results faster. If your return on advertising investment is positive, continue to tweak your campaign and leave it running even as your organic listings start to appear. A special note for those using Google Adwords: You may want to add links pointing to internal pages on your site to avoid being “slapped” -be sure to spend time researching and use good judgment.

Depending on a number of factors, you should start to see your organic rankings appear anywhere from as little as a few days to a number of weeks.

Continue to refine and test this single page for as long as you need to draw a conclusion as to whether it is profitable and worth pursuing.

Tomorrow’s Part 2 will discuss how you can move your product promotions over to a new, more relevant website without losing the promotional “juice” you’ve been creating!

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. Affiliate Strategies: A Powerful Technique to Test New Products- Part 2
2. Choosing the Best Keywords to Promote ClickBank Products Using Search Engines
3. 5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of IT Operations

Some ClickBank clients have raised concerns that the traffic and clicks that they see in external analytics applications such as Google and Yahoo Analytics sometimes don’t match their ClickBank Hop analytics or sales numbers.

Affiliate-driven sales account for the vast majority of ClickBank’s sales, and we are completely committed to making Hop tracking as accurate as possible. ClickBank will soon release new functionality that will allow you to integrate Google and Yahoo Analytics into the ClickBank Hop and sales cycle. This will give our clients complete visibility into the ways in which affiliate promotions translate to Hops, order form visits, and eventually completed sales.

Since the Vendor Thank You page is the last destination for a ClickBank consumer following a purchase, it would seem as though comparing the number of completed sales to the number of visits to the Thank You page would be relatively straightforward. However, I’ll share with you a number of different ways by which traffic can reach this page, demonstrating why this comparison can sometimes be inaccurate.

1.       ClickBank Sales: The most obvious and rewarding way in which traffic lands on a Vendor Thank You page is via a successful ClickBank sale. As mentioned on our Vendor Tools page, ClickBank will always pass nine query string parameters to the Thank You page. These parameters indicate that the visitor has placed an authentic ClickBank order.

2.       Robots: Search engines spider websites to improve search capabilities. The Thank You page should never be scanned by search engines. The Vendor should always add the META tag described in our Vendor Tools to prevent robots from adding the Thank You page to a search engine list.

3.       Customer Bookmarks: A ClickBank customer can always bookmark the Thank You page. Once bookmarked, they can visit the Thank You page as many times as they like.

4.       GOTO link in the receipt email: When a customer makes a purchase, ClickBank sends them a receipt email that includes a GOTO link to the Thank You page. This GOTO link is only valid for 14 days after the sale is made. It contains an encrypted identifier that ClickBank verifies and ties back to the original Thank You page URL given to the customer at the time of sale. A customer is allowed to visit the Thank You page via this GOTO link as many times as they want within that 14-day window.

5.       ClickBank Customer Service: In some cases, ClickBank can provide a customer with the original Thank You page URL and parameters. This is done in cases where sending the customer the Thank You page URL will keep them from requesting a refund, such as if they were unable to download the product immediately after purchase. This is typically only done within the 60-day refund period.

So how can you, the vendor, better protect your Thank You page and get more accurate traffic statistics? ClickBank provides multiple ways to protect the Thank You page in our Vendor Tools. Here are a few highlights:

1.       A Thank You page should always be a script-based page, such as PHP, ASP, Perl, etc. A scripted page can read and evaluate the parameters that ClickBank passes. The Thank You page can easily be scripted to only permit visitors that have valid ClickBank parameters, like the ClickBank receipt.

2.       A Thank You page should always be protected by the ClickBank Link Security Script and a Secret Key. ClickBank provides code examples on the Vendor Tools page that show how a scripted page can verify the ClickBank Proof of Purchase (CBPOP) value. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors that have a valid CBPOP value. It is worth mentioning that less than 2% of registered ClickBank vendors use a Secret Key. However, for sales on any given day, over 50% of the sites that make a sale use a Secret Key. The lesson here is that the most successful ClickBank vendors protect their product using the ClickBank Secret Key and CBPOP.

3.       Check the time. ClickBank passes the time of the original sale in computer epoch time (seconds since 1970). A scripted Thank You page can easily verify that the order occurred within a given number of days. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors within a specific number of days since the original sale. This prevents people from accessing the Thank You page URL via bookmarking or sharing.

4.       Script and log the visitor data. Once your scripted Thank You page has filtered out robots and unverified visitors, you can now accurately track unique visitors by logging the receipt number. Obviously, some consumers will download a product twice if they have problems, but a scripted Thank You page will allow you to match unique visitors with unique sales.

I hope this helps demystify the occasional inconsistencies between ClickBank sales numbers and Thank You page visits. The new ClickBank integration with third-party analytics programs should help even more. Look for it in the near future.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 1
2. The Power of Data
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2

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.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Using Video to Promote Your Business
2. Advertising Strategy: Daypart Bidding
3. Tips for Becoming an Affiliate Magnet: Part 4