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Tech Tuesday: CBpress Customizable Marketplace Plugin

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:18:02 +0000

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

In this week’s Tech Tuesday, we’ve got an amazing new WordPress plugin to share with you. It comes from Matt Broich, the affiliate marketing expert who runs CBEngine, one of the top ClickBank analytics and market research sites. With CBpress, Matt and his team have created a plugin that lets you build “ClickBank mall”-type WordPress sites quickly and easily, and then customize them to target customers and convert like crazy. Since this plugin has so many features and options, I’ll let Matt tell you more about them:

Marketplace
CBpress Marketplace allows you to create a customized online mall with up-to-date ClickBank products and pricing. You control the titles, descriptions, products, and even categories presented on your site. During the CBpress installation process, a WordPress page is automatically created with the [cbpress] shortcode.

Import the ClickBank Marketplace into your own blog in less than 60 seconds.
Set up a WordPress ClickBank Marketplace page with a [cbpress] shortcode.
Seamlessly auto-sync with your WordPress theme.
Choose which categories to display.
Choose the order in which products appear.
Enable or disable certain products from appearing.
Control display further with Product Filters.

Here are some screenshots to show you what it looks like. Click on the images for a larger version:

CBpress Main Admin Area

Importer Function

CBpress Marketplace Front End Example

The Niche Setup
CBpress lets you create niche marketplaces. For example, if your site is geared towards health and fitness products, you can set the “Health & Fitness” category as the starting point for your marketplace page by setting the Health and Fitness category as your root category.

Choose what categories you want to display using the “Category Manager” page.
Create custom marketplace categories.
Setting Root Category: Display whatever category (like Health & Fitness) you wish on your marketplace default page. That can be an established ClickBank category or a custom category.

Category Manager

Marketplace Default Page

Set a Feature Category
You can display custom products on the front page of your marketplace, along with categories.

Front End Marketplace

Short-Code Assistant
A CBpress icon shows above the WP post editor that helps build product shortcodes that you can quickly insert into your WordPress posts or pages. Shortcodes save a lot of time so you’re not having to hardcode ClickBank product lists/ads to your individual blog posts and pages. It can be done on the fly!

Shortcode Insert

Product Titles & Descriptions
Many ClickBank vendors write descriptions geared towards attracting affiliates rather than customers. Here’s what CBpress does to remedy some of these issues:

You can limit the number of characters that display under each product listing.
You can edit any product title or description! This is also good for SEO purposes, giving you unique content.
By default, any edits you make will remain intact each time you run the product importer.
You can use the “advanced search” to find out what product titles or descriptions have changed.
You can enable the Smart Filter setting to automatically strip out titles/description words geared to affiliates, leaving a description better suited for customers.

Custom Product Lists
Custom lists give you the ability to easily display subsets of affiliate products within pages, posts, widgets and more:

Create groups of ClickBank Products you want to promote
Place that list on your blog using the Custom List WordPress Widget
Put the list in your blog post with a WordPress short-code

Admin Product Search

Product HopLinks and ClickBank TID Tracking:

You can add ClickBank’s TID tracking globally or set up a TID for individual products.

Affiliate Strategies: A Powerful Technique to Test New Products- Part 2

Beau Blackwell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:59:18 +0000

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.

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Affiliate Strategies: A Powerful Technique to Test New Products- Part 1

Beau Blackwell — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:26:32 +0000

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:

ClickBank’s New Look

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:33:34 +0000

As you’ve probably noticed by now, ClickBank has a new look! In the spirit of the many improvements we’ve made so far this year, we’ve made significant changes to our company colors, as well as the look and feel of the navigation bar and the layout of several pages on the website.

This is the first phase of making the ClickBank website more attractive and easier to understand for new clients.

Please note that these changes do not affect existing functionality or page locations, so you can continue to use the ClickBank system in the same way you always have.

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Tips for Becoming an Affiliate Magnet: Part 3

Beau Blackwell — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:36:35 +0000

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, Senior Customer Service Representative

This is part three of 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 or part two? Click to learn about how to take full advantage of the Marketplace or creating an affiliate page.

Tip 3: Get Your Site Right the First Time

When you’re sending in your first Product Approval Request, your top priority is probably getting your site active as quickly as possible. It certainly seems like a reasonable notion; the sooner you’re active, the sooner you can start receiving sales.

However, I strongly recommend that you take the time to perfect your site content, and to double-check that your Marketplace title and description are optimized to attract affiliates. You should make it clear what type of product you are selling and list the benefits affiliates receive by promoting your site.

There are third-party companies and sites on the Internet that feature newly-listed ClickBank products for a short period of time. If your site content is not optimum, you may be losing out on an opportunity for attracting affiliates right off the bat.

Check back tomorrow for the fourth tip on becoming an affiliate magnet – offering high commissions.

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