You want to add affiliate marketing as a stream of income for your home based business. You need to focus on your business and not be distracted by unfamiliar details. It is important that you need to be comfortable with the details of Clickbank, the most popular source of digital products for affiliate marketing. I am going to assume that you have registered with Clickbank and now have a nickname and a password. To become comfortable with Clickbank, you must understand the terms used by the Clickbank website.

Sign in using your Clickbank nickname and password.

Click the navigation link to the Marketplace page. You will see the Search The Clickbank Marketplace function box. You have a number of choices including:

• category
• all categories
• business to business
• health & fitness
• home & family
• computer & internet
• money & employment
• marketing & ads
• fun & entertainment
• sports & recreation
• society & culture

subcategory – subcategories for each of the categories

keywords – you input keyword relevant to the product or niche you are interested in.

sort by

• popularity
• high gravity
• low gravity
• $ earned/sale
• % earned/sale
• Future $
• Total $/sale
• % referred

and type of product

• all products
• standard billing
• recurring billing

Gravity is a measure of the sustained popularity of a product as measured by daily sales after adjustment for refunds.

Referred is a measure of the percentage of sales by affiliates. 100% referred means all sales by affiliates. 0% referred means all sales by the merchant.

Clickbank does not report the retail sales price for a product. You can get the retail price from the sales page.

Clickbank does report the commission percentage per sale as %/sale.

Clickbank does not report the refund rate for individual products.

Clickbank does report the $ earned/sale which is the net commission amount per sale after adjustment for the average refund rate.

When you search using the Clickbank search box by entering a choice in one or more of the criteria, Clickbank will return product matches. You can select the number of matches you want returned per search – minimum of 10. You receive the following information from a search:

- list of products ranked by your search criteria.

- each product listed includes the following information:

• name and brief product description
• $/sale
• Future $
• Total $/sale
• %/sale
• % refd (referred rate, this is not the % refund rate)
• gravity
• link to the pitch or merchant sales page
• link to create a hoplink.

Browse the marketplace page. Make a number of searches for products in the niches you prefer. View some pitch pages and create some hoplinks until you are familiar with how the marketplace works.

You are almost ready to enter the marketplace with a Clickbank product.

For more information on Clickbank, affiliate commissions
and internet marketing please visit my blog
Make comments and pick up a free guide to internet marketing.

Author: Mike A.
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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Incoming search terms: understand clickbank total $ / sale

ClickBank affiliate marketing is hugely popular among internet marketers because it is totally free to join and almost anyone can do it. But there is a catch, not everyone who are marketing with ClickBank really make it. In fact, thousands of affiliates are not making a dime with ClickBank because of the fierce competition.

By the end of this article, you will understand the important elements to take for you to start dominating ClickBank. The good thing when you learn this is, you will be making huge improvement on your earnings. You either be really good at ClickBank marketing or make nothing from it.

Lets get started.

First and the key element that differentiates a super affiliate and an failure is the ability to perform research. Like any work or job, a highly refined research that has done will give huge impact on marketing results. When you want to promote a product or a niche, make sure to perform these research steps.

Dominating ClickBank #1: Research Audience

By understanding who your customer is and what your customers want will drive more quality traffic to your affiliate links that will result in affiliate commissions. Do not try to sell one product to everyone, try to break it down to smaller groups of people and approach them in relevant ways.

Research could be done in various of ways, the easiest way is to do forum search. See what people are asking and what people are looking for. When you know who your audience are, then you are way ahead of your competitors to dominating ClickBank market.

Dominating ClickBank #2: Keyword Research

Performing keyword research is a very important task in an affiliate every day’s work. Getting highly relevant keywords will convert more traffic into sales. The most common mistake that new affiliates do is to target the keyword that gets the most traffic. That is the wrong way and will poke a huge hole in your pockets.

Top affiliates that are dominating ClickBank use good keyword research tool to optimize their campaigns that will bring them the highest return on investment, Especially if they are using pay per click marketing.

Dominating ClickBank #3: Campaign Optimization

Using free websites and blogs has a very big disadvantage because your websites are not optimized to convert sales. The highest converting websites are website that has attractive and professional design, attention grabbing headline and highly optimized copy writing.

Simple campaign optimization will drive more sales and increase your conversion rate exponentially.

By now you have learned the basic important steps on dominating ClickBank. Always perform daily research steps and keep an action plan schedule to be a successful ClickBank affiliate marketer. Being consistent at small tasks will bring huge success.

P.S – Click here to see the simple tool that top affiliate marketers use to dominate ClickBank marketing and make $1,000s every day.

Author: Kyle Nuar
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Sponsored by: Social Bookmarking Software

When was the last time you made $500 a day using ClickBank? Was it within the past 1 or 2 months? Didn’t think so. How much did you spend for Adwords/Yahoo? Was it so low that you that you just skipped a day’s coffee? Didn’t think so. What was your ROI (Return in Investment) after all the time spent, hassles taken, e-books from “Experts” bought and promised dreams of “Financial Freedom”? Was it high enough to quit your job? Didn’t think so. Did you “Fire YOUR Boss” after joining ClickBank? Didn’t think so.

Is ClickBank really what it is claimed to be? Is it really the best way to make money selling digital products in the Business-to-Business or more specifically the ever-so-popular “Internet Marketing” category? Let’s clear our doubts first, ClickBank was definitely the best way to make money by have a Squeeze Page or a redirect, or cloaking your Affiliate ID, having a Review Site and having a killer Adwords Campaign. Back then, even I, getting $500 a day from selling affiliate products was a joke but, that was in the “Google Cash” method days which took the internet by storm about 2 years ago.

ClickBank is still good for a lot of niches but again you have to understand that the fact is, the “Gravity” measure is below 20 for almost all other niche’s except a very select few which shows that there is not much interest in them. Now, there are some fantastic products being sold on ClickBank and let me name a few of them, one being the Keyword Analyzer tool and many others. But, how many “Take Paid Surveys” or “Get Rich Quick” or “Make $500 a day” type “products” do we see DAILY on ClickBank?

ClickBank’s BIGGEST flaw is the fact that you can buy using your OWN affiliate ID to get a discount. This is great if you are interested in buying the product but just imagine if more than 80% of the people were to do that (which is common these days) how much do you think a normal newbie affiliate or for that matter an average affiliate would make? You guessed it, very less after the exorbitant Adwords fees. Even if you cloaked your link and masked the website with precision, a person who signed up to be a ClickBank affiliate is 99% of the time smart enough to know what he is up to when he goes to the Checkout or Order page and when he looks below to see the text “[affiliate=someone]” they will right away change it to THEIR affiliate ID, literally STEALING your commission. Is there a way to counter this? Yes, some gurus suggest there is when you increase the perceived value of the product by giving a quality review, or building a very personally bonded list, but seriously, how many more would you get with this method then normal? 4? 10? Maybe 20? (Being generous here.)

Now Imagine the number of Paid Survey sites or Data Entry Job products on CB, if you look at their Earned/Sale (which is basically how much ON AVERAGE a person makes per sale after fees etc.) is so less, that most of the time if you are entitled to get $45 per sale, the average is usually around $33! This is $12! Less on average! Which means that there are many HARD EARNED commissions which are losing out because of ClickBank’s liberal Refund Policy. Just imagine if you just put in $50 for an Adwords Campaign and got two sales totaling $73 or so in commissions and you just got a refund (to which you have no control over) you just made a loss. Now you may say a loss of just about $5-10 but if you total the amount of time, energy, testing, trial and error that took place from you part, it would be A HUGE LOSS.

Now, if you aren’t making any money off of ClickBank, then WHO IS?

Let me rephrase the question, if most of the buyers are abusing the liberal “Refund Policy” of ClickBank and most of the users are trying to use their own Affiliate Hop link then who is making the money? That Link Cloaking software you purchased for quite some cash didn’t tell you about Refunds or this fact. Well, you guessed it, THE MERCHANT. It is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation for him/her. Let me elaborate, even if he/she does not get a sale, he/she will get a future prospect or Lead which will either

a) Opt-in to his/her list

b) Get his/her name known to the world in case he/she does not have a prior portfolio

c) CASH CASH CASH. Either it is from your affiliate ID or someone else’s affiliate ID, it doesn’t matter, they rake in the cash no matter what and the more the merrier.

D) He/she now gets to use those earnings from ClickBank he received because of people like YOU to hype up his next sales letter and his next “Proof of Earnings” Section.

Now you being a disgruntled affiliate will end up bidding on Keywords for Adwords and after all the effort would still not see the results you are promised or made to “dream” on the plentiful E-books which are collecting dust on your hard drive by now. Why? Because the people who will buy from the Adwords Ads will be the people who are NOT a part of ClickBank affiliates at all, these are most probably total Newbie’s who just happened to search and you know what? There aren’t many of those any more, in fact, it doesn’t even matter, the odds of them converting are pretty rare.

So getting back to the original point. There is a trick where you make your Domain URL similar to the Official URL which works but again, only to the “Non-ClickBank viewers.”

So why are the people showing all those huge checks and $$$ out of no where? Well, because these are part of the Merchant’s “inner circle” that get hold of the buzz of the product’s launch and are 1 week ahead of everyone. What these people do is, literally squash all the little affiliates who are not part of the “inner circle” by aggressively marketing on Adwords and sending a killer sales pitch to all their Lists and giving away bonuses and what not. These amount for more than 30% of the sales that the merchants get, often times these people are less that 10! The next kind as I said earlier are the people who buy using their own affiliate ID to get their discount to see “what this buzz is all about” and they amount to over 55-60% of the people. The remaining 10-15% is for average affiliates.

Now, is it worth the effort to be part of this very little percentage and add to the fact the refund policy, merchant’s bad service rapport leading to even bigger problems of the people who bought from your “review website” to ever find it credible again. Now not all of the people struggle but indefinitely, the people who do are the new guys on the game, these are the guys who have been “catching up on the gold rush” so to speak what did they end up getting? Yet, these are the guys the “Gurus” aggressively market, when I mean aggressively, these are the “target market” for them because they will spend anything to fill the gaps, to “crack the code” to “get the secret” to “beat their competition.” But for how long?

These are some of the quotes that some affiliate friends I know say “This is the last e-book I will pretty much ever buy. I’ve had enough of this; seriously, I bought pretty much 30 e-books by now.”

“The information was nothing new, not saying that it wasn’t good but again, I honestly believe that gone are the days where you could use CB for affiliate products because everyone will use their affiliate ID and buy the e-book to get the discount.”

Gurus claim as if being an affiliate will bring HUGE sales of their product and therefore hype up their e-book. All they would do is get sales off of newbie affiliates who haven’t made a killing using ClickBank. Let me give you an example, would be able to sell a “Get rich quick” E-book to Bill Gates? Why Not? Because he is rich, he is NOT the target market. But, if you pitched the same thing to a guy who is working as a store clerk who thinks his life sucks and what are the chances of him buying? You know the answer.

The Quality of products in ClickBank is decreasing and because of high refund rates, the merchants are over-pricing their products, what would have been worth no more than $29 last year is worth more than $97 now, so that they can recuperate from the high refund rates.

Because of this, the “new” buzz is to create physical products to sell at exorbitant prices and decrease the refund rates. ClickBank means well and their refund policy is an example of that, however, the quality and honesty of their merchants is up for questioning as it’s not the merchant or his/her Super Affiliates (i.e. friends from inner circle) but YOU as a common average Joe who is getting affected because, YOU are spending your energy every single day, YOU are spending your hard-earned money on advertising and YOU face the consequences if it doesn’t work out. You got no one to blame at the end if you burn your money on a Scam Artist selling via ClickBank at the end of the day.

I’m not going to lie to you however, I do make enough money using other alternatives and some niche products on ClickBank but the fact is, it isn’t easy, nor will it make you enough to make fun of your boss. So, it is important for you to stand up on your feet and be down to earth on your successes and accept your failures before it is too late. I however, found my success on eBay by using techniques and softwares that are virtually unknown by 99% of the people who venture the affiliate marketing and more specifically Internet Marketing arena. Visit my website for more information.

To Your Success,

Mr. Anonymous

http://www.scamsreviewer.com

PS: You may use this article and publish in your website provided all the links and data is intact.

Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experiences being a prominent affiliate marketer of many ClickBank Products for many years. It does not condemn ClickBank in any way shape or form. It is just no longer a means of making huge amounts of income online for me.

Mr. Anonymous is the founder of ScamsReviewer. He can be reached for more information at his website here: http://www.scamsreviewer.com Mr. Anonymous has been a contributing author for this website and is an acknowledged expert in the field of making money online.

Author: Richard Lexionagtona
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Sponsored by: SEO Blog