How I Still Rake It In With Clickbank

Heard of Clickbank? For the uninitiated, Clickbank is one of the world’s largest affiliate system. It serves two markets. Publishers selling software upload software, ebooks and other intangibles to Clickbank’s system to find buyers. Website owners, market these products as affiliates and earn up to 75% in commissions. The site has paid out an astounding $1 Billion US ollars to date. That’s the GDP of  medium sized country!

From 2001- to 2008, the company enjoyed stellar growth. Millionaires have built a fortune with clickbank. Heard of the RichJerk? He’s one of the mavericks who created a massive clickbank affiliate system selling his ebook RichJerk… which simply teaches people how to market product using affiliate systems! Then there are the niche authors specializing in nlp, SEO,  seduction, etc. There’s a great demand for esoteric knowledge. Clickbank helped them sell and made a lot of rich folks.

Today, Clickbank has failed the expectations of many. From blog rumblings, you’ll discover that sales have slumped across the board with affiliates barely scraping in a paycheck. Some attribute it to recession. Some claim that affiliate marketing simply lost its luster. I agree. But there’s still a hardcore way to make money of this marketing monster.

• Skip the One Page Affiliate Website Method. The average affiliate marketer cashed in on clickbank creating a clone of the original product’s site. He used the same spiel and plugged in his affiliate link at the bottom to reap in the commissions. This worked well in the past when it was easy to get indexed fast and achieve Pagerank early. It’s not the case today. Google is strict in its listings and rarely will a new affiliate marketer find his new webpage listed. It could take months or years to show in the index.  Sometimes these sites never appear on the index because of duplicate content filters. Either way, the e-product may already have disappeared, denying the affiliate a sale!
• Quit The Adwords Blitzes. Another popular method was to spend on adwords to promote an affiliate link or to point to one of the new, unranked affiliate websites. Know something? This has to be one of the lamest methods ever used. Try promoting forex ebooks on adwords with this technique. It will cost you almost $10 o $20 per click (the niche is very costly) and in the rare chance that the purchases closes the sale, you make a measly $30 per sale. Or less. Adwords and advertising networks like overture is not cost effective for clickbank affiliate marketing systems. Variable cost of operations simply goes through the roof!
• Instead, Set up Honest To Goodness Review Networks. I maintain a few sites that give real reviews. These blogs and fora don’t use the exact marketing spiel deployed by the original product owner. Instead, writers look in depth into the product (by borrowing from those who purchased) and whip up solid insider looks. Pros and cons are listed, as well as hidden costs. There’s a balance of view. Some products are trashed. Some are rated highly. At the end of every review, we plug in the hoplink. What happens? The reader feels that the information is valuable. He’s not bamboozled into buying something on the basis of something contrived. Even better, google loves it for unique content.
• Get the Review Network Spidered Well. I want Google to update  data on the blogs so that new reviews appear almost overnight. There’s no point if users search for an eproduct review and don’t see it on my site till months later. My trick is simple. I get backlinks from gargantuan pageranked sites like W3C and .edu. This method gets google spiders crawling like … well… spiders… daily.
• Look at the %refd Attribute of the Product. Don’t just sell any clickbank product. Select the most saleable. When you browse the clickbank marketplace, take note of the %refd attribute. This tells what percentage of the product sales came from affiliates and what came from the company. 100% means that ALL it’s sales came from Affiliates. That means it lends itself well to affiliate marketing!
• Look at the grav Attribute – Gravity is key!  This pertains to the number of affiliates who earned a commission selling the product. It is not an exact number. It is a weighted sum, deeply emphasizing the sales performance of the preceeding 16 weeks. Higher grav means  solid performer.

Have your clickbank sales slowed? Don’t despair. Take a step back and evaluate your strategy. Then try my methodology. It could kickstart your thousand dollar paychecks!