One of the easiest ways to get started in internet marketing is to promote affiliate products. This means you get a commission for each sale of a particular product that comes from your link or referral.
Its definitely the easiest route into making money online.You dont have to spend time and effort creating and marketing a product of your own, you dont have to deal with customer service and recruiting people to sell for you...all that you have to do is find a product to promote and create a website or link “pre-selling” the product.
Many affiliates choose Clickbank.com to start out with, for a number of reasons. They are incredibly easy to use, the merchants pay generous commissions and their products sell well.
Clickbank describes themselves as a “leading retailer of digital
products”; they do not sell physical products. Everything on their site can be digitally downloaded.
So to explain to you how to get started in affiliate marketing, we are going to use Clickbank as an example, although there are many other reputable affiliate companies as well, such as paydotcom, Commission Junction, Pepperjam, and countless others.
To sign up as an affiliate at clickbank, all you have to do is go to their
home page at www.clickbank.com.
When you sign up, you need to give Clickbank your physical address, because they will be mailing you a check for your commission. They do not currently have an option to pay via paypal, but they HAVE just introduced a direct to bank account system. This makes things a whole lot easier if you live outside the US.
They will also ask you to choose a nickname. This nickname is how you get your commissions, because you are going to include it in a link called a hoplink. Dont worry its not madly complicated – this is just a web address that people can click on that includes your nickname so when you make sales, Clickbank knows who to pay.
Well talk more about hoplinks shortly, because theyre very important. They are how you get paid. Customers will be able to see the nickname in your hoplink, so keep that in mind when choosing it. Also, once you choose that nickname, you will not be able to change it later.
product that they want to promote, they are going to want as much help selling that product as possible.
The best way for them to enlist an army of salespeople is to pay those salespeople, (referred to as affiliates), a generous commission. Generally they are going to pay most of the sales price to the affiliate. A product that sells for $37, for instance, will probably net the affiliate about $23 per sale.
If a merchant pays too low a percentage to their affiliates, the affiliates are most likely not going to feel very inspired to promote the product, and the merchants sales will suffer.
There is a huge marketplace out there full of products that an affiliate can choose from when they decide what to promote.From an affiliates point of view, it makes sense to spend their time and money promoting products that pay them well.
After the merchant creates their product (which is usually an eBook on any subject but could also be a service or software), they submit it to Clickbank for approval.
Clickbank will not accept any products that make false or misleading claims, or which promote illegal activity like spamming. They will also review a product for quality; Clickbanks reputation is on the line with each product on their site, and it does not benefit them to accept a poor quality product that wont sell well.
This is of course great for us as affiliates because we know that all Clickbank products will be of a certain quality.
With each sale of a product, Clickbank pays the merchant 92.5 percent of the sale price, less a $1 stocking charge. (Merchants also have to pay a one-time set-up fee of $49.95 to open an account with clickbank if you fancy becoming a merchant)
If someone comes to the Clickbank website, looks through the „Clickbank Marketplace (you can find this link on Clickbanks home page), and then buys the product after clicking on the merchants link, then the merchant gets paid the 92.5 percent of the product minus the $1 stocking fee.
So the merchant does not have to pay any money to an affiliate in that case, because the customer found the merchant by themselves and bought directly through the merchant - they did not find the merchant through an affiliate or buy through the affiliates link.
You following this?However, if someone goes to an affiliates web page and clicks on the affiliates link, which sends them to the merchant page, and then they buy the product...Clickbank pays the affiliate their percentage, say 70 percent of the product price, and then pays the merchant the remaining amount that they are due.
It may seem surprising that merchants would pay such a high
percentage of their products price to an affiliate, but remember that this is very low-overhead product, so its easy for a merchant to be able to afford to do this. AND it encourages the affiliates to go out there and sell, sell, sell. The affiliate is the one spending his or her time and/or money promoting the product, and having motivated affiliates will vastly multiply a merchants profit margin.
And of course if a merchant pays your 70% of their product sale price for getting them a sale, it means they keep 30% of a sale that they wouldnt have if you werent their affiliate.
It takes a bit of getting your head round but makes good business sense.
If you look at the screenshot, you will see that next to the “Home and “Sign Up” links is a link that says “Marketplace”. Once you have signed up as an affiliate, click on the “Marketplace” link to see all of the products that clickbank has to offer, and pick one which you want to promote.
The categories of Clickbank products are:
Its worth taking the time to click on each category to see what they have to offer, just to familiarize yourself with the clickbank marketplace. So once you select a category to check out, you would click on the “go” button on the bottom righthand side of the screen, and you will be taken to a list of all of the products in the health and fitness category.
By default, these products are listed in terms of popularity - with the most popular products being on top.Below is an example from the first page of the “health and fitness” category:
Now lets take a closer look at the number one product on the health and fitness page below (please note that you, this can change at any time as new products come along):
The product is called “Fat Loss 4 Idiots” and it is a hugely popular downloadable diet plan. First were going to take a look at the numbers in green underneath the product name.
“$/sale” means the average amount of money that you will be paid for each sale of this product, minus refunds. It is impossible to predict how many customers, if any, are going to ask for refunds in any given pay period, of course. In my experience 5% is a high average.
“Future $:” - in most cases this will refer to money from an ongoing subscription that a customer signs up for. This is also called “rebill revenue”. If there is no subscription, this amount will be zero.
“Total $/sale” - The average amount that an affiliate will be paid per sale, including all rebills.“%sale” refers to what percentage of the sales price goes to the affiliate. As you see, in the example above, 75 percent of the sales price goes to the affiliate, which is typical on Clickbank.
“%refd” number is how many of the products sales on Clickbank are referred by affiliates, as opposed to how many are made directly by the merchant.
Its a good sign if this is a high number, because it means that affiliates are finding this is a profitable item to promote. If the merchant is doing most of the promoting, that means that affiliates arent making much money off of it for whatever reason.
And finally, a products “gravity” is a measure of how well a product is selling. It reflects the number of affiliates who have earned a commission from a product, and other factors as viewed by Clickbank.
Many affiliates shy away from any product with a gravity below 60 or 70. This isnt always the case though because there might be stunning products in there which sell extremely well yet not many affiliates have heard about them.
Some affiliates also become concerned when gravity is too high - for instance, the products gravity in the example above is 609. The concern is that there are so many affiliates promoting the product that the marketplace may become overcrowded, and it will be very hard to sell that product.
However, some affiliates believe that a crowded market is a sign that the product is profitable.Youll have to decide for yourself whether “gravity” matters to you in this case, although its a good idea not to pick a product with terribly low gravity, because there is usually a reason.
Once you have identified a few products that you are interested in, you will want to click on the link that takes you to the products pitch page. That is the blue link located to the far left on the third line below („view pitch page)
The reason that you want to do this because you need to make sure that they have a good, professional looking pitch page. You dont want to put your time and energy into promoting a product with an amateurish looking sales page that might not convert.
There is another reason that you want to do this: you need to get to know the product as well as possible.It is of course ideal if you buy the product, but in truth, there are affiliates who make a lot of money promoting products that they did not buy.
Whether you buy it or not, you should read the “pitch page” to see what the merchant says about it, what they consider its strong points, and what customers are saying about the product in their testimonials.
Its a good idea to pick a product that is in an area that you have some familiarity with. There are so many high quality, profitable products on Clickbank that it doesnt make sense to pick a product in an area that you dont enjoy.
For instance, if you hate tattoos, it doesnt make sense to promote the Clickbank Tattoo designs product. If you are blessed with a super high metabolism and have never dieted, a weight loss product might not be the best choice for you.
The best thing to do is pick a product that you would enjoy promoting and learning more about.And you also want to pick a product that is on the first page or two of its category on Clickbank, and that has fairly high gravity - above 60 or 70, at a minimum.
Once you have done that, you are in good shape. And now that youve picked your first product, lets talk about creating your hoplink, and then how you will go about promoting your product.
Once you have selected a product, you will need to create what is called a “hoplink”. This is the link that you will put on your sales page, or in your email and when someone clicks on it, it will take them to the merchants page where they can look over the product description and decide if it is right for them.
If the person then proceeds to buy it, Clickbank instantly credits the affiliate for that purchase.You are going to want to put this link on several locations on your sales page, to make it easy for a customer to click on it. The link should be on the top, middle, and bottom of the page so the customer never has to hunt for a way to get to the merchants page.
The link contains your affiliate nickname, the publishers name, and the phrase hop.clickbank.net.Let us say that your nickname is sellsalot and you are creating a hoplink for the Fatloss 4 Idiots product.
The hoplink would look like this: http://sellsalot.4idiots.hop.clickbank.net.
The HTML version would be:
<a href=”http://sellsalot.4idiots.hop.clickbank.net.
The way that you generate a hoplink is to go to the list of products and find the one that you want to promote.
In the example above, you will see that on the third line is a blue link which says “create hoplink.”
You will click on that link, and this screen will pop up:
You will fill in your Clickbank nickname. It is also a very good idea to create a tracking i.d., which can be up to eight characters, either numbers or letters.
The reason that you want to do this is because you will most likely want to test out different versions of sales letters, and the tracking i.d. will tell you where your sales came from. So you would create a different hoplink for each sales page - changing only the tracking i.d.
Make sure to keep a written record of which tracking id came from which sales page. Then, when you see where your sales are coming from, you can tell which sales page converts most effectively, and you can eliminate the sales pages that do not convert well.
It is very important that you always include your properly spelled clickbank nickname in each hoplink that you create. If you do not, you will not get any credit for the sale.
Now, lets say for this hoplink, the tracking id that you picked says“version 1.”
Here is what your hoplink would look like:
All right, now that you have picked a product and created a tracking i.d., lets move on to one of the most important parts of affiliate marketing: how to promote the product!