ClickBank Market Research

Let's get started…

First and foremost we need to dive headfirst into ClickBank market research. We need to try and identify a few potential products worth promoting. Try and generate a shortlist of between 10 and 20 potential products to promote.

The products can be in different markets and niches. Try and find at least two products for each niche you look into. I'll talk more about that later.

Finding a winner is simply a numbers game. I don't care how good or advanced you are — you will almost ALWAYS have more losers than winners when you start out.

Still — you can stack the deck in your favor when you get better at identifying the components and characteristics of a good product in the right market.

I also don't believe there is a right or wrong way of performing your ClickBank niche market research. You'll eventually create your own method if you do this long enough.

And know this — you can make it into the "Hall of Fame" in affiliate marketing with just a 30% success rate! You absolutely, positively do not have to hit a home run with every campaign.

Right — first things first. Head over to the ClickBank Marketplace. You now have two options:

Keyword Search: This is a great way to enter broad root keywords to see what's available. If you've heard of some new buzz word in the news or in your niche — type it in. Chances are that you'll find something.
Ideas: weight, poker, adsense, adwords, affiliate, pet, cure, dvd, game, health, trading, niche, music, money…
Browse by Category: Simply click on one of the nine main categories to drill in a bit deeper. You'll then be presented with a list of products in order of popularity/sales. It's now just a matter of browsing around, clicking, and taking a look at the various product sales pages.

Each product will come with a list of stats to help you with your market research and product selection:

ClickBank Rankings

$/sale: How much you are likely to earn based on sales from the previous two weeks. Refunds have already been factored in too, so it's a great little metric.

In fact, if you're good a math then you'll be able to do a little reverse engineering and figure out what the refund rate is of a product BEFORE you get involved.

%/sale: Simply the percentage commission you earn. Looking at $/sale is a better metric s you'll get to see almost exactly how much you'll earn per sale.

%refd: What percentage of sales were refereed by affiliates. The difference is direct sales — which I guess would be from the merchant.

grav: This is a kind of cryptic metric — but an important one never the less. The higher the number — the more affiliates are promoting it. It's a good gauge as to how popular a product is and whether its selling or not.

Anything between 30 – 100 is pretty popular. Less then 30 and it's either new — or the market just isn't that big. Above 100 identifies a very popular product.

Here is what ClickBank say about their rankings — and more importantly, the gravity metric…

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

Huh?

What this is trying to say is that gravity measures how many affiliates are successfully selling a product over the past 8 weeks. That's it really.

There is a little nugget of gold in this if you have a your own product on ClickBank that you are selling. It is better (from a gravity sense) to have 10 affiliates make 10 sales — than it is for you to make 100 sales by yourself! Your product's gravity will be higher. In fact, you can "game the system" and sign up for multiple ClickBank accounts and promote your product as an affiliate in these accounts. This will increase your gravity which in turn will help you sign up more affiliates.

Ok, this is not an information product on marketing your own product through ClickBank. On with the show…

To Go Popular Or Not?

Simply put, both work.

Go Popular: You can't go far wrong if you only promoted the top 3 products in any category.

These are products that ALREADY have a proven sales record. They are selling — and selling well. The downside is that it's also going to be pretty competitive out there.

If you have a mailing list — all the better. If not — then put on your boxing gloves and get ready to box. It's going to be bloody so have a box of Band-Aids close by.

Go Deep & Narrow: If getting a bloody nose doesn't sound like fun to you — then dig deeper. Browse to page 3 through 10.

Try and find a nugget out there — a great product with a crappy sales page. Or a product for a small/niche market. Sure — the potential money on the table will be less — but then the competition aren't heavy-weight boxers either — for the most part.

There are many ways to skin the ClickBank cat. Some may be a little more effective than others … but still — the KEY is simply to take action!

If you do that then you're 90% of the way to making money with ClickBank.

Selection a ClickBank Product to Promote

I tend to add a product to my shortlist if it looks to have a sold sales funnel and adheres to good direct-response methodologies and principles. If I can find that — then I'll add the product to my shortlist. It's that simple.

Things to look for…

Presence of a Name Squeeze page
Eye-catching headline
Good copy (of course)
Testimonials
Bonuses (good on-topic bonuses, not some miscellaneous unrelated resell-rights crap)
Clear and strong guarantee (which is mandatory with ClickBank, however, it is not mandatory to make your guarantee big and clear and push it as a benefit)
Strong call-to-action!
Optional: an up-sell just before the order page (so you can earn even more commission)

This is also another mode of operation…

Find a product with a crap sales page — but with a good product. You then re-write (yes, requires more work) the sales copy and then link directly to the merchants checkout/buy link. The visitor therefore never sees the merchant's crappy sales page.

WARNING! You'll need to first ask the merchant if he/she minds if you do this. (Or you should at least if you want to be 100% safe.)

I once DIDN'T ask a merchant if they minded if I bypassed their crappy sales copy. I created my own sales page — and then happily started to generate sales.

Then about a whole freakin' YEAR LATER after I had already generated this person thousands of dollars in sales — I got an email from ClickBank…

Oops! Wrist Smack

I was to terminate my campaign within 24 hours or get my ClickBank account shut down. Err … excuse me, but WHY didn't the merchant simply contact me directly and ask nicely for me to stop bypassing their stinkin' copy?

I would have either, of course, done so — or tried to explain to him the benefit of what I was doing.

But no! The fruitcake just reported me. The sad thing was that I must have been one of his top affiliates. This was in a narrow non-IM niche.

Well, needless to say, I stopped. But I also stopped being his affiliate and instead moved on to promote the product of his competitor. ;-)

Long story shore — "ask" before playing this particular game.

WARNING: Grey Hat Guideline Ahead!

The "official" way to bypass a product's sales page is to ask the merchant. But you can often get past this little problem with a loophole.

Load the merchant's sales page but show your own sales page!

What?

Well, the technical thing that is done involves a flux capacitor … dilithium crystals.

But seriously — what you do is load the merchant sales page in an "invisible frame" or "JavaScript variable". This sets the merchant's cookie and lets you link directly to the order form from ClickBank.

Now, since nobody wants to go out there and code up some invisible frame, variable loading JavaScript thingy — help is on the way. You can use my covert cookie script to do this Grey Hat trick.

This bends the rules and drops an invisible cookie without having to load the merchant's sales page. By the way — this is done ALL THE TIME by the super affiliates.

The folks that make $1M in eBay memberships and Amazon product commissions use this all the time. It can be a little sneaky and evil … which is why I like it!

Anyway, back to the shortlist…

My shortlist

I tend to prefer to choose a product where there are a few competing products available. That way I can split test them against each other to find the one that converts best — and more importantly — makes me more money.

Now go right now and generate your OWN shortlist of between 10-20 products.

But Wait! There's More…

It's pretty common for people to struggle figuring out what to promote. This is classic "analysis paralysis." You have to get past it.

Use the general guidelines above — or consider these extra tidbits as well:

It's always good to promote something that that has a built in market. Think about what people are trying to find, trying to cure, want, need, etc.

Those are good markets and niches.

Weight loss, acne, anxiety and depression, saving on a car, getting a mortgage will always be great topics because people stress out about them and are always looking for advice — if not an actual "cure".

Another variation of the "desperate buyer" is the rabid fan.

Look for products that speak to hobbyists that can't get enough — golf, iTunes, online games, etc. These people buy all kinds of products to support their hobby habit.

Finally — you could use any of this advice and then look at products that don't have a lot of existing affiliates promoting it. The gravity may be lower than you like — but the competition could be easier.

I personally love competition!

In my mind here are the essential elements that a market needs to have:

Volume/Demand — Are there a lot of people looking for "solutions" to their need/want … ideally a desperate problem.
Profitability — Are these people "spending money" (buying) in this market?
Competitiveness — Is this market competitive? (Are there lots of competitors advertising in this market?)

Profitability & competitiveness are tightly linked. Meaning that — competitive markets will almost always be profitable.

How Do You Figure Out How Many Affiliates Are Promoting a Product?

Look. Every ClickBank product link has a common format:

http://xxxxx.yyyyy.clickbank.net/

xxxxx: Your ClickBank ID
yyyyy: The Merchant/Seller ID

You can get this link by going to the ClickBank Marketplace and then click "create hoplink" under the product. A new window opens up, which asks you for YOUR ClickBank NickName. Enter that, then click on "Submit".

The Merchant/Seller ID (yyyyy) will be the part just before ".hop.clickbank.net"

For example in this hoplink…

http://xxxxxx.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net

"xxxxxx" = the affiliate's ClickBank NickName
"bryxen4" = the Merchant/Seller ID

… you can go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN and search for bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net

At the time of writing this I get 2210 results returned.

Continue to ClickBank Product Selection…

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