Clickbank Archives

Affiliate ID Golden Rule

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Donald in Clickbank, CPA Leave a comment

Okay so you started your affiliate marketing adventure. Say you started with Clickbank. One of the first things you do when creating your account is selecting your affiliate ID right? Now you think, it doesn’t matter what my ID is, so I’ll just use my usual handle. WRONG! You have to remember Affiliate networks like Clickbank show your ID within the URL. What would you think if you saw a URL like this:

RogerB

Most people will immediately know it’s an affiliate link, and if they buy they’ll know ‘roberB’ will get credit for the sale. You’ll lose 25% of your sales just because of this. Believe it or not most people do not like giving credit to affiliates. Sadly I do the same thing and I know tons of other people who simply chop off the ‘hop’, reset their cookies and buy without the affiliate. Sometimes I don’t do it, but if it can benefit me it’s too easy not to.

Okay now what do you think about IDs like these:

random

short

include

These IDs are random, and some look like they even belong there. That’s what you have to do. If you’re marketing to other affiliates be prepared to lose half your sales no matter what. But if your market is dog training you’ll most likely fool most people into thinking its just part of the URL and it belongs there.

You can also cloak your links, but watch out for browsers that don’t like cloaked links. IFrame cloaking can sometimes not work in IE, and some Affiliate networks have rules about cloaking links.

That’s about it, when selecting an ID don’t use your name or usual handle, go for the random jumbled letters and numbers and you might get surprised by the increase of sales. I increased my sales by at least 25% last year by doing this.

Good luck!

Clickbank Success – My PPC Adventures! XConversions

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, How-To, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff 5 Comments

I have a love and hate relationship with Clickbank. They’re my first affiliate network I’ve worked with and to this day my most successful one. I also use CJ.com and NeverblueAds.com. But I’ve mainly focused on Clickbank this past week.

I wanted to prove a point that I can use PPC advertising to make money promoting Clickbank products. Before this week I’ve only used my content websites to promote. Which works well, but what happens if Google one day kills my content sites? What if I want to get into something but don’t have content websites to support it? I needed to Master PPC advertising. I wanted to have alternatives.

So I tried many different things to try to gain a quick buck with adwords. I tried direct linking to the merchant’s landing page, I tried 301 redirects, I tried email campaigns and I even creating my own landing page.

The only thing that worked for me was sending email campaigns to subscribers and creating my own comparison landing page; basically comparing top 3 or 5 products in a niche.

Having my own landing page was half the battle. What I needed to get good at was using adwords. There are tons of adwords guides out there, so I’m not going to repeat what most people have said already. But here is some key advice:

Use phrase, and exact matches as much as possible. Don’t use broad keywords in the beginning. You want to increase your CTR to lower your bid price.
Create small ad groups with less then 30 keywords pre group, and keep your ad variations on topic. Using keywords that highlight your ad variations in search increases your CTR, which lowers your bid price.
Use good tracking! I used software called Xconversions. It’s the best software I’ve found that turned my campaigns into winners! I had trouble at first, I was converting but I was losing a lot of money. Since Clickbank doesn’t tell you what keywords converted into a sale, I didn’t know what keywords to keep and which to dump. Xconversions basically tracks all that for you. You make a sale, and it tells you which keyword made that sale for you. So you can focuse on keywords that work, and dump the ones that don’t. Xconversions is very easy to use, database driven and it self installs! I had it installed in less then 5 minutes without downloading anything. I highly recommend it.

That’s about it.

Have good tracking, using tight ad groups, use phrase and exact keyword matches and have a kick ass landing page!

Check out my stats on my week old campaign and landing page! adwords

clickbank

I had some up and down days. Mostly because I was playing around with my landinge page. And I didn’t have good tracking until a couple days ago. Again I highly recommend XConversions tracking. It’ll change your crap compaign into a winner.

Good luck!

Is Clickbank Screwing Affiliates?

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank Leave a comment

I’ve been following this one thread at the eWealth forums for the past couple weeks. The title of the thread is, Very bad week for sales…

The thread started September 12th and to this day is very active. One of the major points is that venders are getting the same amount of sales, but affiliates on the other hand have had very low unusual sales of the late. I know I don’t do tons of sales like big Clickbank affiliates (not yet), but my sales are up and down as well. Just recently a vender spoke the differences she noticed.

I did notice something strange in my stats on Saturday. As a vendor, I sold a record number of one product – without affiliate referrals. Normally 95% of my sales for that product come from affiliates. On Saturday, the average number of sales was about the same, but 50% of them had no affiliate referral. Now that makes for a nice sales number for me – but if something is wrong with affiliate linking – then that will hurt me in the long run.

So I looked into it with my own tracking system – and noticed that several sales came from pages with an obvious affiliate link on the page – but for some reason the link didn’t show up in my tracking stats, and the affiliate did not get the sale. So I’m not sure if there is a problem w/ clickbank – or if there may be something new blocking the CB cookie.

This worries me, because not only will I loose affiliates if something is wrong, but I also sell CB products myself as an affiliate. And I’ve suspected this type of loss in my own affiliate sales in the past.

If this is true, which I have no reason to think otherwise… a lot of Clickbank affiliates, including my self are getting screwed by weak Clickbank tracking. Clickbank needs to work on this before I and other affiliates jump ship! This has been going on long enough.

Why Not Make Money Online? Get Started Today!

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, How-To, Life, Rant, Recommends, To-Do 2 Comments

Working for your self or working for someone else.

I don’t understand how people like working for someone else and never trying to better their self. Most people I know are either not doing anything at all, or just working for someone else going no where. I’ve tried to motivate friends and family members on the fine points of making money online, but for the most part it’s too much for them. The simplest of things like using an FTP program, buying a domain name or even understanding what I’ve just wrote is beyond them.

In a place where instead of making 2k a month working 40+ hours a week, a person Â can literally make as much money as they want working from the comfort of their own home and even make money while they sleep! I try to tell people they can do so much better working for their self, but itÂ seemsÂ everyoneÂ I talk to is either afraid of taking a risk or too lazy to do anything at all. Even the smart people I know, who I give step by step advice for making money online never goes through with it. (not you david)

I’m just tired of defending the worker bee!

I’ll help a person out to the point where I’ve done 90% of the work, but if they can’t do that last 10% then I’m sorry, it was never meant to be. If you’ve ever wanted to succeed with something, you have to take a risk and follow through! If you can’t follow through, you’ll never have anything in life.

If you’re having trouble getting your goals completed, the best advice I can give is to create a to-do list. Write down what your goals are, and what you need to do to reach them.Â ThenÂ take the time and work to reach your goals! Instead of watching TV all day, reading blog post like this or forums, take the time to get something done!

If making money online is your thing, then I recommend downloading The Ultimate Wealth Package.

The Ultimate Wealth Package is one of the greatest money making systems out there. Simple to use methods, great earnings potential and good tutorials to help you get started + get a free (limited-time) offer on a new website. DownloadÂ yourÂ copyÂ of The Ultimate Wealth Package today.

Blog Update – Clickbank, Kontera, Adsense, and other Crap!

Posted on September 5, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, CPA, eBay, Intresting Stuff Leave a comment

I think I have too much going on. I have two forums, 60+ websites, several of which generate my main source of income, hordes of affiliate projects, testing, maintenance, updates and more! I don’t consider my self a workaholic, but geezâ€¦ it seems the more traffic a website gets, the more it takes to maintain it. Which I guess comes with the territory. Other then working online, I workout at Golds Gym as much as possible and spend lotsÂ ofÂ time on my other hobbies, cars! I’m a Webmaster, Affiliate Marketer, Internet Marketer, and I guess a soon to be writer. (working on an eBook).

Which brings me to, what do I call my self. As a job title, I would like to say I’m an Internet Marketer. But whenever people hear that, they think I work for some crap company, tryingÂ toÂ sellÂ some crap product. At least that’s what I would think. Calling my self a webmaster seems a bit much. What am I so good at that I’m the master of?

What about Affiliate Marketer? That goes with Internet Marketer I guess. I’m finding more and more Affiliate Marketing is becoming a big chunk of my monthly income. It’s about 1/5 right nowâ€¦ which is nice! I should call my self a writer! Even though I consider my self a poor writer, I seem to write more then anything else. Internet Marketing requires being a decent copy writer.

Affiliate Marketing and other ways to create money is what I want to focus on from now on. I still love talking about SEO, and ways to build websites, but I think people want to know about making money online. I know that’s what keeps me going to my favorite blogs.

John Chow Dot Com and ShoeMoney.com

These guys have some great blogs that are updated a heck of a lot more then my blog (they make thousands off their blog a month). I wish I could focus more on my blog, as it’s producing better and better stats everyday, but until it starts producing real income, besides adsense and Kontera ($100-$200 a month), I can’t spend all my time on it and not on my real money makers. Maybe I should find a niche and stick with it! Lol. I talk about too much stuff with this blog and I can’t target any good affiliates with it. Even though this Blog is blowing up because of my eBay suspension guides and forums, I hate talking about eBay. Other then in the forums, I don’t want this blog to turn into another eBay hater. I want to talk about alternatives to eBay. And other ways people can make money. I think that’s the better route to take.

Well, another post about nothing. I seem to do that a lot! I guess its better then posting nothing at all?

What kind of value can I give off this post? Hmmm

Well, I talked about Kontera a bit.

Kontera to me is okay. It does a little better then adsense, but the lag time for the text links to be created are a bit much. Kontera doesn’t work well in forums either, it seems to do okay in blog post. So far I added it to about 5 blogs, and it’s had about 500 clicks this week, the results aren’t impressive. I’m willing to wait a few more weeks to see what happens. The good thing about Kontera ads are they don’t take up any additional ad space. And they’re highly configurable.

I’ll talk more about this in a couple weeks when I can give more details stats on it.

Oh, and Clickbank affiliate program is working great still! I almost reached my second goal of $200 a day! The most I’ve made so far has been $187 in one day. The average I’m making is $60-$130 a day; which again is nice considering this is all free traffic through a couple blogs and email marketing. I’m definitely going to keep working on this. It’s more then just making money; it’s the progress I love to see.

Well, until the next egotistical post, have a great day!

Clickbank RSS Mass Automation

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, Recommends Leave a comment

A Message from Mass-Automation – Software I use for a several of my sites. If you’re working with Clickbank but find it hard to update with the latest products as often as you want, Clickbank RSS is for you.

View the demo of the software here.

Dear Aspkin,

My latest software called CB RSS has just been released!

Check out a demo video here: Clickbank RSS

I’m excited about this because it finally brings the power of RSS to
Clickbank. Enabling you to create customized, niche RSS feeds all coded
with your unique Clickbank affiliate ID.

Who is this software for?

Anyone who wants to monetize the website traffic.

* If you run white hat websites or blogs, this software can make you
more money.
* If you create blackhat sites this software can make you more money.
* If you create auto-generated websites or blogs, this software can
make you more money.

View the Demo

What is a Landing Page? Clickbank and PPC Advertising

Posted on August 5, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, Google, How-To, Intresting Stuff, PPC Leave a comment

What is a Landing Page?

In my quest of earning $200 a day from Clickbank I’ve come to a roadblock when it comes to generating sales using pay-per-click. To this point I’ve only been making money using banner ads on my personal websites. It’s all free organic traffic, so I’m making 100% profit. The thing is I want to start making money that I can control with a flip of a switch. The problem with PPC advertising is your sales have to beat out your cost to make a profit. I understand this. I understand the proper way to get going with PPC. I just can’t seem to create a proper landing page.

I was reading this great forum post earlier today, it’s about 17 pages worth of great information on getting started with Clickbank. And in the forum this guy talks about his progress with Clickbank and PPC. This thread is an absolute gold mine!

Here are a few highlighted text I found in the forum! There is a lot of great information here, be sure to read before the this thread to get the whole picture.

Well one problem I see time and time again is that people try to sell the product on their landing page.. you shouldnt be SELLING the product… thats what the vendors pitch page is for..your landing page should presell… give an introduction to the product.. let other know how the product helped you etc.. then have a link to the vendors page…Â a customer doesnt want to read your landing page.. then have to read through the same stuff on the vendors page.. it will only bore them…
As someone who’s been in all facets of sales before, the hardest part isn’t getting them to agree on the PRODUCT. It’s getting them to agree to the CONCEPT.Â Timeshare for example, is neat in concept, but has a terrible stigma (in most cases rightfully so). The hardest part selling them was gettign the people to realize it could HELP – at that point it was just a matter of which product they wanted.
I see these pages selling one product, several pages, lots of pictures and big red text, and being savvy, it’s off-putting.Â But when I see several products it’s like my defense is lowered because I’m not guarding against one big scam, but instead 4-5 products which each may be scams, but are arranged in a format that doesn’t make me immediately think so.
An old sales trainer told me to sell the way a predator attacks a horse. Run straight at them and they’ll freak. Wind side to side moving closer each time and they’ll let you get up to their face before running because the slow, steady movements are disarming. Not sure if it’s true, but it was a hell of an analogy..Â I think it goes along with the idea that you can’t throw a product in the customer’s face and force them to buy and expect good results. You start off slow – arouse some curiosity, develop some intrigue, provoke some thought.
Then, you further keep their interest by hitting some of their emotional “hot-buttons” – connect with them, bond with them, show them you’re one of them.Â Then, making the offer as someone who identifies with them, you offer to give them more information about the product [link to merchant sell page] (instead of shoving it in their face) as something you, as someone similar to them, would honestly recommend to help them out.Â Thereby, instead of going after them straight away, you “tack” back and forth several times to get the sale.