With motivation, know-how and plenty of drive, you have the opportunity to make a good living on the ClickBank marketplace as an affiliate marketer. In order to succeed on ClickBank, you need to be able to judge ClickBank merchants properly. There are tons of ClickBank merchants selling products in pretty much any niche you can think of. If you want to learn how to judge ClickBank merchants like the experts, it’s advised that you pay attention and take plenty of notes.
Search for Products First
Most marketers search ClickBank for products, not necessarily the ClickBank merchants selling those products. So your initial search for merchants may begin at the product search stage. The thinking is that the best merchants offer the best products. Therefore, if you can uncover the very best offers that ClickBank has to offer, you will by default find the very best ClickBank merchants.
To begin, conduct a search for a product within your niche by using the ClickBank search feature. For instance, if you are looking for carpet cleaning products or systems, you might choose ‘Carpet Cleaner’ or ‘Carpet Cleaning’ as your keyword.
Of course you can also use the advanced search feature, which is recommended if you want to find the hot sellers in your niche. Next to the Find Products box on the ClickBank Promote Products page, you will notice an Advanced Search link. Click that now.
You will notice that here you can search for ClickBank products by keyword, gravity (which essentially represents the affiliate marketers you will be competing with when promoting that product), initial sale, average sale, average rebill total (recurring income for you), Average % of sale, average $ of rebill and more.
For our example, we are going to use the keyword ‘Carpet Cleaner’ and no other checks. This gives us 48 possible results, ten of which land on the first page.
Product Listings
Right away you will be able to judge ClickBank merchants by the products you find in the search results and the products’ sales stats and records. The item most affiliate marketers notice first in these product listings is the average sale price. If the sale price reads N/A, that could indicate that the product is new or that the product hasn’t sold much.
If you are happy with the average sale price, move on to the stats under the product name and description. We’re not going to worry about the names and descriptions just yet. If the items are selling, the ClickBank merchant must be doing something right. Our job right now is to find those high to moderate performers that can help us expand our affiliate marketing portfolio.
ClickBank Stats
The first stat you notice under the description is the Initial sale total. When you promote that product, in this case ‘How to Start a Cleaning Business in 24 Hours’ – the first product that showed up for the carpet cleaner query – and you make a sale, you will earn $8.29. So if I do nothing else but promote this product, I will make $8.29 right off the bat. This is the number you notice in green right above the Promote button that we just noticed.
Next, we have the average % of sale. This is the average percent that you will be paid from the product’s full price. In this case, the average % of sale is 50%, so I know that I am earning half of every sale that I make as a result of the ClickBank merchant promotion.
The Gravity, as we discussed previously, is your competition. The number represents the number of products that were sold in the last pay period. ClickBank affiliates get paid every two weeks by ClickBank. So when this number is moderate to high, you know that this particular product has been a hot seller as of late and that’s a very good thing.
When judging ClickBank merchants, you always want to pay attention to the gravity of their products. If the gravity is a high number, you know that you have a lot of competition to contend with. If the number is low, you don’t have as much. And if the number is 0.00, you know that no products were sold this last period. You can see how this stat could help you judge ClickBank merchant offers by letting you know what’s hot and what’s not.
Some products have rebill stats, $1 trial offers and more. You will have to dig a little deeper to find these statistics when you are attempting to judge ClickBank merchants.
Digging In to Learn More About Potential ClickBank Merchants
If you are satisfied with the stats you see and you think that the product in question is a good one to promote, you will next want to click on the product title to look at the sales page.
What are you looking for when you click on the sales page? Well, for one, you must decide if you yourself would buy the product in question. Look at the headline. Does it speak to you? Does it speak to your audience? Read the copy. Is it effective, emotionally charging and full of benefits? Are there bonuses and upsells, which will allow you to make even more money with your ClickBank affiliate marketing efforts?
You may have to go through quite a few products in your niche before you find an offer you would like to promote. Your job of judging merchants isn’t over, however? Now you have to decide if the ClickBank merchant you have chosen to promote is helpful or not.
ClickBank Merchant Assistance
The best ClickBank merchants provide help to their affiliate marketers in the form of articles, autoresponders, banner ads, press releases, e-reports and much more. The more help the merchant provides, the more successful the marketers will be and the more products will be sold. This equals big money for all involved and that is why you should always look for merchant assistance when promoting a product on ClickBank.
Sometimes you can find the ‘Affiliates’ link at the bottom of the sales page and in some cases it is listed right in the ClickBank search results.
If you can be lucky enough to find a product with great selling stats and a ClickBank merchant that provides plenty of assistance, you will go far on ClickBank. Do this over and over again with multiple products and you’ll create several income streams that keep earning month after month.
