Clickbank

I signed up for clickbank in the first half of this year and to date have earned (and received) around $488. At the moment I’m running a bit of a loss, but over the last month I have one product that has returned $114 for about $45 worth of ad buys. Most of my loss was incurred in the learning stage February-April. I put things on hiatus for a bit and resumed in October. There’s your lesson for using clickbank and adwords. There is a learning curve and it can be expensive. Yes, it can be worth it, but for some categories in particular it can be more expensive to test and fine tune things. When I resumed in October I did so with a clear idea of how I was going to cut the losing clicks out and run as tight a campaign as possible. Which was really the OPPOSITE of the idea I had gone in with.

First off though…

What is Clickbank

Clickbank is a huge online marketplace where information or data products are sold. The advantage for buyers is a consistent payment system and a pretty incredible variety of products. Publishers can sell their data or digital products fairly easily, track conversions easily and even get other people to promote their product for them which is really leveraging the power of network marketing.

For affiliates, clickbank gives good conversion reporting, a great variety of good digital products to choose from and promote and fairly frequent and quick payouts with a low payment threshold.

So, how do I sell clickbank products?

There are really two approaches. The first is not for the faint of heart or those that don’t have any money to budget towards getting things going.

This first method is to use Adwords and basically buy clicks to visit a squeeze page (of your own or directly to the products squeeze page.) I squeeze page is considered a pre-sell page. You don’t dump people straight at the order form!

If you’re clever in your ad design and your keyword targeting (and the initial product selection and market research), then you can make a good deal of money this way.

However, expect to spend a fair amount of money fine tuning things. My current ~$488+ in Clickbank earnings essentially matches the costs that I’ve put towards Adwords. In other words, I just moved about $500 around.

Now, if I had a larger budget to test and work with I think I could really make this kind of “system” work well and plan to return to this idea at some point in the not too distant future.

The real secret to this equation is to track the clicks, tie them to keywords. Also realize that your goal is not to have a bazillion clicks on your ad. Your goal is to get quality clicks on your ad.

Second Method…

Bum Marketing

I could look up who coined that phrase, but I’ll save that for another day. The idea is that you look for free ways to get the word out about the product you’re promoting. How, pray tell? Well, for instance you could start a free blog and among other things you can promote your product (*remember that most free blog sites will ban you if you exclusively use it to promote a product.)

You could also use article marketing at places like squidoo, hubpages, qassia and others. In other words you try to leverage all the great free traffic out there to get you some referrals. This is the approach I would recommend for those that have no money to waste and want to test the waters. You’ll need to learn a few basics about optimizing a page for the search engines and you’ll also want to invest a bit of time into market research to find the right product and the right approach to promoting it.

No, these are not the only ways of promoting clickbank products there are a few other good approaches, but that’s all I’ve had time to detail so far.

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