Back in September 2006, I knew little or nothing about affiliate marketing of Clickbank products. Sure, I'd bought some products from Clickbank, but even though I've been making a fulltime living online for the last 3 years, I only ever saw Clickbank as a place to buy digital products, not as a potential revenue stream. Funny how you can miss the obvious, isn't it?
Anyway, that all changed when Affiliate Project X was launched in early October. This isn't my review of Affiliate Project X (if you want to read it, follow the link in my bio below), but Affiliate Project X did open my eyes to different marketing methods and to the revenue potential that Clickbank offered.
One piece of advice given by Affiliate Project X is to create a bonus that's relevant to the product you're promoting. Yes, it's a bit of work. But it makes your particular offer unique. And if the bonuses you offer are good, that means more sales.
So off I went, looking for good products to market and then to build bonuses around. If you've ever tried to identify quality Clickbank products, you'll know how time consuming it is.
It was after a few weeks of trawling through Clickbank that the idea for a bonus, for products that promote Clickbank itself one way or another, came to mind.
This bonus would make it easier for people to find hot products to promote, saving them time and money (time is money after all!) I thought it would be a good bonus to give away with Affiliate Project X, to anyone who bought through my link.
Finally, the bonus was ready but I wanted some independent assessments of it before I made it public, so I contact some marketers whose opinions I trust.
They all said: "Don't give it away..." Huh?
"Sell it!"
So Clickbank Elite was born.
Selling Clickbank Elite was a whole different proposition. I picked up a copy of Dominating Clickbank which provides great advice on how to go about selling products on Clickbank and motivating affiliates to sell on your behalf.
Armed with that knowledge, I launched Clickbank Elite in late November. It's proved popular with Clickbank affiliates and the number of sales is actually increasing. It's great knowing I've created something that useful to people.
Just this month I added a whole new module to the software that allows owners to promote popular Clickbank products through what I've called "CB Ads".
These are Adsense-style ad blocks that promote the most popular Clickbank products. There are 9 sizes of ad to choose from. The colors of the ad border, background, links, text and display URL can be changed, as can level of popularity for the products displayed in the ads. Not only that, but products can be filtered by keyword and/or Clickbank category.
One thing I'd become aware of when I was researching Clickbank was commission theft, so I've made sure that all affiliate links in the ads are cloaked.
Clickbank Elite also sells itself through the "Ads by Clickbank Elite" cloaked link beneath each ad block.
And, since CB ads are not contextually driven, you can mix them with Google Adsense ads and not worry about breaking Google's rules.
Looking back, Clickbank Elite has come a long way from its initial idea as a bonus for another product. Without the help of Affiliate Project X, Dominating Clickbank and the encouragement of fellow marketers, it would never have been created.
It's funny how your start down one road and end up going down another. I'd encourage you, if you have an idea for a product or bonus to give it time and go and develop it. I hope my example and experience shows you what's possible with a little imagination, time and effort.
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Friday, 28 October 2011
ClickBank, the AdSense Killer?
Much has been written about the demise of Google's AdSense of late, but the advertising behemoth still seems to go from strength to strength, despite competition from Yahoo! and Microsoft and despite many webmasters' dissatisfaction at how Google run their program and their labyrinthine Terms of Service (ToS) conditions. Yet, there are rumblings on the net about various 'AdSense Killers'. Is Google's behemoth about to be toppled from its dominant position, and who's waiting in the wings, seeking the title of Giant Killer?
Many have pointed towards ClickBank as a possible 'Adsense Killer', but are they correct in this appraisal? On the face of it, probably not... AdSense and ClickBank work very differently. AdSense is very much a marketing tool. It is a way of displaying advertisements on your website that are matched to your website's content by Google itself. As such it's a powerful tool in that you get the ads in return for some of the real estate of your web pages. Each time someone clicks on an ad that you display money is credited into your AdSense account. Adsense is therefore a PPC (pay per click) system.
ClickBank works more like a brokerage house. Their aim is to put the vendors of electronic products in touch with affiliates who will promote those products. They handle the relationship and manage the sales. This is the major problem of ClickBank in that it's geared towards managing the affiliate-vendor relationship. It's not geared towards the selling of products. If you wish to promote a product supported by ClickBank then you have to go to the vendor's website and either use their affiliate tools (if they have them) or you have to create sales pages and sales blurb based on the information you can find about the product.
You can then either create a sales page or you can create ads that resemble those delivered by AdSense for your own site. This is laborious, but can be done. But once you have those ads, things are still different. As an affiliate (though you are selling the vendor's product you are actually, in effect, an affiliate of ClickBank) it doesn't matter how many people click on your ad... you only make money when a product is sold. Admittedly, you could be making $40 or more on a single sale whilst you may only be making pennies from an AdSense click. So, if you have enough traffic ClickBank-based ads could be very lucrative. But you still have to create those ads yourself.
This is where a number of third parties come in. They take the ClickBank product feed, dump it into a database and create AdSense-like contextual ads based around the ClickBank product database. But there's one major problem to this approach, in that many of the product descriptions and titles in the datafeed that ClickBank make available to all are designed to attract affiliates and not to directly sell the products themselves. In effect, the majority of the descriptions provided tell you how good the product is for an affiliate marketer to promote, rather than how good it is for someone to buy (and why they should buy it).
These sites have tried to address the various issues surrounding ClickBank's products feeds. One of these is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace, which is unique in that each product is checked and the product descriptions and product titles are annotated by hand. Each product is also backed by an image either of the product itself or of the sales website. These are all loaded into a database which is searchable. Other systems either use the ClickBank datafeeds or take screen scrapes from Affiliate pages to populate their product description databases. Whatever the methodology employed, extended descriptions make these systems more versatile for any affiliate looking for ClickBank products to promote than ClickBank's own search system as they are sales rather than affiliate centred.
.
But the real advantage of these sites is that many of them provide tools so that you can create your own AdSense-like contextual ads based on selecting a subset of ClickBank products, or on using searches within the sites' databases to pick-out a range of products. For the main, simple tools allow ad blocks to be built (just like you do for AdSense). Typically, these can be configured in terms of appearance, like AdSense ads and the content can be specified in terms of the section of ClickBank you wish them to appear from or based on any keywords you specify. Thus you can make the ads as specific to your site or web page as you need. Most of the better ad providers serve their ad blocks dynamically so that the ads seen change on every refresh. Each time ClickBank updates its product feed the database and therefore your ads are also updated.
The newest feature for these providers of ClickBank-based ads is the development of image-based ads. These are AdSense-like contextual ads but they give the product/website image as well as titles and text. As research has shown that image-based ads can be more effective than plain ads this could be a real boon for your website.
The only problem with serving AdSense-like ads is that these are contextual ads an thus you cannot display these alongside Google ads, as this breaks Google's terms of service. There is, however, a way around this problem. A number of sites providing ClickBank-based ads also allow you to generate an RSS feed of ads. These can be incorporated into your website or even your blog. But as this is 'news aggregation' and not a contextual ad you can mix these RSS feeds with Google ad units with no penalty.
Many of the sites will also allow you to copy a search box for your website that uses their databases and descriptions to allow your visitors to search the ClickBank products list for any product or service that they need or want. This can be a very powerful and simple way of adding a new revenue stream to your website, again without breaking Google's TOS.
The most reputable of these sites offering ad units will allow you to embed your own ClickBank nickname (affiliate ID) in the various products and services so that any sales are credited to your own ClickBank account. Typically they randomly assign their own ClickBank ID to between 15 and 20% of the products displayed so that you get 80% of sales and they get 20% of sales, which is how they earn their income.
So, is ClickBank the AdSense killer? Not yet, perhaps... But with websites such as Celtnet and others working on offering AdSense alternatives pre-loaded with ClickBank products, real alternatives to AdSense are emerging (and these products don't have restrictive ToSes and don't dictate how many ad units you can use). Indeed, a recent small-scale comparison of AdSense and ClickBank contextual ads run by the Celtnet website revealed that the ClickBank ads out-performed AdSense ads by a factor of 2:1 in terms of income generation. More choice and competition is always a good thing and used well and wisely ClickBank-based ads can be a very useful additional source of income for your website.
Many have pointed towards ClickBank as a possible 'Adsense Killer', but are they correct in this appraisal? On the face of it, probably not... AdSense and ClickBank work very differently. AdSense is very much a marketing tool. It is a way of displaying advertisements on your website that are matched to your website's content by Google itself. As such it's a powerful tool in that you get the ads in return for some of the real estate of your web pages. Each time someone clicks on an ad that you display money is credited into your AdSense account. Adsense is therefore a PPC (pay per click) system.
ClickBank works more like a brokerage house. Their aim is to put the vendors of electronic products in touch with affiliates who will promote those products. They handle the relationship and manage the sales. This is the major problem of ClickBank in that it's geared towards managing the affiliate-vendor relationship. It's not geared towards the selling of products. If you wish to promote a product supported by ClickBank then you have to go to the vendor's website and either use their affiliate tools (if they have them) or you have to create sales pages and sales blurb based on the information you can find about the product.
You can then either create a sales page or you can create ads that resemble those delivered by AdSense for your own site. This is laborious, but can be done. But once you have those ads, things are still different. As an affiliate (though you are selling the vendor's product you are actually, in effect, an affiliate of ClickBank) it doesn't matter how many people click on your ad... you only make money when a product is sold. Admittedly, you could be making $40 or more on a single sale whilst you may only be making pennies from an AdSense click. So, if you have enough traffic ClickBank-based ads could be very lucrative. But you still have to create those ads yourself.
This is where a number of third parties come in. They take the ClickBank product feed, dump it into a database and create AdSense-like contextual ads based around the ClickBank product database. But there's one major problem to this approach, in that many of the product descriptions and titles in the datafeed that ClickBank make available to all are designed to attract affiliates and not to directly sell the products themselves. In effect, the majority of the descriptions provided tell you how good the product is for an affiliate marketer to promote, rather than how good it is for someone to buy (and why they should buy it).
These sites have tried to address the various issues surrounding ClickBank's products feeds. One of these is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace, which is unique in that each product is checked and the product descriptions and product titles are annotated by hand. Each product is also backed by an image either of the product itself or of the sales website. These are all loaded into a database which is searchable. Other systems either use the ClickBank datafeeds or take screen scrapes from Affiliate pages to populate their product description databases. Whatever the methodology employed, extended descriptions make these systems more versatile for any affiliate looking for ClickBank products to promote than ClickBank's own search system as they are sales rather than affiliate centred.
.
But the real advantage of these sites is that many of them provide tools so that you can create your own AdSense-like contextual ads based on selecting a subset of ClickBank products, or on using searches within the sites' databases to pick-out a range of products. For the main, simple tools allow ad blocks to be built (just like you do for AdSense). Typically, these can be configured in terms of appearance, like AdSense ads and the content can be specified in terms of the section of ClickBank you wish them to appear from or based on any keywords you specify. Thus you can make the ads as specific to your site or web page as you need. Most of the better ad providers serve their ad blocks dynamically so that the ads seen change on every refresh. Each time ClickBank updates its product feed the database and therefore your ads are also updated.
The newest feature for these providers of ClickBank-based ads is the development of image-based ads. These are AdSense-like contextual ads but they give the product/website image as well as titles and text. As research has shown that image-based ads can be more effective than plain ads this could be a real boon for your website.
The only problem with serving AdSense-like ads is that these are contextual ads an thus you cannot display these alongside Google ads, as this breaks Google's terms of service. There is, however, a way around this problem. A number of sites providing ClickBank-based ads also allow you to generate an RSS feed of ads. These can be incorporated into your website or even your blog. But as this is 'news aggregation' and not a contextual ad you can mix these RSS feeds with Google ad units with no penalty.
Many of the sites will also allow you to copy a search box for your website that uses their databases and descriptions to allow your visitors to search the ClickBank products list for any product or service that they need or want. This can be a very powerful and simple way of adding a new revenue stream to your website, again without breaking Google's TOS.
The most reputable of these sites offering ad units will allow you to embed your own ClickBank nickname (affiliate ID) in the various products and services so that any sales are credited to your own ClickBank account. Typically they randomly assign their own ClickBank ID to between 15 and 20% of the products displayed so that you get 80% of sales and they get 20% of sales, which is how they earn their income.
So, is ClickBank the AdSense killer? Not yet, perhaps... But with websites such as Celtnet and others working on offering AdSense alternatives pre-loaded with ClickBank products, real alternatives to AdSense are emerging (and these products don't have restrictive ToSes and don't dictate how many ad units you can use). Indeed, a recent small-scale comparison of AdSense and ClickBank contextual ads run by the Celtnet website revealed that the ClickBank ads out-performed AdSense ads by a factor of 2:1 in terms of income generation. More choice and competition is always a good thing and used well and wisely ClickBank-based ads can be a very useful additional source of income for your website.
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