Clickbank Tutorial for Affiliate Marketers

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A Clickbank Tutorial for Easy Internet Marketing

Are you interested in making some extra money? Do you want to cash in on the Internet money machine but don't have a product to sell? The Clickbank affiliate program may be just what you're looking for.

The Internet can be a great place to make money. There are many examples of 19-20 year-olds earning hundreds or even thousands of dollars a day. However, for those just starting out, Internet marketing can be overwhelming. Many get frustrated to the point of giving up before even getting started because they don't know where to begin. If you're feeling overwhelmed or are looking for a place to start, this tutorial will help.

Clickbank is often the first stop on a new Internet marketer's road to riches, and rightly so. Clickback allows affiliate marketers to sell their products in return for a commission. Depending on the product, these commissions can be substantial -- up to 75% in some cases! If you're just starting out and are looking for a product to market, they are a great starting point. As I write this tutorial, Clickbank has 21,635 products to choose from! In addition, if you're trying to market your own product, Clickbank can be the sales channel you're looking for.

So how do you hit the ground running and make serious money with them? That's where this Clickbank Tutorial comes in. I will show you how to get started in Clickbank, how to choose a Clickbank product, and how to make your first Clickbank sale. I'll also throw in some reviews of some of the many products available that make Clickbank affiliate marketing easier and more profitable -- which ones work and which ones to avoid!

Enjoy the tutorial, and let me know if I can be of help along the way.

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Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Get Started with Clickbank

Chapter 1

So you've decided that you're ready to make money from home on the Internet but you don't know where to start. You can definitely make money with Clickbank, and as a Clickbank affiliate, the road to riches may be closer than you think. You can get started with little or no money and build your Internet business with the profits you earn. That's the real reason this business is so exciting and rewarding -- the ability to to turn free or low-cost advertising into a steady income.

Before we move into the fun part, you have to set up an account on Clickbank. It's easy and painless: just go to www.Clickbank.com and click the Sign Up link at the top of the page. You'll need to enter your name and address (for checks!) and contact information including your email address and phone number. You can use your primary email address; Clickbank won't send you a bunch of spam. You'll also need to choose an account nickname. This will appear in all of your links to their products, so choose accordingly. You're better off if you use something that sounds somewhat professional, such as "saleslink", and not something silly like "hotmomma". Just think about which you'd rather see in a merchant link. When you're finished, click Submit and you'll have your Clickbank affiliate account.

Once you set up the account, you'll want to sign in and go to the Account Settings tab and set up your tax id and payment threshold. When you're starting out you can set this to $10 or $25, but once the sales start rolling in, you should bump it up to a higher number. You can set it as high as $100,000 so they won't send you a check until you have $100,000 in sales. Yes, there are affiliates making enough that they need that high of a limit!

Ready to Skip Ahead?

The tutorial continues below.

Here are some sites where you can learn some advanced Clickbank affiliate marketing techniques or find tools to make it much easier and profitable. Feel free to check them out now if you'd like. I use some of these daily.

Wealthy Affiliate University: I'm giving away one of my secrets here, so don't abuse it. Wealthy Affiliate University provides a wealth of tools and assistance for Internet marketing. They even offer free web hosting with your membership. I'm a member at Wealthy Affiliate and I wouldn't have experienced the same amount of success without the support of Kyle & Carson, the resources they provide, or the assistance that many of the fellow members at Wealthy Affiliate have given me. My forum ID is Kent if you decide to sign up and want to say hello.
Hostgator: Ok, this site won't help you learn about Clickbank, but I really love a web host that offers web space for unlimited domains for $10 per month. If you're just starting out and need a web host, look no further than Hostgator.
Clickbank Success Report: Justin's report shows how to avoid the mistakes many beginning affiliate marketers make and even how to profit from others mistakes. His code tutorials and examples really help take your marketing efforts to the next level. It costs $97, so you may want to get your feet wet first, but when you're ready, this report will really launch your sales.
Who Loves Money -- Zero Investment Marketing Techniques Exposed: Hands down, this is the number one course on Internet marketing available. Kyle and Carson of Wealthy Affiliate take you into their daily journal as they create a $2000 per day money machine. Their Slow Roller technique is marketing gold! If you're willing to commit to do a little work, you can make life-changing money with this course.

Insider View

Here's a video I put together that's a sneak peek into Wealthy Affiliate; you can see what all they have to offer. I've been a member for months now and considering what I've learned on the site, I don't plan on leaving.

Inside Wealthy Affiliate - A Wealthy Affiliate Review

http://FlashRiches.com Have you thought about signing up for Wealthy Affiliate? Get a peek inside and see how others just like you are learning to make hundreds a day with Internet marketing and Wealthy Affiliate with my review. http://FlashRiches.com

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Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Find a Marketing Niche

Chapter 2

Once your account is created, you'll need to choose a good Clickbank product to promote. Here are four simple ideas that will help you find your niche to get started:

Your Interests and Hobbies

This should be where you start looking for ideas. Do you like to golf? Are you getting married in the next year or are you recently married? Do you play poker? Do you like to scrapbook? No matter what your hobby is or where your interests lie, there are Clickbank products in it. Since you already understand the niche, you're ready to start marketing what you know will sell.

TV and Magazines

What's hot on TV and in magazines right now? Are you seeing lots of ads for weight loss programs? How about hair-loss products? Or those for "male enhancement?" You may not find the exact products in Clickbank, but you will find a product that fills the underlying need -- like "How do I stop my hair loss?"

Online Forums

These can be a great place to mine for marketing ideas. As a matter of fact, this is a secret so powerful that you usually have to pay for it! You're probably already a member of one or two forums in your hobbies or other areas that interest you. What types of things are people asking about in these forums? If you see many people asking for help on the same or similar topic, there's a need that you can fill. For example, one of the common themes in one of the online wedding forums is "How can I lose 10 pounds before my wedding day?" This would be a powerful targeted niche for your marketing efforts.

Current Events

Are there any current events in the news that you could use for the basis of your marketing? This is a strategy that isn't used very often but that can get you traffic with little or no competition. For example, during the recent World Cup soccer tournament, soccer-related Google searches hit an all-time high. This would have been a perfect opportunity to promote a soccer-related e-book.

Hot Trends Make Great Niches!

Visit NicheTrends.net to download a free guide on the hottest trends and markets for 2008 and marketing strategies to make the most of them.

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Choose a Clickbank Product

Chapter 3

Now that you've decided on a niche, you can find a Clickbank product that your customers are looking for. With more than 25,000 products how can you narrow it down to one or two that meet your needs and, more importantly, will make you money? luckily Clickbank provides some tools to help and there are other other tools available elsewhere for a small fee.

To get to Clickbank's search tool, log on to your Clickbank account and choose the Marketplace link at the top of the page. From here you can either browse through the categories in the list at the bottom of the page or search for keywords in the Search the ClickBank Marketplace section at the top of the page. One thing to keep in mind is that the default search order is by link popularity.

When you do a search you'll see some rankings for each of the products. Here is what these rankings mean:

$/sale

This is the average amount earned by each affiliate per sale. This amount takes into account refunds and taxes.

%/sale

This is the percentage of the cost of the item that is paid to an affiliate as commission for a sale.

%refd

The percentage of a publisher's sales that come from affiliates.

grav

This is a weighted count of affiliates who have actually made sales of the product.

Ideally, you would choose a high-gravity item where over 65% of the sales come from affiliates. This means that the item is selling well and you won't have to compete too much with the publishers own marketing efforts. The $/sale number is also important since that's how you get paid!

One additional number that I find important is the refund rate for the item. This isn't listed directly on the Clickbank site, but you can calculate it using the item cost, the %/sale number, and the $/sale figure. If you don't want to do the math, there are tools available online to do it for you.

The search utility in Clickbank is somewhat limited. Luckily there are are other tools available to help. I'll list a few in the link section below, I prefer the Clickbank Research Tool available on Wealthy Affiliate. It keeps me up to date on both new products and those that have gained sales over the last week. In addition, it calculates the refund percentage for me allowing me to focus on other things.

No matter how you find your products, you'll want to make sure it matches well within your niche.

Clickbank Tools

The tutorial continues below.

In addition to the search tool available on Wealthy Affiliate mentioned above, the following sites all provide tools to help you find a product to sell.

CB Elite: CB Elite is a suite of tools that help you find hot Clickbank products, avoid losing commissions when selling them, and replace your Adsense ads with high-producing Clickbank ad blocks. Combined with their free bonuses, this is a site you don't want to miss.
Track CB: Track CB provides both free and paid tools to help you find Clickbank products that are performing well. They have some pretty neat graphs to show how well a particular item has been selling over the last several weeks. You can easily find products that have been gaining in sales in popularity, but the free tools are feature limited. This is a worthwhile tool for product research.
CB Advantage: CB Advantage takes the guesswork out of picking top-performing products by filtering through the list of products and giving you Movers & Shakers every day. You can also easily find new and deleted products. Unfortunately, although their Gold membership has lots of cool features, you have to pay to get all but basic searches.

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Find Keywords for my Clickbank Product

Chapter 4

Whew! You've done some pretty heavy lifting to this point to find a niche and a product to sell, so it's downhill from here, right? Unfortunately, finding appropriate keywords to drive traffic (customers) to your product is going to take a little more work. There are some tools to help you, and even better, you carry around a pretty good one everywhere you go: your brain.

The key to finding profitable keywords is pretty simple: keywords are just search terms that users type into the search engines. Pretty crazy, huh? You want to figure out what people in your target niche are likely to search for when they are desperate for help and pulling out their wallet ready to pay for an answer. Pretty simple in theory, but it takes some practice to pull it off.

Here's an example from above. Let's say I'm a man looking for help in the "male enhancement" arena. I might type in any of the following when I'm looking for information to learn more:

male enhancement
male libido enhancement
natural male enhancement
male enhancement review, etc. (you get the idea)

I might even have a specific product in mind that I've seen on TV:

enzyte side effects
enzyte review
does enzyte work, etc.

But if you're selling an informational product from Clickbook about male enhancement, you want to align with someone who's looking for help -- serious help -- right now:

fast cure for erectile dysfunction
need help with staying power
discrete cure for impotence, etc.

There are tools available for keyword research. One of the most used is Overture. However, because it's so popular, the keywords it finds you aren't going to be very unique. Use your gray matter and tweak them into a meaningful phrase like the example above and you'll do much better.

My favorite research website, Wealthy Affiliate, also has a couple easy keyword research tools available. They let you do things like drill-down research on keywords, keyword combinations, and more. You can find their link earlier in the tutorial.

There are many more keyword tools available online (see below), but if you want the best keywords for Clickbank items, you have to do what very few Clickbank affiliates do: use your brain.

Keyword Tools

Google Rankings

Google Rankings will scan through a web site and rank the keywords on the page. You can use it to find keywords on your Clickbank product's sales page or even research your competitors keywords. It's very powerful, and best of all, free!

Keyword Elite

If you buy one keyword tool, this should be the one. If you've watched Brad's free videos and you still can't figure out how this tool can help you find juicy keywords, maybe it's time to move on...

Micro Niche Finder

Although not a traditional keyword tool, Micro Niche Finder will help you find keywords with lots of searches with little website competition. Take a look at the videos James has posted on his site to see it in used, and you'll see what I mean. I use this tool every day.

Keyword Toolkit

Keyword Toolkit sells two tools. The first is a very versatile keyword research tool. Read about the Linker, Wrapper, and Jumbler and you'll see what I mean! They also have a keyword spider that will find similar keywords to your target. These two tools (with your brain of course) are all you need. You can download a free trial of both from their website.

Top Keyword Data

The Top Keyword Data software provides a view into all of the keyword data you might need at one time. You can see cost-per-click, monthly clicks (CPC), the number of Google web pages, the number of current Adwords campaigns (your competition), and the number of Overture searches for a group of keywords all on one screen! It's a little pricey at $77, but it will really take the guesswork out of choosing the right keywords.

Keyword Explosion

huge

The return rate has gotten so high that I can't recommend this anymore. Maybe people are just copying the keywords before they return the list, but without knowing, I'm removing it from the list.

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Make Your First Clickbank Sale

Chapter 5

If you haven't done so already, you'll need to create a Google Adwords account. Once you've signed up, you'll be prompted to create a campaign. Follow the onscreen instructions and you can set your daily budget to an amount you feel comfortable with. You can always change this later, so it's ok to be conservative.

Next you get to create your first ad. The title and the ad itself should contain the main keywords from your group of keywords; this is very important because these words will be bold when the ad is shown for your keywords. Continuing with the example above, you might write the ad as follows:

Need Staying Power Help?

http://publishers.page.com

You'll probably want to spend time tweaking your ads, but you can always put up two at a time and keep the one that works the best. Make it a battle of the fittest of sorts. Make sure to use your Clickbank affiliate link for the Destination URL and the name of the publisher's website as the Display URL to follow Google's advertising guidelines.

Next you'll enter your keywords. Try to use 25 or less for each ad group, and make sure each ad group has a common theme. Continuing with the example, you might use these keywords with a common theme of "staying power" to match the example ad:

need help with staying power
how to increase staying power
fix staying power problems, etc.

Try to avoid non-specific keywords to keep your costs down.

Next you'll have to decide how much you'll pay for each click. The goal is to get a listing somewhere between position 2 and 9, so you don't want to bid too much. I usually start out at $.25 and adjust as needed. Even at that bid amount, you'll often pay $.05 or less per click if your keywords, ad, and affiliate page all have matching, relevant words.

When you save, your add will start running. You'll want to keep a close eye on it the first few days to make sure that you don't have any run-away costs. You can adjust as needed. I like to add similar keywords for those that are working as well.

Eventually, if you followed the plan, you'll log onto Clickbank and see your first affiliate sale. Once you start making some money, you can spread out into other keywords, products, or niches and repeat the process.

Clickbank Tutorial -- Wrapping it all up

Chapter 6

Making money as a Clickbank affiliate isn't difficult with a little guidance. You need to make sure to find a hungry niche, find relevant products, pick targeted keywords, and write well-aligned ads. Much of this can come from practice, and there are many free tools available to help.

Once you're ready to take it to the next level and really fan the flames on traffic and sales, you'll want to check out some of the paid resources available. I've mentioned Wealthy Affiliate University several times, but they are the best resource I've found. They have training courses from beginner to advanced and provide plenty of help and advice for new affiliate marketers. You can find better individual tools and websites for specific purposes (I've mentioned some throughout the tutorial), but this is the best all-around site.

If you want to dig deeper into Adwords and keyword marketing -- the lifeblood of a Clickbank affiliate -- you'll also want to read Beating Adwords. They'll give you advanced techniques for many of the things you've already learned and more:

How to find products
Ad optimization
Keyword conversion
Google's Quality Score (QS)
Landing pages
And too much more to list here...

I'd check them out, bookmark the page, and come back when you're ready to turbocharge your sales.

You've learned all you need to get started with Clickbank affiliate marketing. If you haven't done so already, start researching a niche so you can get started. Soon enough, you'll join those of us who are enjoying the additional income Clickbank affiliates get every day.

If you need assistance along the way, look me up on the Wealthy Affiliate forum and I'll be glad to help!

Clickbank Tools and Resources

Either vote for your favorite or add your links below.

Clickbank Tutorial for Affiliate Marketers

A Clickbank Tutorial for Easy Internet Marketing

Free Internet Wealth Guide

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Get Started with Clickbank

Chapter 1

Ready to Skip Ahead?

The tutorial continues below.

Insider View

Inside Wealthy Affiliate - A Wealthy Affiliate Review

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Find a Marketing Niche

Chapter 2

Hot Trends Make Great Niches!

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Choose a Clickbank Product

Chapter 3

Clickbank Tools

The tutorial continues below.

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Find Keywords for my Clickbank Product

Chapter 4

Keyword Tools

Clickbank Tutorial -- How to Make Your First Clickbank Sale

Chapter 5

Clickbank Tutorial -- Wrapping it all up

Chapter 6

Clickbank Tools and Resources

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