So I just stopped over at the Warrior Forum and noticed about a gazillion threads talking about clickbank’s affiliate tracking system not working. I checked my own links, and for a couple of products I have been promoting (I have tons of niche sites that promote products on clickbank), the affiliate ID isn’t being passed through.
When people started talking about how clickbank was having tracking problems and sales were declining, I just ignored it — but now I have no doubts that something fishy is going on. Clickbank has always been a great company to deal with for me so I really hope they can sort this out.
If you promote clickbank products as an affiliate, check your affiliate links now.
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What’s More Important - A Quality Product Or Marketing?
Posted by Louis under Uncategorized 8 commentsI was playing this cool Fantastic Contraption game last night with my brother, who said something like “I wish I had the idea to make a game like this - these guys must be making a fortune”. It got me wondering whether having a unique idea and useful product was enough by itself to become successful, without knowing much about marketing. Unfortunately, however, my experience is that you can make ANYTHING sell with the right marketing - whereas having a great product doesn’t guarantee success.
In fact, I regularly come across great products — in huge markets with plenty of demand, I should add — that don’t sell, simply because the product owner doesn’t know how to market their product effectively. I think of brilliant products I use everyday like PromoSoft that are mostly unknown. On the other side of the coin, there are totally useless products that sell into the thousands everyday, because (you guessed it) the product owner knows how to market effectively.
I’m regularly involved with promoting products off ClickBank as an affiliate, and one thing I have definitely noticed is that the top gravity products that sell really well aren’t actually that good. Most of them are hyped-up “get rich quick” scheme’s that get promoted by thousands of affiliates just because they offer a generous 75% commission. And when you do a Google search for reviews of a product on clickbank, you’ll find all of them are simply disguised affiliate marketing “reviews” that just want you to buy it so they’ll get a commission from it.
There was a thread on the Warrior Forum about this a while back (I’ll try to dig it up) where the forum admin (who I am sure makes at least $1 million per year) went on about how providing value isn’t the most important thing to make money - it’s your system. Without a proper system for generating traffic, promoting the right things and converting your visitors, you don’t make money. There are marketers who have a system nailed down for generating huge profits each day. But the quality of products they sell simply don’t have much to do with how much they money they make.
I believe that you definitely SHOULD provide 100x the value someone ever pays for your product. Always try to underpromise and overdeliver to people, regardless of what you are selling. Your profits may not dramatically increase, but you will have a reputable business that genuinely helps people, and that’s becoming something of a rarity with online businesses today.
Anyways, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue - Does having a great product guarantee success? Or is your marketing strategy more important? I know a lot of people will disagree with the above. Let me know what you think.
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How To Get Affiliates To Sell Your Product
Posted by Louis under Affiliate Marketing, General Business, Make Money Online 6 commentsMost successful internet marketers agree that having your own product and affiliates is the #1 way to make a large income. In fact, if you look at the top players in the internet marketing field you will find that most of their sales when they launch a new product come from their JV partners and affiliates. So how do you actually go about recruiting affiliates?
First, if you have a digital product like an ebook, software or membership site, I recommend you set it up through Clickbank and let them handle your affiliate program. This gives you exposure to over 100,000 affiliates signed up at clickbank, and it’s just easier. Your affiliates won’t have to sign up and they’ll promote you because they KNOW they’ll get paid. You can of course set up your affiliate program with your own in house script like JV manager if you want, it’s totally up to you. I personally only use clickbank to sell products.
Anyways, once you have an affiliate program set up, here’s what you can do to get affiliates to sell your product. I’ve tried each of these myself, and they should work fine in any market.
Getting The Ball Rolling For Affiliates To Promote Your Product - Use Forums:
The first thing I do to pick up affiliates is go to forums. Specifically, you can use the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums. These are two very popular webmaster forums, with hundreds of thousands of members.
Digital Point has a separate affiliate forum where you can post a new thread advertising your affiliate program. If you sell a product through clickbank, for example, just go to their clickbank subforum and post a thread about your product and its affiliate program. This is GREAT free advertising. It only takes about ten minutes, and you’ll typically get hundreds of views. Just go through what commission you offer, your products price, and everything affiliates need to know. If you are an active member of digital point with lots of posts, you’ll get plenty of people promoting your product.
With the warrior forum, what you can do is post a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) for $20. This is WELL worth it for the price. As the name implies, this has to offer something “special” for members of the warrior forum. What you can do is make a WSO asking members to promote your product, and offer one-on-one support, as well as a free website to promote your product and other promotional material.
In addition to posting a thread on both digitalpoint and the warrior forum, you can advertise your affiliate program in your signature on these forums. This will come up at the bottom of every post you make.
After You Have Posted On Forums About Your Affiliate Program:
You want to pick up affiliates from:
- people already promoting products similar to yours as affiliates;
- product vendors that are selling a product similar to yours;
- your customers
To find affiliates that are promoting products similar to yours, I use Affiliate Elite (my affiliate link), which is a really neat piece of software that can give you a list of every website promoting a product. You can then get the WHOIS information for each site, and contact the owner asking them to promote your product too. You can find bloggers, website owners, and other marketers that already promote a product competing with yours - then just send a friendly JV request. Make sure you have a strong argument for why they should promote your product over your competitions.
You will also want to do JV’s and partnerships with product vendors selling a product similar to yours. I have to give Mike Filsaime credit for this one. Let’s say you have a generic weight loss product, and you find someone selling a product on how to build abs. These 2 products aren’t directly competing but they appeal to the same kind of person. So, you can make a deal with the person selling the product on building abs where they promote your weight loss product to their customers, and you promote their abs product to your customers. It’s beneficial for both sides.
In terms of recruiting affiliates from your actual customers, this is obviously much easier if you are selling an internet marketing or B2B product. I haven’t personally sold a make money product before so it’s harder, but you can still tell your customers that they can refer their friends to your product and make commissions. You’ll naturally get much more word of mouth exposure and customers becoming affiliates if you have a great product that actually works.
How To Make It Enticing For Affiliates To Promote You:
The main things affiliates look for in a product to promote is:
- The strength of your sales copy, and how well your website converts visitors into buyers;
- The commission % they get for each sale they send;
- The price your product is sold at;
- The quality of the product itself
Therefore, you want to invest in writing a compelling salesletter that converts, offer your product at a high price point, give affiliates high commission (you can give affiliates up to 75% in clickbank, which is what I recommend) and create a good quality product. To justify a higher price you will want to include additional bonuses and everything else that makes your product a good deal for the buyer.
Of course this post is just scratching the surface of some of the things you can do to build a successful affiliate program. I’ll touch on some more things later.
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