Here is a quick Clickbank tutorial for those that are not familiar with this very popular affiliate network. Also, hopefully this will help you pick a good product to promote.
1) Visit the Clickbank Marketplace at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm.
2) Enter the search criteria and keywords that you are interested in. You will want to sort by “High Gravity”.
3) Click on the “Go” button and you’ll get a list of products.
4) When viewing different products, you will want to analyze the following:
$/Sale – This is the amount that you’ll earn from each Sale. Look for a product that offers at least $20 in commission. This should be sufficient to cover your advertising costs.
% refd – This is the percent of sales that have come from affiliates. Look for a product that has %refd of 70 or above. A lesser %refd indicates that the product is not popular among affiliates and the sales are coming from merchant’s own promotions.
Gravity – This is an indicator of how many affiliates are promoting the product. This is only an indicator and not an absolute number. The higher the gravity, the more affiliates are promoting it and vice versa. Look for a product that has gravity between 20 and 100 (A gravity of more than 100 indicates that the competition is high).
Note – Gravity also depends on a niche. Some niches have lots of products but all of them have low gravity. This doesn’t mean that the products are not good. It simply means that the products in that niche is not promoted by many affiliates. You can very well select a product that has gravity of less than 20 and earn decent profits.
But our research is not over yet. We need to dig in a bit more to see if the products that we have selected are worth promoting. The next step is to analyze the performance trends for the products that we have selected. Before we do that we need the merchant id of the products that we have selected.
It is very easy to find merchant id for any product. You will see a “Create Hoplink” link below each product description. After clicking on the “Create Hoplink” button, the merchant id for the product appears in the hoplink after your clickbank ID.
Next we have to analyze the performance of individual products over a period of time. This is crucial to judge whether the products that we have selected are indeed the best ones.
To check the performance trend of a Clickbank product, head to CBTrends
http://www.cbtrends.com/clickbank-pr…ce-trends.html. Enter the Vendor ID of the selected products (one at a time) in the space provided and click on “Click to get the performance trends”.
CBTrends will give the performance trend for the product that we have selected. If the product is in Clickbank for more than 6 months, it will give the trends for 6 months. Else, it will give the trends for the period that the product has been on Clickbank.
An increase in gravity is a very good sign. You should always promote products that show an increase in gravity. Declining gravity over long period of time is never a good sign. You should not pick such a product to promote.
In some niches, you will find that the product with highest gravity is actually declining in popularity and gravity whereas a competitor product with lower gravity is gaining in popularity and gravity. In such cases pick the product that is gaining popularity as it is getting more popular and you can benefit by promoting it.
