I just wanted to spend a few minutes here talking about a great way to get started in affiliate marketing and making money on the internet.
What I wanted to talk about is Clickbank. I am sure you have heard about Clickbank and probably have promoted a few things on there as well. If you are more advanced then you might even be a Clickbank publisher and have affiliates working for you, which is a great way to go I might add. Basically Clickbank is an enormous website that handles sales of ebooks for people. For example, say you write or pay someone to write an ebook about how to dominate Google or something, you could then post it on Clickbank and then all sales of your product go through that website.
Every time someone buys your ebook and downloads it through the Clickbank website, they get a small cut of the profit. But in return, they handle all payment processing for you and sending the book to the buyer through a link or email. The really great part of it though is that they also allow anyone to promote your book for you.
I will give you another example. Say I have a great website that gets a ton of traffic about dog training. I could go to Clickbank and find an ebook about dog training and promote it on my site. Every time someone buys that book through my site I get a cut of the profit, usually anywhere from fifteen to fifty dollars. The publisher also gets a cut since it is his book, and of course Clickbank gets a small cut. Everyone wins, especially the publisher because he did no promotion of the book outside of posting it to Clickbank.
Clickbank is a great website for beginner affiliate marketers because of the very low barrier to entry, anyone can sign up and start promoting Clickbank products. All you do is sign up and then pick what book you want to try and sell/promote and they give you an affiliate link. Then anyone who buys through your affiliate link will give you a pretty nice commission.
Most beginners start out using Clickbank and promoting different ebooks with article marketing. Article marketing has gotten a little tougher since the last Google update, but there is still room for it. If you have an established website with traffic, throwing a few Clickbank links on there is a great way to make some extra money.
Of course there are a few downsides to Clickbank as well. The first one being that anyone can publish ebooks and post them on Clickbank, therefore there is a lot of crap that you will end up wasting your time promoting. You will wind up with either a terrible conversion rate or a ton of refunds. So you need to look carefully at the sales pages of the products before you decide to promote them or not.
Another great idea that works well is to just go ahead and email the author of an ebook you are considering promoting and ask them for a free review copy. Just tell them the truth, let them know you would like to be an affiliate of their product and would like to read over a copy first so you can better promote it and get better conversions. Most will say yes, unless you are in the IM niche, then it is unlikely.
Promoting Clickbank books works really well through small niche marketing websites. You would be surprised at how many people by books about dog training, fish, guitar lessons, video game guides, anything you can think of! That is why niche websites work well, there is a lot of low hanging fruit in the form of three word phrases that are searched a couple thousand times a month that you can easily rank for. Using exact match domains works awesome for this.
Promoting Clickbank product is not easy and it is a lot of work. The most frustrating thing I found with Clickbank are the conversion rates. Even good products might only get you one sale for every 60 or 70 clicks you get. Not too good!
I prefer CPA and will talk about that next week most likely. If you want to read about a good home income system that works, click here!