My Clickbank Journal (without the BS)

Hey guys.

First of all, I want to say this forum is a really cool place. There is a lot of very useful information here, and this past month I've been getting my feet wet thanks to doing research here. Unfortunately I've found 75% of the content here to be either spam, shameless self promotion, or misleading sales pitches dressed up as "help". I'd like to chronicle my clickbank journey from the ground floor using this thread. It'll help keep me motivated and organize my thoughts.

I'm also going to try my best to copy and paste information straight from digital point that (after much sifting) I've found to be the most useful to hopefully help out some of the more clueless here.

 

I'm doing this entirely bum-marketing style, and my blueprint is as follows

I try to think of a niche that will convert well, and start off with choosing a few keywords. There's only so much research one can do here. Finding a niche, and keyword within that niche that work together to turn a profit is the dirty work, and is mostly trial and error.

To find a niche, I think about something I'm either
a) interested (and consequently knowledgeable in)
or at the worst
b) knowledgeable in, and can tolerate writing about

Now I plug that niche into google and the google keyword tool:
(edit: apparently I'm not allowed to use live links. just google it)

This gives me an idea of potential success. If there is decent search volume, and the results aren't too crazy (aka in the millions and seem highly SEO'd) I'll go to content creation

I'll choose a few keywords from the keyword tool, and write up keyword-rich articles about them, including that keyword in the title. I'll post that to my blog.

From there, I submit each article to the top 8 article directories, including EZA and articlesbase. I re-write the articles slightly each time to avoid the duplicate content penalty. Each article backlinks to that post on my blog, where I have that content tweaked slightly to be slightly more sales-pitchy, or creating a call to action. I have my afflink included on that page.

I'll repeat this for several blog posts. Each post will also be backlinked via a list of 30 (and growing) top bookmarking/social bookmark/misc pages that have a high pagerank.

Each blog post will link to the main blog page, ie. www.xxxxx.blogspot,com. As the subdomains gain rank, all of them linking back to the main blog post will hopefully boost it in google results.

Ranking on page one is the goal here, but hopefully some of the traffic from article sites will convert.

Anyway, I'm not sure how perfect this plan is, but it's the best I know from a few weeks of research. I'll keep you guys updated as I execute. My goal to start out is 2 articles per day, along with necessary submission and backlinking.

 

you are on right path . check up the mutual link of posts and the linking to the main page? see whether it violate the link rules since Google is not appreciative of link farms and linking to same site.

All said and done my 2 cents. Bum works in niches in which you are thorough. Readers are smart and they do research to find out the authour and his expertise . If they find that the articles are only for promotion ,they wont buy. All sales are cheating in one way or other, the difference being in degrees only . Many people market products,that they have never seen ! What a tragedy!!.

 

Noted Thanks man.

 

I'm going to try an experiment. Before I dive into making a site with really well placed, properly backlinked content to rank for search terms, I'd like to try pure article marketing - just to get it "out of my system". My goal this week is to right 100 (yes 100) articles on a weight loss/fitness niche.

During my learning I've gotten better and better at re-writing articles - I can take a high quality article I've written and duplicate it (while maintaining a high standard of quality) within 3-5 minutes. I'm going to start off with 4 categories under this niche and then write 5 very HQ articles for each of them. This will give me 20 articles. From there I'm going to re-write each of those articles 5 times, giving me 100. I'm going to set up 4 simple 1-page landing blogs, each tweaked slightly to the subcategory that 25 articles will be geared towards.

Through trial and error I've found that my absolute least-viewed articles get ~30 hits per article database (some higher some lower, EZA obviously being up there). I have 8 article databases I use. Since I'm interested in straight-up article traffic, I'm going to submit each 100 to the 8 directories - The duplicate content policy doesn't matter to me right now.

I get an average of between 10-20% click-through on my articles. On my landers I have, I also average about 10-20% click-through to the product.

So lets crunch some numbers, being conservative to see the bare minimum I should theoretically make:

100 articles posted 8 times @ 30 hits/article - 800x30 = 24,000 article views
24,000 article views @ 10% clickthru = 2,400 hits to the blog
2,400 hits to the blog @ another 10% clickthru = 240 hops
EPC of this product is very high Assuming my lander isn't very effective and I only get 75% of the stated EPC, I'll make about 400 dollars from the first month these are up.

Using higher estimates:
100 articles posted 8 times @ 60 views per article (averaged out) - 800 x 60 = 48,000 article views
48,000 article views @ 15% clickthru = 7,200 hits to the blog
7,200 blog views @ 15% clickthru to the product = 1080 hops
Assuming my lander is on point - ~1500-2000 dollars from the first month

Residual earnings, I don't expect much from. If the articles don't rank, they don't rank, and will probably get buried. Although a terrible article I posted last November has 140 and 150 views respectively on two of the smaller article DBs, so who knows.

Either way, this is just "for fun" so to speak, if I only make a couple hundred bucks off a few sales that's a few hundred dollars I didn't have before, and my article writing/rewriting will be very well practiced for when I focus on creating content for a real website. Not only that, but I'll have 200 bucks to play with for domains and hosting for my real deal site.

I'm gonna start today, I'll keep this updated.

 

all the best for your highly calculated plan. Keep us updated about this.
hope to see some results this time

Edit: Don't make two continuous posts, or you will get banned for bumping the thread. you can edit it.. for some time after you have posted. So use edit button next to Quote. I don't want to see you banned.

 

This is going to be exciting. I've always loved to read journals. Thanks for sharing!

By the way, are you going to rewrite the articles yourself or you're going to outsource them?

 

Awesome plan and quite similar to what I am doing. Looking forward to keeping track of your results!

 

Here are some tips:
- work on your click through on articles. Don't write long articles. 250 words is enough. Have a STRONG and persuasive call to action in your signature.
- have a lot of calls to action on blog
- rotate products on every 200 hops without conversions

Good luck

 

I definitely will!

What's this about continuous posts? I have no links in my signature and this thread is pure information and advice. If I got banned for back to back posts of this nature while the rest of this forum is spammy promotional bullshit, then that'd be absurd.

I'm going to be rewriting them myself. It's gotten fairly simple for me, and I can re-write an article either in 3 minutes to avoid duplicate content, or within 5 minutes to give it a totally unique look while touching on the main key points.

I have trouble with doing this and I really appreciate the input - I can tell you know what you're doing.

My main pitfall is that I write under the assumption that everyone reading the article is... Me. I'm fairly intelligent, skeptical, and have been regularly using the internet since I was 7 years old. As such, I try to actually provide a long and resourceful article and make my signature/resource box seem really innocuous or innocent to try to "fool" people into clicking it for more genuine information. Me personally, I can sniff a sales funnel out upon immediate glance. I always see pre-sells and sales pages and think to myself, "Jesus this looks like a cheap marketing/spammy internet ad", which is is, but to most people it's eye candy that creates urgency. I need to really work on rationalizing that - Afterall, these spammy-looking sales pages wouldn't exist all over the place if they didn't work!

What I need to do is work more on structuring my article in a more urgent, promotional way. Most people surfing the internet aren't me, a cynical, skeptical kid who over-analyzes everything. Most people are going to be average joe slim-attention-span consumers who will oftentimes do what you tell them if you're compelling enough

Thanks for the input, I'll definitely take it into account for when I'm creating content!

 

it will happen. mods are pretty on it when it comes to the rules. better for you (if you want to keep this journal going!) to just stick by them

100 articles for only 250 hops seems like a lot of work for not much reward. although your traffic estimates are very low. if you target your key phrases then i would imagine you will do much much better. get 1000 views on 1 article and you're laughing.

 

I can understand a pruning for shameless bumping, but I'm not really getting anything for posting all of this. If they want to remove me and have another guy step in that's spamming his sig everywhere, posting information but withholding to bait people into buying or using a service, etc, then that's entirely up to them.

Anyway, I agree with you that writing 100 articles for 250 hops would be pretty damn awful. That's using a really really rock-bottom estimate - Most of my articles work out well. My experience is limited, but a result typical of the few blogs I have is something like this - One blog containing one article submitted to the 8 directories + posted to fark and digg netted about 150 views and 30 hops within ~3 weeks.

If I can get 30 hops per article within a 4 week period - That's 3000 hops. The product has a very high EPC. Even if my personal EPC was 50% of the stated amount, I'd be happy with my earnings from this effort

We're just going to have to wait and see. I'm writing 100 articles, about 20 of those articles use broad all-encompassing keywords, and the remaining 80 use long tail keywords that have a decent search volume. While I'm not going to put effort into ranking for these beyond posting the articles to the 8 directions (+perhaps digg, fark, and other social media sites that can send me a lil extra bonus traffic), if I get a fluke google ranking that'd be great (and also a cue to develop that keyword!)

My original intention here was to roll up my sleeves, put on a few pots of coffee, and bang out 100 good articles within a week, send them off, and see what happens. If I got tied up with trying to optimize these I think I'd lose my mind I'm going to save my long-haul SEO skills for something I'm actually semi-interested in, which will be my next and main endeavor after this. It'll be funded by this project - Hopefully I'll have enough for a domain, hosting, EZA paid acct, perhaps some article outsourcing, and some other goodies.

Anyway, tonight I fleshed out the titles. I broke the niche down into 4 sub-categories, and used the google keyword tool for each. I wrote down 30 keywords for each subcategory (most of them long-tail) and will work them into nice titles. After picking the best of these, I'll have 100 articles all with keywordy titles (without being too obvious!).

Tomorrow I'm going to make 2 or 3 different landers as part of this experiment. One of the landers is going to be my style (which may be mistaken) - A site with 1 page of additional smart, eloquent content, along with a nonchalant but solid reason to buy intertwined. Nothing over the top, and using the actual product page as kind of a casually, smoothly-inserted personal recommendation

The second will be similar to the above, dressed up but will essentially be a more urging, action-oriented letter

The third will be a truly ballsy call-to-action sales pitch that I'll hopefully wordsmith not too look entirely too spammy to the consumers that have landed there.

Josearmando's advice falls between the 2nd and 3rd I believe. I'm going to be keeping a VERY close eye on conversions during the first few days and will switch the wording of the landing pages if one is clearly outperforming the others! This should be interesting.

 

nice work mate. keep us updated (between other peeps's posts )

 

Good luck on your journey man, lets hope you see some success!

 

Man I was like you, very skeptical, but one thing I had learned from my experience calculations falls when you apply it practically.
Always do what you feel and don't waste your time estimating every single thing.
Best Luck!

 

Ill follow your thread and see where this will lead... dont forget to update us...

 

"calculations falls when you apply it practically"

Did you make a typo here? I don't understand

I dig what you mean by intuition though. I just enjoy crunching numbers - To figure out the potential for this venture it only took about 60 seconds of figuring. If I can see what I can potentially earn, it motivates me to crank out content hard

I've had a long day of (normal) work and didn't get much sleep last night. I'm going to go through and create the three lander blogs tonight, but I don't have the energy or sanity to begin fleshing out my skeletal list of keywords with content. With the landers created and keywords chosen, all I need to do is write to finish the puzzle here! Content creation begins tomorrow and my goal is to warm up with at least 10 articles. I'm going to take the advice above and keep the articles to 250-300 words in length.

 

good luck DF20...

bum is the best way to start with no or very little money down

Cheers,

 

I dont really get it, but sound interesting. I`m just excited when it come to analytical.

 

any updates or did u not go through with it?