Does gravity on clickbank tell how many people sold a product in the last month? - Newbie's question!
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=clickbank+gravity Produces: http://whitehatcrew.com/blog/how-clickbanks-gravity-is-calculated/
Not quite. It's a "weighted total" showing the number of affiliates who made one or more sales each during the last 8 weeks. If an affiliate made their first sale of the product yesterday, that scores "1". If they made it 8 weeks ago, that scores 0.1. So the average is 0.5 (for an affiliate making a sale 4 weeks ago, say). It's no indication of conversion-rates at all. A product can have a gravity of 300, but if those 300 affiliates have made one sale each from thousands of hops each, the conversion-rate might be dreadfully low. This isn't just a theoretical point - it often happens (especially when products have been hyped early in their listing). It isn't much of an indication of total sales, either. A product with a handful of super-affiliates making tens of thousands of sales each can easily have a low gravity compared with a product with hundreds of affiliates making a couple of sales each. To affiliates, gravity is a pretty useless indicator, really. The only time I ever look at it is to make sure that I don't start promoting a very high gravity product. Those are the ultra-competitive ones where you'll be up against people with huge Adwords budgets. In my case, it was when I eventually learned this that I started making money. Even Clickbank themselves now state clearly in their own description of the term "gravity" a warning that these will be the most competitive products to promote. Many affiliates either haven't quite worked this out yet, or they disagree with it and "want to be right" and stick to the "consensus opinions" on this subject (which are pretty screwed up, which is part of the reason the success-rate is so low in affiliate-sales) - but I suppose I shouldn't complain about that at all!
Yeah gravity doesn't hold any weight but it's a good indicator of if at least one person has made a sale using this product and whether a products, service of ebook is way too competitive to market.
I can tell you what I do but I can't promise it'll be the best way for you. I look for products in niches I have an interest in myself and can easily write articles/reviews about. I search through Clickbank marketplace, a category at a time, searching by the classification "$ earned per sale" (because the way I look at it, it probably takes the same amount of work, for me, to generate a big commission payment as it does for me to earn a little commission payment. Some will disagree with this, as is their right). I immediately reject anything that has a vendor's opt-in on the sales page, any kind of free offer if you give your email address, or anything that obviously gets the vendor directly in contact with the lead I've just generated (again some will disagree, but many successful professional affiliates assess this way and do the same as me, for obvious reasons). I reject anything that's a "no-no" subject to me. That includes "make money online", "weight loss" (with one exception), "internet marketing advice/services", "video-games", anything really "technical" (because I just know know nothing about these niches and they don't interest me). I reject anything with very high gravity (for reasons mentioned above, among others). I love "low gravity" because these are easy to promote, as long as the sales page converts. I reject anything with a sales page which I think "just won't convert well" (subjective and unreliable, of course, but I'm a writer myself and like to think I can tell!). I reject anything that uses obvious "scammy/dishonest tricks" such as "9 copies left" or "the price is down to $37 only if you order by midnight tonight" because these are plain dishonest, and I won't promote dishonest people's products - and those "sales tricks" are sometimes used by clueless vendors who are "just copying everyone else" and haven't actually done their own proper, reliable testing at all. I reject anything with an "exit pop-up" of any kind (for a few different reasons, mostly covered above directly or indirectly). I don't reject, but am slightly cautious about anything with a "really glossy/glitzy affiliate page" full of tricks, suggestions, banners and gadgets for affiliates, because (i) these can be competitive, and (ii) vendors often provide all that stuff believing that it matters to affiliates, whereas all most successful affiliates care about is how well the sales-page converts (good) and whether there's a vendor's opt-in on it (bad) - in other words, if they've dressed up their affiliate page (if they have an "affiliate page", and I don't care if they don't), it may be to compensate for bad sales copy. Call me judgmental but I choose not to take a chance on this. (Again with one exception where I know the vendor). What I'm left with, I look at and think about. Especially if I can find two or three or four potential products in the same niche, because then I can potentially combine them on review site/blog or whatever. Then I find a way of contacting their vendors (and the harder that is to do, the more I like it), and ask politely for a "review copy", explaining who I am, what affiliate marketing I've done before, what domain-names I own, how I'm proposing to market their product if I like it, what tricks/techniques I have available, and say everything I possibly can to encourage them to take me seriously as a potential affiliate, rather than just someone asking for a free copy(!). If they reply saying "yes", I read the product and see what I think of it and promote it if it's good. If they reply saying "no", then I decide whether or not to buy it using my own affiliate link (this is expressly allowed by Clickbank). If they don't reply at all (which happens more often than you'd think) I cross it off my list because if they won't even reply to an email from a potential affiliate, what are they going to be like replying to an email from a customer who's already paid (i.e. I don't want to promote them or their product). It works for me. But I've been doing this for less than a year, and there are certainly others here with more experience than I have, and there are definitely lots of people here who won't agree with much of what I've said above!
Wow great post so would you say this method works quite well for you then. Would you say you get alot of convertion
I am in the process of making my site and definately like to know what potential affiliates like and dislike. You are right about newer sellers copying some tactics that appear to work! But longterm it will only hurt vendors who want to attract the top affiliates, which is want I hope to do!
There are two very different questions here. One is "What do potential affiliates like/dislike?" and the other is "What do serious, successful potential affiliates like/dislike?". These questions have very different answers, and sometimes exactly opposite answers. The world of internet marketing in general, and affiliate marketing in particular, has an enormous turnover of people dabbling in it, not getting very far, and dropping out of it. The "majority" of potential affiliates, at any one time, are perhaps not the people you want to aim at. So a "majority view" can be terribly misleading to you - so much so that it can even make the difference between long-term success and long-term failure. Paradoxical but true. I'll tell you my own opinion of what serious affiliates want to see - and very much in this order:- 1. A good product (to avoid refunds) and a sales-page that converts well (most important: without this you can have nothing but temporary affiliate turnover) 2. Absence of a vendor's opt-in or an exit pop-up on the sales-page (either will totally rule out your product for many) 3. A decent payout per sale (from either high price, high commission-rate or a combination of the two: what matters to affiliates is their earnings-per-sale, obviously - you won't easily get serious affiliates for a $7 product whatever the commission-rate, but for a $97 product you'll get them potentially interested even at 50%/55%) 4. Affiliate tools (articles, emails, banners etc) and "special incentives/gimmicks" (least important) In short, if your product and sales copy are good and you don't look like a vendor who might be able (with an opt-in) to steal the affiliates' leads that they've spent their time, energy, attention and money producing, nothing else matters very much anyway, really. Professional affiliates will find your product and promote it. The "affiliate gimmicks" will appeal to a certain kind of affiliate, it's true, but they'll barely be relevant at all to the people who are going to produce your long-term bread-and-butter income for you. So be careful whose opinions you listen to.
Again thanks a million! Your insights are invaluable, I tend to agree with what you are saying. I am going to look at my affiliates as "long term" partners instead of a temporary sales force. I have actually been talking and taking advice from my "first" affiliate on this project. He is a seasoned IM and have been a great asset to me already. I will post my link to my site in the CB affiliate section soon, and would love to get your opinion(s) but most definately would love to have you on board. At any rate you have been alot of help already! Thanks again, Al
Good advice Alexa, to be honest i always do things my own way anyway and learn from any mistakes as following other peoples methods will only get you so far.
Neither is "better". They just measure two completely different things. Gravity measures the number of affiliates who have each made 1+ sales of the product over the last 8 weeks (the "average" gravity score is 0.5 for a sale made 4 weeks ago). "%referred" measures the proportion of sales credited to an affiliate rather than just to the vendor. Note, though, that because of Clickbank's unreliable affiliate tracking, the number of sales credited to affiliates isn't the same as the number of sales made by affiliates. It's known to vendors that paying a notional "75% commission" will work out, overall, to costing them 50% - 55% of their takings, not the 75% you might expect, because of the proportion of sales made by affiliates which are not "credited" to the affiliate for various reasons. Neither "gravity" nor "%referred" tells you the conversion-rate or the number of sales made.