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10K/Month Clickbank Method - Revised

Discussion in 'ClickBank' started by amycheung, Mar 3, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi Everyone!

    I've revised the original 10K/Month Clickbank Method. Here's the revised method below. I'll talk about the breakthrough (and simple) change in the next post.

    _______________________________________________
    1)Pick a Clickbank Product:

    I personally tend to stay away from the following types of products:

    -Internet marketing - too much competition unless you put together a kick-ass landing page and give away bonuses (read: bribe) that are relevant to the particular product (or use other advanced tactics)

    -Tattoo design products - extremely low conversion and fierce adwords competition. I once promoted "tattoo chopper" and lost close to $200 in the first few hours after I started my campaign.

    -Gambling type products - blackjack, texas holdem, betfair, sports betting, etc. Gambling related adwords ads will be found and stopped by adwords staff sooner or later - they don't allow it.

    -Anything involving a well-known trademark, such as "World of Warcraft" guides, or anything to do with "Ipods". Those will be stopped by adwords staff.


    I also check the following:

    -That the sales page (or the squeeze page - whichever page the visitor first lands on, on the merchant's site) doesn't have a pop-up; it's against adword's TOS. I've had more than a few campaigns stopped because of this.

    -That the product has a low refund rate – which is, to me, anything below 10%, because I don’t want to promote something that I know won’t help people, and not to mention will hurt my bottom line. A good way to judge customer satisfaction with a product is by looking at the refund rate, which can be calculated as follows:

    refund rate % =100*(1-(A/((B-B*0.075-1)*C/100)))

    where A=$/sale, B=Product Price, and C=%/sale

    -Preferably, the merchant has an opt-in form to capture the visitor's email. The subsequent sale made through follow-up emails would still be credited to the me, since their computer will contain a cookie with my ID for the next 60 days. (Sorry for having said otherwise in my original post on this method.)

    -That the product has a high $/sale – this allows me to bid higher and be more competitive in adwords without losing money. I generally won't consider anything with a $/sale of below $20 (unless I think the product is in demand, and the competition is small).

    -That the merchant’s sales page doesn’t contain any “leakage”, i.e. outbound links from which your visitor can “escape” from the sales page (for example, links to other products for which you won’t get any commissions if they buy).

    -Preferably, the merchant doesn’t offer other methods of payment (if the visitor orders by mail or cheque, I won’t get the commission).


    I usually pick around 30 products first, then look over them again with a more critical eye and get the list down to 25 (the limit for the number of campaigns on a single adwords account). Then I'd move onto the next step.


    2)Collect Keywords for the Clickbank Products

    -I first browse the merchant’s sales page to collect relevant keywords, which I call “seed” keywords (e.g. for a dog training product, I may write down these keywords: “dog potty training”, “dog house training”, “stop dog peeing”, “stop dog scratching furniture”, etc. etc.

    -Then I go to the Google Adwords Tool, type in the seed keywords (making sure to have the "use synonyms" box checked), and browse the resulting keywords. For keywords I know are likely to convert, I click "Add" to add it to my main keyword list. For each keyword I see I’d ask myself “if I were a visitor typing in this particular keyword phrase, would I possibly be interested in this product?” I’m selective in my choice of keywords – better safe than sorry, as I don’t want to waste adwords clicks on keywords that may not convert. If in doubt I don’t include the keyword that will probably waste me money, because I know there'd be no shortage of products, so I wouldn't have to squeeze every sale out of every product.

    -Because I make sure to include synonyms in my search, the keyword results will include related keywords that I hadn't thought of before, when I was gathering "seed" keywords. I would “dig” into those related keywords by typing them into the search box to return even more keywords.

    -I try to come up with keywords I could “tag onto” my seed keywords – for example, if the product was the solution for a kind of health condition, for example arthritis, I would do searches on “arthritis treatment, “arthritis cure”, “arthritis remedies”, “arthritis medications”, “arthritis medicine”, etc.

    -While building my keyword list, I also make a note of words that are completely irrelevant to my product. For example, say I was promoting a product that taught women how to make their husbands love them again, and the google keyword tool results included “make my man love me again lyrics”, I would make note of the word “lyrics” so I could put that as a “negative keyword” for my adwords campaign later.

    -Finally, when I run out of keyword ideas to type into the tool, I export the whole keyword list into a text file


    3)Separate the Main Keyword List into Adgroups

    I usually just use an excel worksheet to organize my keywords into adgroups (if the keyword list is too large I use Keyword Companion to do the sorting). I separate them by common words. Going back to the dog training example, I may end up with the adgroups “stop dog barking”, “dog housebreaking”, “dog potty training” etc., where all the keywords in each adgroup would contain the common words [adgroup name]. For example, in the “dog housebreaking” adgroup I may include the keywords:
    House break a dog
    House breaking dog
    Housebreaking dogs
    How to housebreak a dog

    4)Write the Adwords Ad for Each Adgroup

    The following is what I do to consistently achieve high CTRs for my ads. Continuing with the dog training product example, say for the adgroup “dog housebreaking”, I may write an ad that looks like this:

    Housebreaking Your Dog?
    Only 7 days to housebreak your dog!
    Learn how to housebreak a dog.
    Dog-Housebreaking.domain.com

    For the headline and 2nd description line, I try to stuff as many common keywords (of the particular adgroup) as I could into them to catch the surfer’s eye. As you know, the keywords that the surfer types into google’s search box will appear in bold in your adwords ad. I do the same thing to the display URL, which many people don’t bother to do. I register a domain with a very short name – for example 1best1.com – and set up unlimited subdomains on that one domain. So in my example I would name my subdomain “dog-housebreaking” so that they would appear in bold to catch the surfer’s attention. With all the bolded words in the headline, 2nd description and display URL, many surfers will look at my ad. I read somewhere that most people will only read the headline and 1st description, so in the 1st description line I try to stress a benefit. I simply go through the headline and 1st paragraph of the merchant’s sales letter to find the most impressive point I can. If all else fails, you can always just say “100% guaranteed or your money back!”, since clickbank has a refund guarantee for all products. Using this simple method I’ve almost always been able to start off an ad with an above 1% CTR, which gives me a good headstart in ad ranking and keeps my bids low.

    As for regional targeting, I don’t really do much with that – I probably should. I mostly just target the English-Speaking Countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States. Some products are only useful to US residents, e.g. setting up a business in the US, so it's important to consider this on a product by product basis.

    I usual set my starting bids low at the beginning, usually at 1/100 of the sales commission or less. I also set my daily budget to $20/day to start. When I first started doing adwords I was setting the daily budget to $100, but several run-away campaigns and several hundreds of lost adspend later, I learned better.

    Tip: I find that it’s easier to first load my campaigns into the Adwords Editor (free download from google) and then upload them to my adwords account.


    REVISION: STEP 5 BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY "WRITE THE FRAME REDIRECT SCRIPT", THIS HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH...

    5)Construct a Dead Simple Landing Page

    Note: In my original thread on the 10k/Month Clickbank Method, I talked about using frame redirect scripts to direct the visitor from adwords ads directly to the merchant's site. The major flaw with this method is that it's against the TOS of both adwords and (as I was later told) clickbank. One of you, in your response to my post, inspired the alternative method below.

    Simply construct a landing page that has nothing but a box in the middle, and text in the box that says ">>Enter Site Click Here<<".

    Simple eh? Here's the code if you don't want to bother creating one:


    <head>
    <title>Say Something About Your Product - try to include main keywords.</title>
    </head>

    <table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=100% bgColor=#6699cc>
    <tr><td>
    <DIV align=center>
    <CENTER>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <TABLE borderColor=#000000 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=15 width=350 border=2>
    <TBODY>
    <TR bgColor=#ffffff>
    <TD vAlign=top align=left>
    </CENTER>
    <p align="center"><font size="4"> </font></p>
    <p align="center"><font size="5"><a href="myid.merchantid.hop.clickbank.net"><b>>> Enter Site
    Click Here <<</b></a></font></p>
    <p> </p>
    </TD>
    </TR>
    </TBODY>
    </TABLE>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p> </p>
    <p>Keywords:</p>
    <p></p>
    keyword1
    keyword2
    keyword3
    etc.
    <p> <center><b><a href="http://www.mydomain.com/tos.html">Terms of Service</a> | <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/privacy.html"> Privacy Statement</a></b></center>
    </p>
    <p> </p>
    </DIV>
    </td></tr></table>

    A few things to note about the "landing page":
    -put in a title with some main keywords for your product - good for QS
    -where I have "6699cc", this is the background color. By changing this color to match that on the merchant's site, you'll create a more consistent experience for the visitor
    -edit the hoplink
    -insert the main keyword list of the product at the end. The visitor will never scroll down that far, but adwords will (=good for QS)
    -add links to a TOS and Privacy Statement. You only have to do this once and use the same pages for all your campaigns. This is reportedly good for QS also.

    6)Create Subdomains

    Remember I used “Dog-Housebreaking.domain.com” as my display URL? Now I will create the subdomain (via cpanel or using a subdomain creator script), put the landing page code above into a text file, name it “index.php”, and put it into the “dog-housebreaking” subdomain folder.

    To create a large number of subdomains on autopilot, download the free Subdomains Creator at http://tinyurl.com/2aj57z. I usually wait until I've done all previous 5 steps above for the batch of 25 products, then load all the subdomain names onto my server and run the script.


    OPTIONAL BY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Use Xtreme Conversions to Track Your Campaigns

    I strongly suggest that you use xtreme conversions to track your campaigns. If you do use it, all you need to do is to insert a couple pieces of code into the landing page code above. In my free ebook I will explain in detail how I tweak my campaigns using Xtreme Conversions.

    As you can see, this is no get rich quick method – a lot of work is involved. The beauty of this method is that it’s so simple to implement. The flip side is that you’ll have to go through lots and lots of products to find a few that are profitable – that’s the case for me anyway. If you’re an adwords expert you’ll most probably do better than me. Usually, I set up campaigns for 25 products at one time. Of each batch of 25 products I may end up keeping anywhere from 3-8 that turned out to be profitable, and stop the rest. This is why tracking is so important – you need to know exactly which keywords in which adgroups are making you money so you’d know which adgroups / keywords / campaigns to keep and which to turn off.

    Phase 2:
    This method is really only Phrase 1 of a larger scheme. Once you've identified profitable campaigns, you'll want to replace your landing pages with squeeze pages, then still send the visitor to the merchant's page after they opt-in, and then follow up with autoresponder messages to sell that product plus other backend products. I think of this stage as Phase 2. This is the stage I'm at right now.

    Phase 3 and Beyond:
    If a niche does really well, I may even go one step further and set up white hat sites for the specific niches, using those keywords in my adwords campaigns that have bee making the most sales (write an article for each keyword etc.). I may even develop my own products to sell to my list and then put it on clickbank too, and also other affiliate networks.

    There....not rocket science. None of what I'm doing or planning to do is new. It's just a straight forward method that will get you results.

    I'm writing a free ebook that will explain the above procedure in much greater detail. If you'd like to be notified when the ebook is ready, please sign up at the link in my sig.


    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 3, 2008 IP
    brokerdedi, Arson and ronaldec7 like this.
  2. amycheung

    amycheung Active Member

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    #2
    For those of you that were following my original thread on this method, you'll remember that instead of the simple landing page above, I was using frame redirect pages.

    The idea with this adwords-clickbank method is to make it as simple as possible to make money promoting clickbank products on adwords. The simplest way to do this is through direct-linking, by using one's hoplink in the display and destination URL of the adwords ad.

    However, adwords has a "double-serving" rule, which says that only one ad per URL will be shown for each keyword. This means that if two affiliates have created ads targeted at the same keyword, only one of those ads will be shown (the one with the better QS or higher bid or both...I'm not sure).

    To solve this problem, I was creating frame redirect pages to be stored on my own server. I would put my domain's URL on the adwords ads, and use coding in on the frame redirect pages to automatically redirect the visitor to the merchant's site.

    The major problem with that approach is that both adwords, and clickbank (as some of you have pointed out to me recently), do not allow the use of frame redirects. Continuing to to do risks getting banned by both sites.

    So a couple days ago I set out to find a better alternative to frame redirects. One of you in a post in the original thread suggested that I used a blank page with just "click here to go the website" as a link to the merchant's page, to replace the frame redirect. I thought that was a very good idea (to me it was. I'm not a creative person!)

    What I did was set up the landing page as described in the post above, including a little piece of code that, every time someone lands on this landing page, will record the visit in a log file. As a part of the test, I linked from the ">>Enter Website Click Here<<" text to a frame redirect (just for testing's sake - not for implementation - please see post above), which would redirect to the merchant's. On the frame redirect script I inserted the same piece of code that would record each click to another log file.

    Sorry for being confusing... Essentially what I did was record the number of landing page impressions in one file, and the number of click throughs in another file.

    I did this for the best campaign I have, for the adgroup that was getting the most traffic. Almost two days later, here are the results: 1019 impression and 910 clickthroughs, meaning 89.3% of the people that saw the landing page, 89.3% of the people clicked through to the merchant's.

    Granted, I know I wouldn't be getting the same amount of traffic or sales as I would otherwise get with a frame redirect. But at least with this simple landing page I'd be able to sleep at night without dreaming about receiving the dreaded "your account is shut down because you've been bad" notifications from adwords and clickbank...

    I've also done a simple analysis of how this change could impact on my profits....will post that later. Gotta go get some work done :)

    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  3. massimo

    massimo Peon

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    #3
    Thanks for sharing this information with all of us! That's greaT1 Thanks a lot!

    Very descriptive!
     
    massimo, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  4. Yordi

    Yordi Peon

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    #4
    thanks alot for this information!!
     
    Yordi, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  5. ncmw

    ncmw Peon

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    #5
    Sweet, thanks.
     
    ncmw, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  6. JackRipper22

    JackRipper22 Peon

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    #6
    Again, thanks for the info and lookin forward to ur ebook!
     
    JackRipper22, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  7. flukie

    flukie Peon

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    #7
    It's cool. thanks. :)
     
    flukie, Mar 3, 2008 IP
  8. pachecus

    pachecus Well-Known Member

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    #8
    thanks for this info
     
    pachecus, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  9. amycheung

    amycheung Active Member

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    #9
    You're all welcome :)

    If I can help people make some money with my ebook, that'll be thanks enough.

    I've started working on it. Will really try to get the first draft ready soon.

    Thanks for all your support.

    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  10. amitfan

    amitfan Active Member

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    #10
    Great information and too much detailed to anyone to understand.

    Thanks
     
    amitfan, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  11. Cary Bergeron

    Cary Bergeron Well-Known Member

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    #11
    do you have to use sub-domains or would a folder off the regular domain work something like

    website.com/keyword/index.html
     
    Cary Bergeron, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  12. WayneB

    WayneB Peon

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    #12
    If a human from the adwords team ever visits your site, they will
    probably suspend that campaign for your page not being relevant, with
    hardly any content on it. I think they require more on your landing page
    than just a click here link and some keywords.
     
    WayneB, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  13. bigmodo

    bigmodo Well-Known Member

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    #13
    Thats pretty cool and helpful.
     
    bigmodo, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  14. Ganceann

    Ganceann Peon

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    #14
    It sounds like the ebook could be useful... and a possible 'must-have' for people new to affiliate marketing (through Clickbank and Adwords method at least).


    The idea of the low content page is really to guage the potential of the product... once the potential is known and you have some figures (profitable figures would be best), you would then add more content and make it a squeeze page.

    I guess it is an efficient process of elimination that requires some work - but not as much work as building a full squeeze page for each campaign before starting it.
     
    Ganceann, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  15. want444

    want444 Peon

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    #15
    great info amy! thanks!
     
    want444, Mar 4, 2008 IP
  16. amycheung

    amycheung Active Member

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    #16
    A subdirectory would work too yes, but it may be more eye-catching for the bolded term to appear in the front (i.e. a subdomain).

    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 7, 2008 IP
  17. amycheung

    amycheung Active Member

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    #17
    You have a valid point - that's a very real risk.

    Actually I found this out yesterday - the product I tested these landing pages with got slapped. I tried to revise my post above but it's past the date where it can be edited.

    When I originally did this test, I had thought (mistakenly) that the QS was not affected - I found out afterwards that QS is not re-evaluated immediately after you change your landing pages - it's once a month (or more often...but not instantly).

    So I set out to find another solution. After some testing I found that by doing the following, I got the original QS back and better:
    -start with the "click here to enter site" landing page I talked about above
    -take parts of the merchant's sales letter that are keyword-heavy, and rewrite it (to provide unique content that would boost QS, and also to avoid copyright infringement issues); insert this rewritten article below the fold on the "click here to enter site" landing page
    -copy and paste the "click here to enter site" link below the article

    This time, for the campaigns I'm doing this test on, I replaced the destination URL with another domain altogether, and moved the new landing pages to this new domain as well, to force adwords to calculate my QS. My minimum bids have gone back to the level they were before, and some keywords even had
    lower min. bids than before (when I was using frame redirects).

    I'll wait some time before I finalize my testing, and share the findings in the ebook.

    Thanks for pointing that out!

    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 7, 2008 IP
  18. amycheung

    amycheung Active Member

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    #18
    Thanks Ganceann for your encouragement!

    Yes, that would be the idea - to spend as little time and money on each starting campaign as possible until they prove themselves profitable, after which we could than concentrate our efforts on the "winners".

    I was using the easiest but riskiest method, but now I'm taking measures to use better landing pages to avoid getting shut down. I know I'm not wasting my time because most of the losing campaigns have been identified and stopped, so I'm only spending the extra time on the winning campaigns.

    Amy
     
    amycheung, Mar 7, 2008 IP
  19. Ganceann

    Ganceann Peon

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    #19
    I am just wondering if you block spiders from indexing your subdomains (as you are using PPC campaigns)... or do you let them index the content on the off-chance that you will also get organic traffic.

    I can see reasons why you wouldn't get them indexed but also reasons why you would have them indexed (especially in case where you are adding more content).
     
    Ganceann, Mar 8, 2008 IP
  20. dead@27

    dead@27 Member

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    #20
    Thank you for taking the time to post this very valuable information. Gets me thinking about some great new ideas.
     
    dead@27, Mar 8, 2008 IP