How I Do Over 10K in Clickbank Sales Every Month

If you've been following this subforum, you may be aware of the recent decline in clickbank sales that is reported by many affiliates and some publishers as well. I've been asking in other forums about this problem, and in one of my posts I mentioned how much I was making through clickbank before the decline. After I posted I received some private messages asking for tips on how I do it. Last night I wrote a long post explaining the simple method I use and by this morning many people have provided feedback that they've found the post useful, so I'm posting the information here too...hope some of you will also find it useful.

Before I start I'd like to point out a few things:

-Everything I say in this post is just from personal experiences - your mileage may vary.

-Although I'll be using "dog training" as my example product below, be forewarned that it's a very competitive niche and that if you don't know what you're doing, you could lose big bucks in adwords without seeing any returns.

-From what many publishers and affiliates and end customers are saying, there's a glitch in Clickbank's payment processor which causes customers' credit cards to be declined. This may very well be the reason why so many people, including me, has been seeing sharp declines in sales. Therefore, you may want to avoid clickbank unless they get their act together.

-Using frame redirects, I heard, is against adwords TOS – so be prepared to have all your ads shut-down in one fell-swoop one day.

Anyways, if you still have your heart set on promoting clickbank products, here's how I make over 10k in sales (several thousands in profit) every month using clickbank and adwords.


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 like that)
-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-related products - blackjack, texas holdem, betfair, sports betting - any gambling related adwords campaigns 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, will be stopped by adwords staff (World of Warcraft is a trademark)

I also check the following:
-that the sales page (or the squeeze page - whatever's the first page the visitor 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 – to me, anything below 10%, because I don’t want to promote something that I know won’t help people and a good way you can judge that is by the refund rate, which can be calculated as follows:
refund rate % =100*(1-(A/((B-B*0.075-1)*C/100)))
A=$/sale
B=Product Price
C=%/sale
-preferably, the merchant doesn’t have an opt-in form on the sales page, or have a squeeze page – because then the merchant could collect the visitor’s email, sell to them through email, and cheat me of my commissions (however, many merchants are honest and will credit you with your commissions even when they buy through an email sent by the merchant. I sometimes opt-in and check the first email they send me to make sure my affiliate link is in the email)
-that the product has a high $/sale – allows me to bid higher and be more competitive in adwords
-that the merchant’s sales page doesn’t contain any “leakage”, i.e. outbound links from which your visitor could “escape” from the sales page (for example, links to other products for which you don’t get any commissions)
-preferably, the merchant doesn’t offer other methods of payment (if they order by mail or cheque, you won’t get the commission)

I usually pick around 30 products in one sitting, then move to 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 (make sure to include synonyms), and click “Add” for keywords I know are likely to convert (for each keyword I’d ask myself “if I were a visitor and typed in this particular keyword phrase, what would I be looking for? Would I be interested in this product?”). I’m selective – better safe and sorry as I don’t want to waste adwords clicks on keywords that may not convert. If in doubt I don’t include a keyword that will probably waste me money, because I know there’s no shortage of products so I don’t have to squeeze every sale out of every product.
-Because I made sure to include synonyms in my search, the keyword results will include related keywords that I didn’t think of before. I would “dig” into those related keywords as well by typing them into the search box to return even more keywords.
-Think of words you can “tag onto” your seed keywords – for example, if the product is 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 I’m building my keyword list, I also make a note of words that are completely irrelevant to my product. For example, say I’m promoting a product that teaches women how to make their husbands love them again, and the google keyword tool results include “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 – do a search on IJ). I separate them by common words. Going back to the dog training example, I might have adgroups “stop dog barking”, “dog housebreaking”, “dog potty training” etc., where all the keywords in each adgroup contain the common words [adgroup name]. For example, in the “dog housebreaking” adgroup I may have 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, say for the adgroup “dog housebreaking”, I might 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 line description, 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 eye. With all the bolded words in the headline, 2nd description line 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 and 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 anyway. Using this simple method I’ve almost always been able to start off with an above 1% CTR for my new ads, which gives me a good headstart 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 depends.

I usual set my starting bids low to start with, 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 I was setting the daily budget to $100, but several run-away campaigns and several hundreds of lost adspend later, I learned better.

Note: 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.

Note 2: To create a large number of subdomains on autopilot, download the free Subdomains Creator at: http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/cpanel...ns-creator.php


5)Write the Frame Redirect Script

I use frame redirect scripts, because landing pages take too much time to set up, and using my hoplink directly in my adwords ad would put me at risk of commission theft and would also decrease the chances of my ads getting served, due to the double-serving rule that adwords has (i.e. they won’t allow two clickbank affiliates to promote the same product using the same keyword).

Remember I used “Dog-Housebreaking.domain.com” as my display URL? Now I will prepare my frame redirect script, name it “index.php”, and put it into the “dog-housebreaking” subdomain folder. My redirect script would look something like this:



<HEAD>
<script>window.status = '';</script>
<title>Successfully Train Your Dog in 7 Days!</title>
</HEAD>

<FRAMESET border=0 rows="100%,*" frameborder="no" marginleft=0 margintop=0 marginright=0 marginbottom=0>
<frame src="http://myclickbankID.merchantID.hop.clickbank.net" scrolling=auto frameborder="no" border=0 noresize>
<frame topmargin="0" marginwidth=0 scrolling=no marginheight=0 frameborder="no" border=0 noresize> <body></body>
</FRAMESET>
House break a dog
House breaking dog
Housebreaking dogs
How to housebreak a dog
House break a dog
House breaking dog
Housebreaking dogs
How to housebreak a dog

You can cut and paste the code above into a text file and edit the title, your hoplink, and the keywords for your purposes. I include all the keywords from the main keyword list for the campaign, because I don’t want my adwords quality score to go up due to my redirect page being “irrelevant”. I don’t actually know whether adwords can read the actual contents on my redirect page or not, but I do it just to be safe.


Optional but Highly Recommended: Use Xtreme Conversions to track your performance!
I strongly suggest that you use xtreme conversions to track everything. If you do use it, all you need to do is to insert a couple pieces of code into the frame redirect file above. See my post in the thread below where I explain how to use xtreme conversions to tweak your adwords campaigns:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=720435

This is no get rich quick method – a lot of work is involved. The beauty of this method is that it’s 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 30 products at one time. Of each batch of 30 products I may end up keeping only 4-8 that turn 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.

As using frame redirects, as far as I know, is against adwords' TOS, I suggest for you to eventually replace redirect scripts with actual landing pages. This is the stage I'm at right now. Since I already have about 40-50 campaigns that have proven themselves to be consistently profitable, I can now replace their frame redirects with landing pages / squeeze pages, still send the visitor to the merchant's page after opt-in, then follow up with autoresponder messages to sell that product plus other backend products. If a niche does really well, I may even develop my own products to sell to my list and then put it on clickbank too, and also other affiliate networks.


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 are making the most sales (write an article for each keyword etc.).


There....not rocket science. None of what I'm doing or planning is new. It's just a straight forward method that will get you results (that is, if clickbank fixes their payment processor soon...).


Sorry for the grammar mistakes - I'm too lazy to go back and correct them. Good luck, take care, and go make some money!


Amy

 

Amy,

I have tried the method that you have posted. The only problem that I see, is that the affiliate id does not carry over to the clickbank payment page. When I check for my affiliate id on the bottom, it says "none."

I unfortunately do not know a workaround for this. I will research how to pass the id.

Tom

 

practice makes perfect

 

Wow very informative. This is a great starting point for clickbank folks. Right now I'm stuck becaue I got a random sale on clickbank so I've got about $90 in my account but as clickbank says, I don't get paid until 5 sales with 1 being MC and 1 a Visa. Freaking crazy terms to get paid. Ah well, maybe this method will help me later.

 

Actually, I had just cross tested the script amy gave me on Internet Explorer and Firefox, and the affiliate id had passed through! I only had a pass problem on Safari (Yes, I admit I am a devout Mac User)

I will use this thought for my landing pages. in the meanwhile I will find a fix for Safari.

amy, thank you again for the tip!

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

Here's something you can try, and see if it solves your problem. I have no idea what it is and what it does exactly but apparently, according to this post, it is sometimes useful in solving affiliate ID tracking problems:

http://speedmoneymaker.com/speedblog/?p=34

I tried to find out more about it, but googling it yielded no additional information. Also, if you also use tid to track your sales, I did some trial and error to find a way to include both the "type=nohop" and "tid=xxx" extensions to my hoplinks:

http://myid.merchantid.hop.clickbank.net/?type=nohop&tid=xxxx

I implemented this to all my hoplinks yesterday and my sales have jumped back up! Now I don't know if the change is due to this "nohop" parameter or if it's just because clickbank happened to have fixed their payment processor issues. But at least I know for sure that it won't break your hoplink.

Hope this helps you a little bit!

karma

 

Apparently using frame redirects is against clickbank's TOS as well - they can shut down your account if they find out. This is why I strongly advise everyone to only use my method above as a time-saving method to finding profitable niches. Once you have a few profitable campaigns going, proceed to replace the frame redirects with landing pages such as squeeze pages or product review pages, and quickly load up a few messages in your autoresponder to sell the particular clickbank product. You can still direct your visitors to the merchant's page after they opt-in. Try not to be complacent earning quick money - it could disappear overnight (if google or clickbank catches you), whereas with a list you can sell to your customers again and again.

Amy

 

Great tips.

And I think I'm going to go ahead and stop that Chopper Tattoo campaign... I was hoping it was just bad luck I hadn't made a sale yet

 

What is IJ?

 

Yep its all changing thats for sure - I did some scans with this the other day and quite upsetting are the results really

 

This is an excellent guide. Much better then guides I've paid for. Very nice Amy.

 

nice,

+ rep

 

Good advice but alot of us know this. You have to take these instructions in to greater detail. Evrey Ebook that I read puts evreything in to a summary just like you did.

Once again good advice for beginners.

 

I dont know about that. I've seen plenty of eBooks with less useful info than that post. Plus I think she said everything that needs to be said.... It's just a matter of realizing how much failure you'll have on the way. I mean what she described is really quite a bit of work.

I've been too lazy to do the subdomain thing for the urls thus far... I know it improves CTR but..

Side note: I bought XTreme Conversions and I'm having some technical difficulties with it .. I can't get it to work properly.

 

How do you find clickbank products?

All the good ones are already mass promoted on PPC.

The ones no one promotes are bad. Do I just randomly pick a few and go with it?

 

Thanks for that post. This is actually the second time I have read it (I saw it on another forum).

High gravity + High Payout = Success (That's my equation anyway and I'm sticking to it!

 

thanks for the post dude i am going to put that into practice

 

how do i put the redirect script in the godaddy subdomains? thanks

 

Thanks for the post, I'll give it a go

 

Good post, I have already read this on your blog.