I'm considering making my first foray into being a Clickbank vendor. I have a good idea for a product - something that's unique, helpful to a pretty large market and something I know a fair bit about. I can't find any decent competition out there. My question is - how do you convince affiliates to start promoting your product? At this point I don't have a large network of affiliates or contacts that I can turn to and although I expect my product to convert well, I just can't see it taking off without having a network of affiliates ready to jump on it after it gets launched. Any ideas on tracking down quality affiliates? As I said, I'm confident my product will deliver, but I don't want to spend weeks on a project that never gets off the ground. Thanks in advance.
One way is to recruit them here... theres a clickbank forum (duh) and a partners forum as well. You can also get affiliates from other forums... theres probably 3-4 other big forums that concentrate on affiliate marketing and you're guaranteed to get affiliates if you have a nice affiliate page. Make sure you provide them with the tools they need to. Things like PLR articles, free small guides they can give away, banner, images, ad ideas, ppc ads, keyword lists, and lastly tell them you'll provide free help if they need it. This shows you WANT affiliates. I hope that helps.
Thanks for the post. Obviously I know about the Clickbank forum here (seeing as I posted in it, lol) but do that many affiliates actually start promoting stuff they see introduced on this forum?
Lots of affiliates will find it through the marketplace itself on clickbank.com, and via various scraper sites like cb-analytics.com, nichejunky.com, cbengine.com and so on. Plus if you post on a few forums to recruit and offer bonuses, you should get a bit of gravity assuming the product converts. Once your gravity starts climbing, more affiliates will naturally notice the product through the marketplace and scraper sites, and you get a sort of snowball. I've never publicly announced the free gadgets product in my signature but it's up around 20 gravity all on it's own. A few more tweaks and it'll be ready for a public launch and then I hope to hit 100 Oh, one more thing - many vendors have an opt-in list of affiliates. Maybe there's some way you could contact them and partner up to do a cross promotion of some sort.
Contact both SEO and PPC affiliates in your niche directly by email. This means using whois a lot of the time. It is very slow going but worth it. It's also easier if you have 75% commission and your competitors do not.
I believe good product will attract big number of affiliates. Check the CBEngine site for more research in this space. Good luck.
You should try being nicer to people you catch affiliates like you catch flies: with honey! Now, seriously... I agree to all the points expressed so far, but I also think that for starters you should mostly focus on doing what you already do. Finish your product, start promoting it, make some sales, get some nice conversion stats going. That will make the rest of the work easier. Good luck, man! I'm curious to see what kind of product you've come up with. I just hope you're not about to create the "Learn to cope with idiots" niche.
as other guru's said Affiliate is a lazy man/girls. personally i will prefer to promote a product that have affiliate tools like banner, images, ad ideas, ppc ads, keyword lists, and good support to the affiliate. same as d0rhk said,if you provide those affiliate tools for your affiliate, they will happy to promote your product. A good looking site and promising saleslatter will help you gain affiliate trust also. Cause your affiliate will not promote your product if the conversion was bad! hope that will help.
One place I know of is the niche choppers forum, don't know if you're a member there yet. It's filled with top quality affiliates who share info and who actually know how to promote products without a learning curve attached. A product launch there will see atleast 8-10 big fish jumping onto your product.
OMG I can hardly believe it: he thought you meant the Clickbank forum here at DP! d0rhk was perhaps referring to the forum called "Clickbank Success Forum". It's not officially affiliated to Clickbank in any way (which some people think ought to be a plus, but sadly it doesn't work out that way). It's independently run, full of misinformation and heavy censorship: they don't allow discussions there about declining Clickbank sales, vendor fraud, and a number of other subjects. You'll fit right in, Dlm.
My .02 1. Provide tons of affiliate material. 2. Test it and prove that your product actually converts! Affiliates will drop your product quick if it doesn't convert, don't waste their time or yours if you can't make sales with it. Many aff's run a quick ppc test to see if the product will convert and then build for the "long term" if it's appropriate for the product life cycle. 3. Talk about your product everywhere! Join every marketing forum you can find. There is 1 marketing forum I know of where a lot of big publishers and tons of heavy hitting affiliates hang out (me included). I'll tell you where it is in private. 4. Treat your affiliates like friggin gold. Good affiliates are a precious commodity, just 2 or 3 can make or break a product and 10 or more can make your dreams come true. Learn to identify the top affiliates and latch on to them, make them happy and keep them close to you for future ventures.
I give almost every new CB product announced here a 'test push' to see how cold the water is. That is, almost anything not Mafia Wars or weight loss related. Would an eBook explaining that the dollar sign goes before the amount convert like crazy?
What's the easiest way to pre-launch? Would that be making a thread here (and on similar communities) introducing the product a few days before it officially goes on sale so that affiliates can do the research on it to get their campaigns ready beforehand? Fortunately, my product has nothing to do with any of the "saturated niches". As I said, I think there's a legitimate market for it and it will actually help people. Anyway, time will tell I guess. Thanks for the feedback.