I am curious to hear from those of you that have your own products on clickbank. Was it difficult to get the product approved in the clickbank database or was it a matter of throwing up a landing page, having a decent product and simple adding it to the marketplace? I would also like to hear some of your marketing techniques if you're open to sharing them. How did you get your product known and is it working out for you?
I'm not a vendor yet, but if you look at the horrible quality of some of the products on Clickbank, you will see that it apparently doesn't take much to get them to approve your product. For example, there's a product that "teaches you how to live like Paris Hilton". Who would actually buy this thing I have no idea, but it was accepted by CB nonetheless and there's tons of examples like that.
It's not difficult to get a product approved at all, as long as you follow the few rules that they have for inclusion. You may get a product approved, and that is the easiest part of the process. What is difficult is getting affiliates. Join some forums, become a part of a community, and people will give your product a chance if it converts.
I figured generating the traffic and getting affiliates to start promoting your product would be the real challenge. If you have experience, can you elaborate on this as to how you could gain some momentum besides just becoming apart of communities? Or perhaps explains what types of communities? Are you referring to forums?
You need testing data to show affiliates how your product converts, what type of traffic it converts with, and what type of pitch works best. That is the beginning of your momentum. If you don't have an amazing product(converts very, very well in a broad niche), then secondary momentum is needed. This momentum comes from communities and outreach. When your relationships are not built before your launch, it is obviously much more difficult to get something even earning 100/day on autopilot from pure affiliate sales. By communities, yes, I mean forums, for the most part. There is also networking with people who have lists, mailing established sites owners in your niche, etc. There are forums where all these niches hang out, you just have to find them. General forums relating to Clickbank are obviously great places to advertise less mainstream niches. When you get involved in smaller forums, and people know you personally, then they are more willing to try your product. You get what you give. If you don't have a super product, that has lots of conversion data, your personal relationships with affiliates are very important. On smaller forums, you may get five people who promote your product, and, in total, they may make you fifty dollars a day. Mailing site owners in your niche, and being prepared to help them deploy ads and banners on their site is key in smaller niches. They have the traffic, and you have to make it very easy for them to split test your product.
It is not technically difficult to get a product listed in the marketplace. They have very simple rules, and pretty much the only / main reason you would get rejected is for trademark infringement. Getting our product / website to a standard we were personally happy with was a lot of effort - 9 months of work, 3 months solid conversion testing / sales improvements, then 2+ months of further improvements, writing affiliate materials, recruiting affiliates, tweaking, testing... we have big aims though and wouldn't dream of launching something in a couple of weeks like some of the attempts you see on here - browse a few pages back in this forum and you will see all the product launches and can estimate how much time goes into them... not a lot for some sadly, but you can see some that have had time and investment and are done well...
It is not hard to get your product live at Clickbank. You will even manage to get around 20 affiliates with no effort. Those affiliates won't get any sales though. You need to get the affiliates that have the capability to generate some serious sales for you. Those affiliates won't promote a product with a low quality sales page. You need to test and tweak the sales page until it gets good conversions. I am not saying that the sales page is the only thing that matters. The product (your offer) also matters a lot to bring in good conversions. As far as affiliate recruitment is concerned, the easiest thing will be to announce your launch at some of the best forums. Here is a rough idea of the things I do to build a new product: Niche research, product outline/idea, sales letter research (identifying the real buyers, their language and major problems), product and sales letter outsourcing (according to the research I did), graphical overview for the designer and affiliate area. The hardest (and usually the most expensive) part begins when I have everything ready. I use organic and PPC traffic for testing and tweaking the product until it gets good conversions. 1 sale out of every 100 site visitors can be considered good but 1:50 is the thing I aim for (and mostly fail in achieving that). The testing and tweaking part takes the most time and is also the costliest one because I may need to get paid revisions to the sales page. In some cases, I may even need to change the copywriter. In certain cases, the product demands a certain type of free "Bonus" to convert better. That's an additional expense. If the graphics don't work well, I may have to either get paid revisions or hire another minisite designer depending upon the information I gather while testing (and copywriter's suggestions). The affiliate area also demands some investment into articles, emails, free report, banners, etc. It is always better to have landing pages, review sites and videos for affiliates to use but that is optional for me and I don't do it for every product. That is a rough idea of the steps you need to take. But I am not a "super vendor" anyway. This information can be useful for anyone looking to build a product. You need to work a lot and invest some serious money into the product. Good Luck!
It wasn't hard... they have their rules you gotta follow. And certain products attract more affiliates than others. Mine is Soldin21days dot net ~ JIM