How To Survive As A Clickbank Affiliate

I just have to laugh at some of the ads I see. "Make easy money as a Clickbank affiliate". Let me tell you, if it was that easy, 95% of all Internet marketers wouldn't be failing at this business. So it's time that somebody printed a Clickbank affiliate survival guide. While this article can't possibly replace and entire guide, it is the hopes of this author that it will at least alert you to some of the things that as an affiliate you should be on the lookout for. Otherwise, life as a Clickbank affiliate can be a real nightmare.

Probably the biggest pitfall of being a Clickbank affiliate is the competition. What most people don't realize is that they're not alone in the world. Clickbank probably has the largest affiliate base of any affiliate network on the Internet. So if you're going to have a chance of success, the first thing you want to do is not try to compete with the guys promoting the flavor of the day.

This is probably the easiest thing to avoid because of the tools that Clickbank gives you. The Clickbank marketplace may very well be the greatest thing to come to Internet marketing since the dawning of the autoresponder. At the marketplace, you can see every product that is being sold and make an informed decision as to what products you want to sell. How do you do this? You do this by examining the stats.

The stats that Clickbank tracks are dollars per sale, percent per sale, percent referred and gravity. Let's take them one at a time and point out what you'd like to see in each.

Dollars per sale is a simple stat. That is how much you will make on each sale. Ideally, you want to look for products that pay the most, especially if you are going to use Google Adwords to promote these products, which can really eat up profits quickly. But this is not the only thing you want to look for.

Percent per sale is the percent of each sale that the affiliate gets. Ideally, you want at least 50% on each sale. Some products pay as much as 75% or more. Of course, these products are more popular and harder to sell because of the competition.

Percent referred is the percentage of all sales that come from affiliates. This is a very important figure and usually coincides with the next stat. Ideally, you don't want to compete with the products where 85 to 90% of the sales are coming from affiliates.

Gravity may be the most important stat of all to gauge competition. This figure tells you, roughly, how many affiliates are promoting this product. If you want to sell something with little competition, you want to look for gravity numbers under 20.

Okay, putting this all together, ideally, these are the numbers you want to look for:

Dollars per sale - $25 or more
Percent per sale - 50% or more
Percent referred - Less than 70%
Gravity - Under 20

Believe it or not, these products exist. You just have to find them. When you do, you have found products that you will have a decent chance of selling, especially if you use Google Adwords and mine long tail keywords.

These are just some basics on how to survive as a Clickbank affiliate.

To YOUR Success