ClickBank – Internet Gold or False Dawn?

Clickbank is one of the great success stories of the Internet.

This site has generated over a billion dollars of revenue since it was set up a few years ago.

It doesn’t even sell it’s own products – it relies of you and me to create digital content that it can sell via the Internet. While this can include software and other digital deliverable content, it’s strength is in the selling of digital information in eBook format.

Selling Your Own Digital Product on Clickbank

You’ve probably noticed that newspapers and your local bookstore may be struggling. Is it because we are reading less?

Of course not! We’re reading more than ever, it’s just that newspapers and bookstores are so last century!

If you want to get published the Internet has never made it easier. While you can make a modest income writing blogs, if you have a lot of knowledge on a specific subject then it’s sometimes better to collect it all together in the form of a eBook.

eBooks can sell very well, but there are a few considerations.

Firstly, choose a popular subject area. On Clickbank the most lucrative areas in terms of sales are:

• Making Money – The Internet is full of get rich quick schemes, but some people have actually made a lot of money by affiliate marketing and other means. While some of the eBooks in this niche are nothing short of pyramid selling schemes, there are incredibly good eBooks in certain niches that will quickly repay their initial purchase cost many times over.
• Health – How to cope with a certain illness, lose weight, these types of eBooks are steady sellers. I’ve actually written an eBook in this niche.
• Finance – How to make money trading stocks, forex, commodities or other items. We all want to get rich, and so it’s important to know about financial matters.

Be under no illusions that if you want to make money from selling eBooks on Clickbank, you have to be commercially minded. Unless you are an established author with a big following nobody is likely to want to buy your poetry, or favorite recipes, or your novel. Also don’t forget that most eBooks sell for far more than an equivalent paper book would cost from a bookstore. People are willing to pay more for eBooks compared to traditional paper books, but the content has to be good! The best ideas are to write an eBook in a very narrow niche which would be too small a market for a traditional publisher.

Once you’ve written your masterpiece, it’s usually best to turn it into an Adobe Acrobat file. There is a range of free software available that will convert Microsoft Word documents and other formats into PDF files. Some authors choose to protect their documents so that they can’t be copied.

Clickbank is fairly relaxed about what products it sells, but check their terms and conditions before you start writing your eBook. Also bear in mind that your eBook needs a domain name from which you can market it, and it can’t be on a free website hosting service. There is also a one time activation fee for listing a product on Clickbank.

You’ll also need a marketing squeeze page for your product.

Selling affiliate products on Clickbank

Short of ideas? Hate the idea of writing eBooks? Can’t write software to sell?

Don’t worry – if you don’t have your own product then you can still make money from Clickbank. Instead of selling your own product, why not market someone else’s product.

The important thing is to realise that Internet Marketing is hard work… immensely hard work.

You know, when I visit the Clickbank website I usually see adverts like this:

Well it would be fantastic if I made $3,815.60 a day selling eBooks on Clickbank. But that ain’t gonna happen for 99.9% of aspiring Internet Marketeers. In fact, what you’re more likely to see is something like my own sales report:

So I make a few sales here or there, but I’m certainly not getting rich off of Clickbank. And you have to remember that I have to pay tax on that income, as well as pay for my web hosting and other business expenses. Most marketeers probably don’t make enough to pay for the electricity to run their computers!

How to choose which Clickbank products to sell

If I haven’t put you off, then here’s how to choose products to market yourself…

Clickbank has a Marketplace in which it lists all the products you can market on behalf of the vendors.

There are several strategies for affiliate marketing. The first is to place fairly untargeted adverts on your websites, and hope the website user fits the demographic that your product relates to. So for example if you were marketing a weight loss eBook then you would hope that some of your website visitors were overweight, and might notice the advert for the weight loss eBook.

This can be an effective strategy for selling products. However, it relies on very high levels of traffic to your website(s), so it is only really effective if you have a big online empire.

You might however have noticed that you can get smart. Smartness is very important in Internet marketing! Now if your website was about dieting and weight loss, you could also put an advert for the weight loss eBook. But since you know that your target audience of the website are looking for information to lose weight, they are many more times likely to want to buy an eBook about weight loss.

So when you are marketing a Clickbank product, it makes sense to market products related to your website’s own niche.

Fortunately finding suitable products to market is straightforward, as Clickbank has a marketplace that lists suitable products in a range of subject areas. Products are listed according to how well they sell – this is a good indication of whether you would be able to make money from them.

If you don’t have a website in a specific niche then you could try marketing a specific eBook. You can do well at this if you are better at marketing than the book’s original author. Always remember that people like to see product FEATURES, but they will buy a product based on its BENEFITS. Product review pages are effective at online marketing.

So I hope this article helps with your Clickbank product marketing career. People have struck gold on Clickbank, but it’s a hard, hard way of making money!

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