Clickbank Case Study: Preliminary Product Selection
There are several key skills you need to succeed in affiliate marketing. You can’t afford to be sub-par on any of these if you hope to stay alive in this “game”.
The first skill you need to master is product selection. If you pick the right product you’re well on your way to a good-sized Clickbank check. Pick the wrong one and the only winner at the end of all this will be Google (holding all of your money).
There are two points to consider here. Number one, and I’m quoting Andre on this one, “I don’t care how good or advanced you are, you will ALWAYS have more losers than winners”. And number two, all the right products in the world won’t save you if you can’t market them correctly.
But assuming you have some decent marketing sense, some experience under your belt with Adwords and Clickbank, picking the right product greatly increases your chances of making some money with this campaign.
Now enough of my ranting. It’s time to pick some products.
Your goal is to put together a short list of possible promotions. In fact, you should ALWAYS have a short list of products you’re keeping an eye on with the intent to market them in the future. Always have several, and always refresh your list. Dump one’s you think will be losers and keep adding “potential winners”.
For this exercise, I drew up nine possibles from the Clickbank marketplace using the following preliminary selection criteria:
- Commission - I like to promote products that have commissions of $20 and up (not a hard and fast rule, however)
- A quick glance at the website to make sure it’s even worth analyzing further
- Quick competitive analysis on Google
Now I’ll give you a further explanation on each of these 3 points.
Commission: The higher the better (obvious) but it’s important not to settle for something too low. If you figure in the CPC in Adwords of $0.10, a conversion rate of 1% (both good estimates when you start promoting something new), then you’re spening $10 on average to make a sale. If you pick a product that pays out $13, that leaves you with $3 after you pay Google, making it not worth your time, unless you find much cheaper clicks and/or significantly increase your conversion rate.
Quick Glance At Website: Here I’m just making sure the website looks “presentable”, has a decent headline, and the copy is easy to read. Quick rule of thumb (which should be a no brainer), if the website looks like crap, I hit the Back button right away, and so will most visitors you send there. If there’s no headline, or something that “hooks” you into spending a little more time at the site, chances are others will follow suit and leave as well.
Quick competitive analysis on Google: If I had to pick my best skill so far in internet marketing I would definetely say it’s coming up with a lateral approach to product promotion. I have a long way to go as far as copywriting, preselling, and other skills go, but this is one which I’ve become extremely good at.
Lateral thinking is an extremelly important skill you need to master if you want to make serious money with Adwords. It’s a way of eliminating your competition, or drastically reducing it. For example, if you’re promoting an ebook about cheating, how many of your competitors will be bidding on the “cheating” related keywords? 100% is a safe bet.
If you’re bidding on obvious keywords in a competitive market (unless you have rock solid copywriting skills and a fine-tuned “sales funnel” which you are constantly testing for improvement) you’re going to go down hard. This is why you need to think out of the box a little and target the not so obvious keywords.
For the previous example I might type in infidelity, adultery, two-timing and other synonyms into Google just to see if there are other bidders there. If there’s a decent search volume (as reported by your favorite KW research tool) and a significantly smaller number of bidders I’ll examine the product further.
But those are just synonyms. Going really lateral is about knowing your market. You must know your market in order to break down the product into a series of problems/solutions that revolve around what you’re marketing.
I’m going to go a bit off-topic here and rant a little on lateral thinking so bear with me.
Earlier this year I was promoting spy software (I’ll spill the beans on this because Google deactivated my KW’s and I’m not running it anymore) with a very lateral approach for great profit. While everyone else was bidding on KW’s such as “parental control software” and phrases of the sort, I was bidding on “find myspace password”, “get yahoo password”, etc…There were hardly any bidders and I was getting clicks for $0.03 and converting 1:50.
Go try this for yourself. I guarantee you’ll make some money before (and if) Google deactivates your keywords for “hacking related content” (what bullshit).
That’s all for now. I went a bit overboard with the preliminary selection and explanations, but it’s pretty exciting stuff 
Tomorrow, I’ll show you which products I selected using the above three criteria and delve into further analysis so stay tuned.