Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money from blogging when it’s done properly.

One of the easiest ways of getting into affiliate marketing is by signing up with ClickBank and making use of their extensive database of digital products and services that can easily be downloaded by the customers that the affiliate marketer sends to the vendors’ sales pages. Of course, there are two sides to Clickbank - that of the vendor who has a digital product or products to sell and that of the affiliate marketer who will promote those products in order to earn commission from all sales that are generated from customers they introduced. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you’re going to be working as an affiliate in order to make money from those commissions.

Signing up with Clickbank is the easy part. It’s a straightforward form to fill in and you create your own user name and password. Then the fun begins…

To get the best from Clickbank, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing is to focus on niches that are nothing to do with Internet Marketing (IM). The niches you choose will depend entirely upon your own choices. These will be topics that you know enough about to be able to work with enthusiasm and drive in order to promote the products effectively. You will also need to have done your homework by researching keywords, consumer trends and other factors that will affect the potential of your chosen niche to make money for you.

You don’t actually need your own website to be an effective and highly profitable affiliate marketer. Many have done very well by using free hosted blogs and Squidoo lenses, so that choice is also yours.

One thing about having your own professionally hosted website is that you have total control on the content that will appear on your site, plus you will have the advantages of large storage and bandwidth as well as excellent guaranteed uptime that your host will provide.

Once you have decided on your medium, be it free hosted blogs or professionally hosted websites/blogs and you have found a potentially profitable niche, then you can start trawling through the vast database at Clickbank for products to promote.

There are some things you need to look out for when choosing which products to promote. Once you get the list of products displayed there is certain statistical information associated with each item that is of great value to you, if you know what each statistic means. Here is a summary of what you’ll see:

• $/Sale. An average of how much money is earned per sale. A product selling for $100 with a 50% commission should have a $/Sale of $50. If it is a lot lower than that, it means the product produces a lot of refunds, so you might want to avoid it.
• %/Sale. This is the percentage of commission given on each sale. Affiliates prefer the higher percentage commissions because it means more money in your bank account per sale.
• % Reffered. This gives the percentage of overall sales that are generated by affiliates. A very high figure, say over 80% will mean that most sales come from affiliates. That could mean a lot of competition making the product more difficult to sell.
• Gravity. This is a weighted number of how many affiliates are promoting the product and earning money doing so. The higher the gravity, the more affiliates are promoting a product, meaning more competition. The current top product at Clickbank has a gravity of over 700, meaning that over 700 affiliates are promoting it. That’s how many other affiliates you are going up against to sell a product.

These figures should influence your choice of products to sell, as you might find it difficult to get many sales from those with heavy competition, so it might be wiser to stick to products that have lower gravity and % referred figures.

Once you choose your product to sell, there is a link to “create hoplink”, which is your unique affiliate code for that product. The resulting link you are given is what you should enter in your own promotional review of the product that you will write and publish on your blog or website. This is how Clickbank tracks which customers were referred to a product by which affiliate. A cookie with your hoplink is placed on a customer’s computer, so when they come to make the purchase, even if it is several days after being referred from your site, you are credited with the sale and will receive your commission.

This has a downside in that many people now use anti-spyware software on their computers, some of which block cookies from being set, which effectively negates your sale. Many affiliate commissions have been lost because of this and at present, Clickbank have not come up with a solution to the problem.

Still, don’t be put off by this. There is still a lot of money to be made from affiliate marketing using the services of Clickbank and the beauty of it is that once you have your site up and running with your carefully reviewed affiliate products displayed, your energies can then be directed to promoting your own site in order to attract as many people as possible, any number of whom could be potential customers just waiting to buy one of the products that you are promoting.

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
Author and creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Filed under: Internet Marketing