Kevin McClelland, successful internet marketer, shared with us his top tips for earns profits with a ClickBank Product. Read on to find out more.
My name is Kevin and I’ve been an Internet Marketer for about 4 years now, going full time about a year and a half ago. I started first as an affiliate for other people’s Clickbank products, but have recently started selling my own ClickBank product and would like to share some of my tips to becoming profitable.
Creating Your ClickBank Product
Even if you have already created your product you might want to read this, as there are some valuable tips. The first thing you want to do is make sure your product is solving a problem.
For example, someone is overweight and wants to lose weight. You create a product that helps them lose weight – you are solving their problem.
A man wants to impress his girlfriend by cooking her a nice dinner… problem is he doesn’t know the slightest thing about cooking. You create a video site that teaches a beginner how to cook like chef – you are solving a problem. If you aren’t solving a problem you will have a hard time trying to sell your ClickBank product.
The next thing you want to do is figure out if there are enough people looking to solve that problem.
Lets say you have an idea to write a strategy guide that is going to help people beat your favorite N64 video game. Is there really going to be enough people looking to solve that problem to make it profitable and worth your time?
Remember no matter how good you are at getting traffic, marketing, selling, etc., you are only going to get your product in front of a very tiny percent of your target market. Focus on markets that have thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people you can target.
Sure the bigger market, the greater the competition, but there are lots of potential customers on the Internet to go around.
You can always find a big target market and find a smaller “niche” within that market. For example if you are doing a weight loss product, you could focus on weight loss for woman over 50 and still have a big market. If you are doing a cooking video membership site why not focus on people looking to learn how to cook Italian meals.
Research!
The worst thing you can do is put in weeks of your time creating an awesome product, only to find out no one is interested in what you have to offer. Do your research before you start creating your product and make sure there is a need.
I highly recommend creating a ClickBank product worth at least 5-10x what the customer is paying. This is tough to judge in some niches, but as an example, if you have a course that teaches small businesses how to advertise online and you want to charge $100 for it, you will want to make sure that if your customers follow your course, they will easily make that $100 back and then $500-$1000+ more on top of that.
Another way you can look at that is lets say you have a weight loss product that costs $50. If you are completely replacing their personal trainer that would cost the person $1500, there’s a lot of value in your product for the customer so you shouldn’t be selling them too hard.
Product and Website Design
Alright, so you now have an awesome product that a lot of people are going to want to get their hands on. Next is “packaging” your product, creating your sales page, and creating your sales process.
A lot of ClickBank products are “virtual” products, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need any packaging. Getting a graphic designer to create “packaging” for your product can pay off ten fold. If you are selling an eBook, you can get a book cover created, membership sites can make membership cards, and video courses can create DVD cases. These types of virtual packaging will make your product look more valuable in the eyes of potential customers (just make sure you remind them that your product isn’t actually physical and that it is just for display purposes).
If I was writing this a year or two ago I would probably come out and tell you to get a nice, professional looking template designed for your product’s sales page, but I’ve learned over the years from others and from personal experience that pretty websites don’t always result in the most sales. Sometimes ugly is better. This is something you will have to test on your own. What I would recommend as far as website/template design is that you choose a template that allows you to have content “above the fold” (meaning the part of your website that is visible when people first arrive on your sales page).
This gives you room to put an eye catching headline, video, and/or content where visitors will see first. I also recommend having a sales page design that isn’t too distracting. Try to keep the eyes focused on the sales copy. Eliminating sidebars and other distracting stuff that takes the eye away from the sales copy is usually your best bet.
Lastly, create a sales process following the ClickBank guidelines. You have the option to offer customers a low priced front end product, and then upsell them on bonus products. For example, using our cooking example, maybe you will sell a basic cooking instruction book for $9, and once the customer makes the purchase they will immediately be offered an upsell of $39 to get access to the video instructions. Then after that you may want to offer them a bonus cooking for fat loss recipe book for $19. Create your sales process and make sure you get the customers email captured with an email marketing service somewhere along the way (more on this later).
Getting Traffic
Once you have your ClickBank product and website set up the next thing you will need is, of course, traffic. I could probably write an entire article about finding traffic, but I will just throw out some ideas here.
The first thing you can do is try and get natural traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). You will need to make sure your page is Search Engine Optimized (SEO’ed). Depending on your product this may be hard to do, especially if your site is new. For example, if you have a fat loss product it will be pretty tough to rank for “fat loss product” or “how to lose fat”. If that is the case what you can do is try to rank for a variety of “longtail” search terms.
The easiest way to do this is to start a blog and write relevant, quality articles around your topic. Sticking with the fat loss product, you can start blogging about anything fat loss related and you may have people finding your site via searches like “yoga for fat loss,” “struggling losing weight because I’m stressed,” etc. Once the visitor is on your site you can direct them to your product via calls to action within your articles.
The next thing you can try is pay per click advertising. This is where you run ads and pay a certain amount of money every time someone clicks on your ad and gets taken to your sales page. Pay per click is popular on Google, Bing, and Facebook (just make sure you meet their guidelines). Be careful with pay per click advertising if you aren’t familiar with it, as you can run up your advertising very quickly this way. I’m not too familiar with search engine PPC, but with Facebook I know you can do some cool stuff such as targeting certain categories and interests, which really helps get your costs per click down.
My favorite way to get quality and cheap traffic is to contact website or blog owners that have sites within your niche and ask them if they are willing to sell you advertising space. Often times these sites are run for fun, and the website owner will be thrilled to be paid for advertising. Create a banner that stands out, grabs attention, and has a call to action and ask them to post it somewhere (above the fold is best).
Another thing you can do is ask to buy an advertisement paragraph or sentence within their content. This gives you a great chance to create a solid call to action and get click throughs to your sales page. Plus it will help with your SEO (as long as you make sure they don’t “no follow” the link).
Lastly is something that ClickBank does a great job with – affiliates. As you probably already know, you can get other people to promote your product for a percentage of the sales. If you are offering a virtual product that doesn’t cost you money to take on a new customer I highly recommend looking at offering at least 50% commissions. Think of it this way – without the affiliate you wouldn’t be getting the sale. Assuming 50% and a $100 product – would you rather have $50 over $0? Offer your affiliates a generous commission and more people will be willing to promote your product.
Don’t be afraid to go out and actively search for affiliates. Find people who are promoting other products within your niche and ask them if they’d be willing to promote your ClickBank product.
Also I highly recommend putting up an affiliate page, and link to it from the footer of your site. On this page include your ClickBank hoplink, and creatives (banners, email copy, etc.) that affiliate can use. The easier you make it for the affiliates the more affiliates you will get promoting your product.
Testing
OK cool – you now have traffic coming to your sales page… what’s next? The next step is to test absolutely everything you can think of on your sales page.
Believe it or not, things like the color of your background, your headline font size, what your “add to cart” button says (i.e. buy now, get access now, sign me up, etc.), and the height of your header image can all affect your conversions. Changing your headline font can be the difference between making $500 and $1000 in a month. Use a tool such as Google Optimizer to test various aspects of your sales page. You literally can never test enough.
I won’t try and give any specific tips for increasing conversion rates because with every product it will be different, but here are a few things I’ve had success with: videos on the sale page, arrows pointing to my add to cart buttons, making your guarantee offer nice and visible, and including lots of testimonials.
Capturing Leads
Have you ever heard the saying “the money is in the list”? For those who are unfamiliar with that saying, it refers to capturing leads usually with an email marketing service (Aweber or iContact for example). I am a big believer in this, as I have made a lot of money from leads I’ve captured and communicated with through email alone.
I highly recommend that you try and capture the emails of as many of your visitors emails as possible. There are a few ways to do this on a sales page. You can have a mandatory squeeze page that captures emails before visitors see your sales page (the downside to this is some people may close out and never end up getting to your sales page), you can use scripts that have email popup boxes when people try to leave your site, or you can offer a portion of your product for free in exchange for their email (example “Get 1 Free Chapter from my Cooking eBook to test out – simply enter your email below). Whatever you do you should be trying to get as many emails as you can without disrupting your sales process too much.
The next step is to create a follow up sequence with anyone who entered his or her email but didn’t purchase the product. Provide them with as much valuable content relating to your ClickBank product as you can. Again, this can be sneak peaks at certain parts of your product, or whatever you think will keep the prospect interested in your product. Every now and again throw in a call to action to try and get them back to your sales page to purchase.
Note: The email marketing services allow you to automate your lists so when the prospect purchases they can be taken off the list. This way the emails aren’t being sent out to customers who’ve purchased already.
Tip: I find the more the customers you’re trying to target are like you as person, the more they are willing to purchase from you.
Don’t be overly annoying, and make sure you are providing value for free more than you are trying to sell. Once you have this all set up properly it will all be automatic and your sales will start to increase.
Cross Promoting Products
You’re now at the step where you have customers, and you have a list of people who didn’t buy your ClickBank product but you know are interested in your niche.
The money making isn’t done just yet. You can now visit the ClickBank Marketplace and find similar products to yours that you can become an affiliate of and promote to your past customers and prospects list.
If your product is a video membership site teaching people how to cook Italian why not show them a great home wine making course, or a Chinese recipe cookbook?
I recommend purchasing the product first and trying it out yourself before recommending something blindly. This way you can actually give your personal experiences with the product and the selling will come easier and be more natural. If you don’t want to spend your money you can always take a look at the cool info that ClickBank has in their marketplace like average $ per sale and gravity and get a good idea of which products are the best to promote.
Lastly you can always begin the process over and create another product to cross promote to your now raving fans.
So that is how I’ve started to make a great income selling my own ClickBank product and I hope you found at least one or two points in here that will help you start making more money.
About The Author
Kevin McClelland is an Internet Marketer who blogs at his personal blog “DropoutGotRich.com” and has a growing lists of sites including his “Workout Tips” blog.
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