Affiliate Marketing – Finding a product part 2
There were a lot of questions about finding a good affiliate product so this will be a part 2. I do want to step back though and cover some things about the purpose of the series.
This series will be primarily looking at using affiliate products that are evergreen in a specific niche to decide if it is a profitable niche and what product is missing in the niche. The ultimate goal is to use the affiliate system to become a player with your product.
The type of product I am looking for when I say evergreen is something that will be around for a while. Because we are looking to build a system around our affiliate promotion you want something that will be a viable long term product. For example the latest ad words system is probably not going to be an evergreen product. The scene changes constantly and next week a new ad word product with a different technique will be available and the last one stops working because too many people are using it.
Now to some of the questions and some explanations of the affiliate services. Start with Clickbank and PayDotCom.
One of the tools I use for Clickbank and PayDotCom is PayDotClickbankAlert. This is a free service with an upgrade. The free service will allow you to get a daily email with the new products and products that have been removed. The paid service allows you to sort and shows what they call stars which are items that are on their way up. At $25 a year the upgrade is very worthwhile. It also has a great search feature that I use regularly.
One of the big questions about Clickbank was the various statistics they give you and using that information.
I pulled this screen cap from Clickbank just doing a search under Golf. First the products are ranked by how well they sell.
$sale – This is the average that is paid to an affiliate
Future $: – If the product is membership based this shows the average dollars earned from ongoing payments for the product.
Total $/sale: – Combination of the first two so you have an average customer value minus refunds. If there is a huge difference then the refund rate may be high.
%/sale: – Your percentage of the sales price
%refd: – The percentage of sales that come from affiliates
grav: – This is a number that is based on the number of affiliates that earned money over the last 8 weeks. The higher the number the more popular it is currently.
If the product is ranked high and the gravity is low it usually means the product is declining and can be a warning not to invest the time to create a system. One of the nice things with PayDotClickbankAlert is that the paid membership shows you the products increasing in gravity as their stars.
The other question that came up in picking a product was about products using squeeze page to enter. Now if they have a float in or try to squeeze an email within the sales letter I don’t have a problem with it. I will not promote a page that requires a squeeze page before you can enter the sales page.
The system will be getting people onto our list before we are sending them to an affiliate product (future post) so I don’t mind sharing but unless the product is really kick butt would not send people directly to a squeeze page myself.
More next time and as always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
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Disclaimer: Some of the links mentioned within this post or posts it may lead to are my affiliate links and in such case I will get compensated for recommending those products. However, I will never recommend something that I don't personally believe in and I welcome your questions and feedback.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Some great point Mike and nicely laid out info on what is important. I do have to say that low gravity can also mean a potential gold mine – if product was just freshly reworked (sales page, sales process) and ranks well through the push of the product owner – it can mean less competition to affiliate.
Although your scenario is more common!
Alex
April 16th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Yes I have found that to be true but the key is if it is high in the rankings and low in gravity that can be a big red flag that the time for that product has passed and it is not evergreen.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Mike. Great info again.
Thanks for the explanation of the numbers that you find at Clickbank. Very helpful.
I was wondering if you are going to get into the use of affiliate promotional tools in this series or not? I have been listening to some audios of how to use these and would like to ‘hear’ your opinion of them.
Keep up the good work and looking forward to the next segment.
Ron
April 16th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I agree with Alex, although it is tempting to look for popular affiliate programs, they have also been milked to the limit. I personally look for niche areas that agree with my current audience. Although it seems that things have been done to death, there are plenty of avenues to explore.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Mike thanks,
Now I understand better the stats. Clearly the two I didn’t fully understood “%refd” and “grav” are important.
I have been using the PayDotClickbankAlert and even the free version is very useful.
Fred
April 16th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
This is really good information that I think a lot of people miss or do not fully understand. Thanks for taking the time to clear some things up about this. I think it will help some people quite a bit.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Great post, Mike!
The PayDotClickBankAlert service is one I recommend for every affiliate – information about which products just launched today through ClickBank and PayDotCom gives affiliates a chance to jump on board as soon as a new product comes out, often meaning better SEO rankings for their reviews of the product.
Just as important, learning which products are delisted that day let’s people remove their buttons and/or banners and put others in their place – a real problem for ClickBank affiliates up til now.
You’ve got the start of a great series here – Looking forward to reading the rest of it as you post it!
April 16th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
another good post, I have looked at this before but seem to have forgotten about it.Thanks for including it in your series.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I also use PayDotClickbankAlert, it’s a great tool to find up and coming products to promote which others might miss. It can take time to find a good product to promote, but once you do it can be a goldmine.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Thanks for the info Mike,
I have been struggling trying to figure out what some of these statistics actually meant and how best to utilize the information. You laid it out in a very easy to understand format.
Looking forward to the next post!
April 17th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Thanks for this good explanation about ClickBank stats. I will have to check out PayDotClickbankAlert. This is a good series, keep it coming.