The easy way to spot high profit gaps in the ClickBank market, create a product and get thousands of affiliates to sell on your behalf!
Following on from the Clickbank refresher last week, I’ve enlisted the help of super successful Clickbank entrepreneur Avril Harper to show us exactly how to ramp up a great income by producing and selling your own titles quickly and cheaply. Take it away Avril...
We all know that affiliates sell other people’s products on commission and the good news is there are more than 100,000 of them waiting to make money for you at one of the world’s largest and most trusted online trading places – ClickBank!
ClickBank describes itself as: ‘The online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product vendors and their 100,000 active affiliates’. The company has been around for more than 10 years and acts as a kind of middle man between information buyers and sellers, not only providing a high profile marketplace for quality information products, but also taking payment and redistributing cash 24 hours a day to product owners and affiliates.
Typically, the ClickBank sales process works where someone visits a web page describing a product listed at ClickBank, they decide to buy and pay using credit card or PayPal account, ClickBank takes payment and directs buyers to product download pages then takes its own small share of the proceeds before sending the bulk of the money to the product owner and sometimes also a ClickBank affiliate.
Now if you don’t like the idea of sharing you can market your own products and keep all the money for yourself, after ClickBank commissions of course.
But going it alone means you increase your own workload – usually significantly – and you will also severely restrict your earnings potential.
Consider it this way: would you rather spend four or five hours and £10 or £20 pounds a day promoting your own products, through Google AdWords, for example, or by writing articles, selling on eBay, for maybe £30 pure profit … or would you rather have 10 or 20 regular affiliates sell a dozen or so products for you, earning you £80 or so each day and demanding no effort or advertising investment from you? I know which I would choose!
From personal experience, I recommend you let other people do the hard work of selling while you focus on locating information products and uploading them to ClickBank, as well as providing marketing tools to help affiliates catapult sales of your products.
If you don’t have anything to sell right now, don’t worry!
I had nothing to sell either when I first pondered making my fortune online... but I very quickly learned how and where to find enough products to keep me busy for life uploading new items to ClickBank and letting thousands of affiliates promote them for me.
But before I disclose my secret sources, let me explain the ‘huge gap’ in the market, actually lots of huge gaps, every one of which you can fill and attract thousands of buyers every year, without ever breaking a sweat!
You spot the gap by locating high demand products at ClickBank, titles that sell thousands of copies each month and have little or no competition.
You find them through ClickBank’s Marketplace where you’ll see some classed as ‘high gravity’, meaning lots of affiliates are promoting them, and you’ll find some of those products have no obvious rivals at ClickBank.
So your daily/weekly/monthly task is one of finding a popular product that lacks competition but has high affiliate interest at ClickBank, whereupon you create a rival product offering more buyer and affiliate benefits than its predecessor, and you steal your rival’s ready-made army of affiliates, then you get to work doing the whole thing all over again!
This is one of the most profitable businesses I have ever encountered, and I personally have information products at ClickBank fetching £2,000 and £3,000 pounds each year purely from affiliate sales.
Imagine, for example, you get just two affiliate sales of every product each week, earning you $40, more than £20 a week, that’s in excess of £1,000 a year for at most two days’ easy work. That’s the very least you should expect for a good product, carefully researched before its creation, and with plentiful quality marketing tools for affiliates.
Once you get really good at it you should expect to make £15,000 a year from even a moderately good seller, I have quite a few of those, and you should earn much more if you continue adding quality marketing tools for your affiliates or, dare I suggest it, you do a little of the marketing yourself?
How to find high profit product gaps to fill at ClickBank
Go to ClickBank’s Marketplace page at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm: You can search products using keywords here, so if you want to locate all products relating to eBay or AdSense, for example, you key either of those words into the search box.
You can also click on categories here which I personally think is far less effective than using keywords to find items such as you might soon be selling at ClickBank
You can also locate hot selling, low competition products by choosing a main category and a subcategory which narrows your search and makes it easier to compare titles.
I recommend you choose the first option using keywords to locate product ideas and I also suggest you start with a subject you enjoy, a hobby perhaps, or a topic you can easily research and write about, which in my case might be: making money from eBay Classified Ads.
You should search using tightly focused, not generic keywords in ClickBank’s search engine, such as ‘classified’ rather than ‘eBay’. Use ‘eBay’, for example, and you’ll be presented with 147 titles, look for ‘classified’ and you’ll find just 30, which you then study for titles most closely resembling your new product idea.
From just four titles I found about making money from eBay classified ads, I must determine which of those titles is currently favourite with ClickBank affiliates, and then set to bettering that title with my new product and steal affiliates away from its top ranking predecessor.
My search starts with statistics like these at the foot of each listing:
$/sale: $15.76 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $15.76 | %/sale: 60.0% | %refd: 80.0% | grav: 9.98
‘Grav’ for ‘gravity’ indicates popularity with affiliates. The title with the highest gravity is currently most popular with affiliates and it’s also the one you and I need to study, emulate and get affiliates to abandon in favour of promoting our new products.
Once I’ve found my main competitor, it’s time to buy the book, read it and look for shortcomings which I can rectify in my version. I must determine why the book is popular with buyers and affiliates, and I will use all my findings to create my own more profitable counterpart.
Developing your new product
Next I must choose whether to create my new product from scratch or find a ready-made product needing just a few tweaks to turn it into my own exclusive long-term moneymaker.
The latter option is usually best; it’s easier, faster, less stressful, and lets me add new products weekly, or even daily to ClickBank, and start making money right away.
So where do we get this ready-made, high demand, potentially best-selling product to sell through affiliates at ClickBank?
• Resell Rights Products: You’ll find literally tens of thousands of products carrying ‘resell rights’, meaning buyers have rights to offer those items for other people to read and usually also for those people to sell. Some really high quality products are available for just a few dollars each (they usually come from the USA and are charged in dollars, rarely in pounds). Most include their own websites, even graphics and articles for you to use and give for affiliates.
But don’t expect long-term profits from most resell rights items. You see, within weeks, they might be available from countless different sources, including your intended affiliates. Marketing overload happens, for example, where one person sells to 10 other people, who then sell marketing rights to another 10 people (101 SELLERS ALREADY), and so on, potentially through countless generations. A glut of sellers means little profit for you on ClickBank, or anywhere else for that matter! So consider resell rights items useful in the short term, or apply them to one of the more profitable ideas shown later.
• Private Label Rights (PLR) Products: These normally comprise text-only documents, without websites and graphics, and they range from a few hundred to many thousands of words which buyers can use as they come or by making extensive changes and even adding their own name as author. They are hugely popular as website content or for converting to eBooks, also as articles to generate website traffic. But PLR items are created for mass market use by writers wanting to sell as many copies as possible, and it’s by no means unusual for a good article to be purchased thousands of times within weeks of being released. That, like resell rights items, suggests you’ll be one of many people selling the same information which will not endear you to affiliates. But with a little work – don’t worry, just a few hours will do it - PLR items can be your very best source of immensely profitable products. I’ll tell you why later.
• Other People’s Articles: You can download other people’s articles from online directories, compile them into one document, convert it to pdf, create a sales letter website and upload your product to ClickBank the very same day. But your product must contain active buying links back to other writers’ products, so although you might make decent money on front end sales, it’s your authors who benefit most from second tier selling.
Worse still, not only will you limit your profit potential from PLR articles, but you’ll also lose credibility and respect when readers find you’ve charged them for information they can download free of charge from article directories. Of the four sources mentioned today this is the one I least recommend but there is one really big benefit to using other people’s articles which we’ll talk about later.
• Items in the Public Domain: The public domain describes creative works – books, plays, pictures, music – that have fallen out of copyright or perhaps never were copyright protected. As such they are free for anyone to copy and sell unchanged or with slight or wholesale amendments. But public domain works are normally 70 years old or more and might feature outdated terminology which makes them unpopular with readers today. However, there are some very good and timeless titles in the public domain, relating to perennially popular subjects like cooking and playing golf, caring for children, learning a foreign language, and other subjects you’ll find selling very well at ClickBank.
Because there are millions of creative works in the public domain it’s unlikely two people will ever find and promote the same product independently at ClickBank, making this a good source – subject to the next sentence – of unique products for anyone prepared to spend a little extra time differentiating their product, so making it difficult for others to download a competing title from the public domain.
Differentiating your product is crucial, because rival publishers will cut corners by spying on you, checking your latest public domain finds, studying how many copies you sell, then accessing and selling the very same book from the public domain.
Thankfully, there are ways to stop your ideas being hijacked and you do it by giving your product a new title which makes it harder to find from the public domain; you also add a copyright notice to your new product with a threat of action being taken against copyright thieves. This will fend off all but the most determined copycat publishers.
Resell rights, private label rights, other people’s articles, the public domain... all make it easy for you to create and upload new products daily to ClickBank... but all it takes is another few hours to create your own unique product, one with full backing of copyright law, and little chance of being stolen.
How to create your own unique infoproducts in just a few hours
You could write your own products, of course, which makes them unique, but writing takes time, and in the time it takes to write one book you could create 20 hugely profitable and unique titles, carrying out any or all of the following simple tasks:
• Choose several resell rights items on your specific subject, take book graphics and a few hundred words of text from individual websites and place them all in a folder on your desktop. Next, take three or four articles on the same theme from online directories, copy and paste them into a Word or other editing document, turn the titles into chapter headings, convert it to pdf. You must leave authors’ links intact but those articles now form a unique product to complement your resell rights package, which you now call a ‘TOP GURUS’ GUIDE TO (whatever your chosen subject)’.
Buyers love guru packages and using articles from top writers at Ezine Articles (www.ezinearticles.com – THE top online directory) is the very best way to create them. Now you design a website, putting your title in a big font at the top of the page, followed by a review of your own report; you can use introductory paragraphs from your experts’ articles with bullet points or checkmarks - ticks – separating them and making the page look more attractive, like this which took me less than three minutes to create:
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You could create a graphic for your new product (you’ll see how in our free report), then place it close to the title on your website, and you’re on your way to a very professional looking website for your affiliates.
Next, you add graphics for your resell rights packages down the left side of the page and alongside give a short review of each item taken from their individual websites.
At the end of the page add an order button hyperlinked to your ClickBank nickname – our free report shows how – then finish with something like ‘See you at the bank!’ followed by your name, your email address, and ClickBank’s official guarantee policy. All done!
• Take 10 or 20 Private Label Rights articles, copy and paste them into a single Word or other editing document, then go through deleting repetitive text (some points are bound to be repeated through several PLR articles from the same batch), then reorder your chapters to lead naturally from beginning to end of your new book.
Now visit Google’s massive depository of books, some old, some new, many in the public domain. It’s these latter ones you need which will be used to differentiate and expand your private label rights compilation.
You’ll find Google’s book site at: www.books.google.co.uk
At the front page key your subject into the search box, then click through to locate books that might help build your new product. But be warned, not all books listed here are in the public domain. You’ll find most public domain books by choosing ‘Full View Only’ here:
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Importantly,‘Full View Only’ will return public domain books which you can use and many current copyright books which you can not use, so you must search through titles for works published pre-1900 (not public domain specific but a useful ballpark date) which are acceptable for you to use.
You can use copyright protected publications as research material for your new book as long as you rewrite it using your own words and do not include portions from copyright items.
Thankfully, most Google listings show the publication date so you don’t have to open documents to find it. Here’s what I found for ‘dog’ full view only books:
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All dated 1700s and 1800s and perfect for my proposed new book about dogs – well, one day maybe! When I click on those links I can download titles in pdf format for rekeying sections into my Word file containing PLR articles, but I probably won’t be able to scan them into my Word document because many old books have marks and stains that distort text on scanning.
• Take items from all four sources mentioned above and create a large range of reports and books for your chosen subject. Take a graphic for each of your resell rights items, create your own graphics or banners for Private Labels Rights, Articles and Public Domain Items – or have them created for you inexpensively by experts at Elance (www.elance.com). Use your graphics to create a website like the one mentioned earlier, but this time create a long, long website, featuring reports covering every possible aspect of your chosen subject, and expect very few visitors to leave your site empty-handed!
Unless you’re using resell rights titles only with websites you can convert to unique sales letters for your new products as shown earlier, then you’ll have to create a sales letter to form the website for your new product.
You can learn to create great letters (takes time), or have specialist copywriters create them for you (can be expensive), or could create your own from other people’s ideas free of charge and without breaching copyright laws. You do it by studying the sales pages for books you researched earlier, those on which your new product was built, and others you’ll discover at marketplaces such as PayDotCom.com and Lulu.com, for example, also Amazon and virtually all well-known book selling sites.
You study other people’s sales letter for elements you think might be appropriate for your new product, such as eye-catching phrases like ‘New’ and ‘First Time Ever’, impressive guarantees, mouth-watering insights into what those other books contain.
You key these elements into a Word file and rephrase them into your own words and your own unique writing style, being extremely careful to remove or rephrase every single element of other people’s sales pages. Creating a sales letter this way is called ‘research’, featuring more than a few words of another person’s work on your website is a breach of copyright law and can land you in trouble.
Now you need to upload your product to the Internet, apply to become a ClickBank merchant, and create marketing tools to help affiliates sell hundreds of copies, even thousands... don’t worry it’s all very easy... and guess what, that free report shows exactly how it’s done!
Now get ready for cheques to arrive – ClickBank calls them ‘checks’ – every two weeks and growing bigger with every new product you create.
Good luck and maybe I really will see you at the bank!
FREE DOWNLOAD! Hungry for more advice on how to boost your Clickbank income? Avril has kindly put together an info-packed ebook. Just go to www.canonburypublishing.com/clickbank and follow the instructions.