Zero Sales Week - US Elections or Halloween?
I don’t know what was the exact reason for my past zero sales week, but I think some impact on it was from US elections 2008 and probably the Halloween. Now, I’m not saying that if America is selecting a new president, then you can’t make sales, but I’ve noticed that I wasn’t the only guy, who had a bad week.
If you hang around some Internet marketing forums, such as Digital Point or Warrior Forum, then you have probably heard lots of complaints from members about abnormal sales fluctuations. Some even believe, that Clickbank is constantly having payment processing problems, which of course, we know nothing about. A lot of marketers went from few daily sales to complete zero. How normal is that?
The strangest thing about the past week with zero sales was that my traffic remained the same, but my conversions turned to zero. There was a product, which was making me 1-2 sales daily, and suddenly nothing for a week. I don’t usually like to complain about things, and I try to cope with my problems patiently, but when the problem is not on your side, you can’t do anything, can you? I especially hate, when Clickbank is having some transaction issues, and they don’t tell us about them. We are working like horses, sending massive traffic to merchants websites, and then after emailing Clickbank, we realize, that they had some “problems”.
Ok, I think I need to stop here, because I can keep writing about such problems forever. Well, let’s hope that the following weeks and months will be much better. Christmas and New Year are coming, and if you have missed your money-making opportunity on Halloween, then you have pretty much time to get ready to cash on winter events. You may even try to promote some physical products, and become an affiliate of eBay or Amazon, because those sites sales explode during Christmas period.
If you are planning to use paid advertising for your promotions, then of course, Adwords is the best way to go and if you feel that you need some help with creating profitable campaigns, then I would certainly recommend Commission Blueprint. Check it out here.
Linking From A Landing Page To The Payment Page
There is still ongoing debate about linking from a landing page to the Clickbank payment page or to the merchant’s website. I don’t know why people are confused with this, because for me it’s absolutely clear, that a landing page is not meant to be a page, where you want to sell something. The reason, why we are building landing pages is because we want to make a customer more familiar with a particular product or share our experience with it, but not to sell it. The selling part is the job of the merchant’s website.
My personal opinion on this is that you should never direct a customer from a landing page to the payment page without letting them to see the publisher’s website. Of course, there might be people who are doing well this way, but I am sure, they could have better conversions.
One of the biggest disadvantages of using this method is that you don’t set a cookie in the customer’s browser, when they go the payment page. So if they don’t buy now, and then come back later, you won’t get a commission. However, that’s not the only problem. This method is actually cookie stuffing, which is against Clickbank TOS. You may do fine for some time, but I think sooner or later, Clickbank will find you. It’s always better to say on a legal side, so you don’t run into problems later on. If you are really curious, how to directly send a visitor to the payment page, then here’s how you do it.
http://ItemNumber.AffiliateID_PublisherID.pay.clickbank.net
Let me give you a quick explanation of what that means. Item number is simply the number of the product you are promoting. Usually it’s “1″, but if a publisher sells multiple products under the same ID, then that number will be different. Affiliate ID is your Clickbank username, and Publisher ID is the username of the publisher. You can get the ID of a publisher, when you are creating your hoplink. It comes right after your affiliate ID.
I don’t recommend using this method, but if you think it might work for you, then you can give it a try. To be honest, I haven’t tried this, but I am 100% sure, it won’t bring good results. In any case, landing page linking to the merchant’s site will produce better conversions and the visitor will get more information about the product, meaning more chances for a sale.
Preselling always works great, and if you think you are not good at it, then you should have a look at Affiliate Project X. In my opinion, this is one of the best ebooks, which describers how to properly present a product to a customer, before sending them to the merchant’s website. Click here to check out my review.
Outsourcing Clickbank - How You Can Do That?
Outsourcing Clickbank is of course a great thing to do, but unless you already have some cash to spend on freelancers or know how to actually outsource the work, then you shouldn’t to do it. In my opinion, you should do everything yourself at the beginning, and there is no reason to outsource anything, unless you really have no idea how to do it yourself.
For example, an excellent way to promote Clickbank products and get sales is to write articles for specific niches by targeting particular keywords, and finally getting ranked in search engines. However, if English is not your first language, or your grammar or spelling is not perfect, then you may have problems writing good articles.
So in this case, you can either keep practicing until you get better at writing, which is what I would recommend you to do, or you can find a freelancer, who will write an article for you for about $5-15 depending on the length of the article. I personally think paying someone to write an article for you is simply not necessary. It takes maximum about half an hour to write one, and I think every person can find 30 minutes during the day to write few words. You get better by doing, and in the long term, you will save tons of cash by doing the writing yourself.
That’s about articles. However, outsourcing doesn’t mean just that. It basically means that you are asking someone to do a specific job for you. It can be writing an article, designing a website, creating a program, or anything else. So what I think about outsourcing is that it’s not necessary, unless you really have no idea how to do the task, or have spare cash, which you can spend without worrying much about it.
Personally, I would recommend you to stay away from outsourcing until you establish some consistent online income. It is really useful for reinvesting your profits, but not at the beginning, when usually you don’t have much to spend. For example, if you bought some articles, and then you made more money in return, then it would probably be a good idea to buy more articles. In terms of Clickbank, you can outsource quite a lot of things, depending on how you are promoting or selling products, starting from writing articles to creating customized websites for your niches.
In conclusion, I would like to say that it’s really up to you how you want to do your everyday Internet marketing stuff. Outsourcing is easier and quicker, but it’s not free.
One of the places, where you can outsource your work is www.getafreelancer.com and also you can have a look on forums, such as DigitalPoint or Warrior Forum, in Buy/Sell/Trade/ sections for people offering their services.
A great tool, which helps to outsource quite a lot of SEO work, is called SEO Elite, developed by Brad Callen - the founder of Bryxen Software company. If interested, have a look at my review here.
One Time Payment Or Recurring Billing Products?
In this post I am going to talk about, whether it’s better to promote one time payment products or the ones with recurring billing. First of all, I would like to say, that there is no right or wrong answer to that question, because both of the types of products can be profitable. However, what I want to do here is to share with you what I personally think about this. So let’s start first with one time payment products.
One Time Payment
These are the most common products, which are promoted by affiliate marketers. They are great. Everything is quick and simple. You find a product, get traffic, the people pay for the product, you get your commission and customers get their product. Nothing else. What is perfect about this is that people are not subscribing to any monthly payment plans. Usually they don’t want to be involved in any kind of future payments. People have a problem, and they want to solve it as soon and as cheap as possible. This is what makes one time payment products very accessible and best-selling.
Recurring Billing
I am not saying that recurring billing products are worse, but I would rather promote one time payment stuff. The reason, why I don’t really like monthly payment products is because members usually don’t stay for more than 3-4 months. These are only approximate statistics, but this is what often happens. Unless the product has a really super-duper member’s area, like Wealthy Affiliate for example, no one is going to stay there forever or for long time.
What people do is they subscribe to recurring billing to see whether there is really that much good stuff, as the website promises. If there is, then they will stay for few months, but sooner or later, they will leave. The perfect thing about recurring billing products is that you get paid for doing nothing. If you get a big number of people to sign up for monthly payments for the product you are promoting, then you can just relax and do nothing, while you will be getting the monthly commissions. However, you can’t rely much on that income, because as I said, it’s not going to last for long.
As a conclusion, I would like to say, that you should promote all types of products, but you shouldn’t pay much attention to recurring billing products, because those are not going to be long time money-makers for you.
For those, who are out of Internet marketing world, and don’t know, what I am talking about, then you should check out Six Figure Yearly system. It’s really great for beginners. Have a look at my review here.
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