What was the niche
It was a home and family related, one of those in there. I don't want to give it away.
OK, so after you've done one email campaign for that ClickBank product, are you done with it?
It depends. If the author contacts me and says hey, I noticed your sales. Let's work together again, here's a higher percentage. sure I'll do it again. Other times, I'll just, you know a week or two later, I'll remind the people who didn't purchase it that, the product's still out there and the offer's still valid if they want to go check it out. And I get a couple more follow up sales on that.
What do you do to stand apart from all the other affiliates that are promoting the same product?
I try not to promote the same products as everyone else. I mean, when everyone was promoting the Rich Jerk, I mean there was thousands of people that were promoting him, and I stayed away from him. I would find other people who I thought had better products, I would promote them.
But if I do have to promote someone that everyone is promoting, like I said, I come up with those funny ads for AdWords or I'll put a personal touch on it to my email list, I'll personally review the product and give my own opinion on it. This way the people who are buying it know they're getting a good deal because they know someone they trust has already reviewed the product.
Or you go into the forums and talk about the product with your affiliate link?
Right. You've got to be careful with that because some people consider that spamming.
Oh, OK. And then how do you prevent your ClickBank hoplink from being hijacked?
I actually set up my own website, it's sort of like Tiny URL. You can type in any URL you want and it converts it into a smaller link that's encoded so no one knows that it's a ClickBank hoplink. And I've been using that for the last couple of weeks. It seems to be working pretty well.
I can actually, since I own the site, I can actually check the stats on it and see how many people clicked on it and what not. I'm thinking about introducing the tracking to just regular users as well. I
just got to do a little bit more PHP programming and so other people can use that function. But the website is aifan.com.
Before that I was using tinyurl.com, but the problem with that is a lot of spam filterers are starting to stop that URL from coming through.
Oh, really! What about the other related ones like runurl and zippedurl?
I haven't tried any of those yet. I know Russell Brunson has LinkBrander.com which is pretty cool. It allows you to cloak your links and send traffic to other sites, and as well, it places another little ad on the bottom of the window, promoting anything you wish. So you get sort of two ads in one there.
Now with the shrunken ones like the tinyurl and those kinds of things, that's just a re-direct, so when they actually get to the site, they can still see the hoplink. Do you think it still prevents them from stealing it at that point?
Well, basically when you go to a website, if you use a ClickBank site and it takes you to the website, it'll say hop= and what not, it'll say your affiliate URL, your affiliate ID. If anyone changes that, it doesn't do anything because it doesn't reset the cookie. The only way they can reset the cookie is if they know the original YourID.theVendorID.hop.ClickBank.net.
If they know that URL, then they can reset the cookie, otherwise, just by changing the affiliate ID in the window, in the address that's shown at the window, it's not going to do anything. It won't hurt your sales because it's not going to reset that cookie.
So they actually have to go out of their way to do that.
Yeah, they have to figure out what the vendor's ID is and then they'll have to figure out how to set the hoplink up and if they're not familiar with ClickBank, they're most likely going to be able to know how to do it.
When you're choosing a product, what's a good commission level that you're looking for?
Anything above 50%. Recently, I've been looking for 60% and up. The one problem with that is, you get into the refund rates.
You get the higher refund rates because the products sometimes aren't as good.
I can't say they're always not as good, but you're getting into the products that they just throw it together and offer a higher percentage rate just to attract affiliates. You just got to be careful with that.
And what kind of price point on the product sells well?
Depending on the niche again, $49 to $99 seem to do well on ClickBank. I've seen a couple of them for 29 that sell well. But really the 49.99, 49.97 you know that price range right there seems to do really well with ClickBank.
Now I know you mentioned that if you're spending more than you're making, then you know that you're spending too much. But just as a general rule, if you were going to bring in, let's say $5000 in sales, how much would you spend on advertising for that?
If I was doing strictly AdWords? I don't look at it that way, I guess. I look at it as how many subscribers I bring in and the long term money that those people can bring me. Because I mean I can spend $5000 upfront and you know, break even or lose a couple of hundred dollars, and over two months, I'll double that money without a problem, because I have all those subscribers in my email list now. And I stop my AdWords campaign or what not and I just use my email list to generate income.
So besides the Pay per Click, and you also mentioned buying links on other people's pages, what other kinds of paid advertising would you do?
I'll do ezine advertising, I'll do the solo ads, I've tried banner advertising, it doesn't seem to work as some people claim. I just love email advertising. I spend most of my money on solo ads and top position ads and sponsor ads for email advertising.
But if you've already got a huge opt-in list, why do you need to buy solo ads on someone else's list?
Because there are people you'd never ever be able to touch, other people that have spent time growing their list, they have people on their list that you'd never be able to get onto your list. People will trust the other people. like say I advertise on a website that's related to work at home niche, and this newsletter that's going out has tons of good information and it like goes out on time every week at like, on Wednesday night, and these people just love this newsletter.
When you put a solo ad in there, I mean you're guaranteed that those people are going to be looking at this email because they're expecting it and they're just happy to read this information, and they see something that is coming from this trusted source. So they think that hey, let me check out this site they're recommending, and they go to it and they're happy with the site and they click through it and purchase the product.
How do you pick a good ezine, or a good list to advertise on?
That's pretty hard to do, it's sort of hit and miss. I've had a lot of times where I'll spend $500 and I make absolutely nothing just because the email is junk.
What I try to do is I try to find people that I have heard of before or I know personally, and I know that their list will work. Or I'll see, you know, some of the sites will offer guaranteed click through rate or something like that. And I'll try to go with those sites.
But there are a lot of spammy ones out there that say like send an email to 3 and a half million people once a day or something. Or blast your email ads off to 5 million people a month. You see that, and I mean I would stay away.
What you want to look for, is you want to go type in your niche on Google, so you're typing your keywords that you're looking for, go to the top ten sites and see if they have a newsletter.
If they do, go down to the bottom or go to the contact or something like that and look for advertising and send them an email and say, "I'm interested in putting up an ad on your website," or "I'm looking to do a solo ad on your newsletter. If you can, send me the rates, and I'd like to work together with you". And I mean, those are the sites that actually work well because you have that newsletter that's related to that niche.
How much would you expect to pay for that?
Depending on the subscribers, anywhere from $100, I mean I've seen them all the way up to $3500. So it really depends on the number of subscribers in the niche that they're in.
If I'm paying $100, how many subscribers would be on that list?
Probably like, anywhere from 1000 to 2500, it would be double opt-in of course, so you know that they're actually real emails.
What's the biggest mistake you made when you got started in ClickBank affiliate promotion?
The biggest mistake would be, when I first started, I would just take a hoplink, throw it up on AdWords, use a generic ad and spend a couple hundred dollars on it, expecting to make money and then see absolutely nothing and wonder why.
What are the big mistakes that you see other people making?
Basically the same thing. I see a lot of people that don't understand that their email list is very important. They just send traffic right to the vendor's site and hope that the vendor closes the sale. And to me that just doesn't make sense, because you're sending a potential customer away that you're never going to be able to see again.
So, you never send them direct to merchants?
No, I'll never do that anymore.
What do you think is the next big trend in ClickBank affiliate marketing?
I think, I mean, content sites are always going to be big. Email marketing is going to be big. I think it's sort of going to stay steady with what's going on now. I think more and more people are going to start getting into it and realizing that there's a lot of money to be made with ClickBank marketing.
So I think there's going to be like a lot of content and niche websites popping up, that are going to be promoting strictly ClickBank sites. And I think those ClickBank malls are going to start to fade away as people will realize those ClickBank malls don't work too well.
Some people say they do work well, but I guess it depends how you promote it.
Yeah, I never had luck with them. Most of the people I've talked say, they'll make a sale here and there. With a lot of the people I see promoting them, all they do is they put up their main web, like main mall page, that says here's a list of products, and expect people to click through them and find a product they're interested in or do a search and find a product they're interested in, and that just doesn't seem to work well.
So it's not effective because they're not actually pre-selling the products?
Right, and they don't know what that person is actually interested in. So you're just sending them to a generic site and say, "hey, I hope you find your product. Good luck".
So what about making like a custom ClickBank mall type of thing where you have all those links but also personal recommendations on the products?
Right, that's what I see happening with the content sites, like people are writing reviews about specific products and posting links to those ClickBank products, and just providing relevant information instead of just pointing out a link. That seems to be working well for a lot of people.
So after the listeners are done either listening to or reading this interview, what's the first thing you think they should do in their quest to become a top ClickBank affiliate?
First thing I would do is sign up with an autoresponder so you can start building up your email list. Then start contacting some of the vendors who are top ClickBank vendors and ask them if you can possibly review their site or if they can give you more information on their products, so you can write a review on it.
And then from there, I mean you just start into the AdWords promotions and start building your list and providing relevant reviews to the people that are coming to your site through AdWords.
When someone's just starting out with those AdWords campaigns, how much do you suggest they would spend?
When I first started out, I think I was budgeting myself $25 a day. Nothing more than what you can afford to lose, that's what I got to say. If you can afford to lose $25 a day, go ahead and do it, if not, if you can only afford $10, try $10. Just until you get the hang of it, you know what's going on with it, and then you can start increasing your budget.
So, I guess when you first start out, you're paying that $25 but you're not necessarily making the $25 back in sales.
Right. The first time you do it, you're most likely going to lose that $25 and then say, I'm never going to do this again. But I recommend taking that as a learning step and as tuition I guess, and say, "let me see how I can fix this," and learn from there and keep plugging away at it.
For how many days would you spend that 25 bucks?
About a week.
And if it's not pulling in 25 bucks a day and breaking even at that point, then you're doing something wrong?
Right.
What final words of wisdom do you have as people are out there, to keep in mind as they're trying to become a success?
Everyone fails. Don't be afraid of it. It makes you stronger. I
failed many times and I pulled myself up and I've learned from it, and I just kept on growing.
Well, thank you so much, Costa, for sharing all your tactics and techniques with us.
Continue reading here: How do you prevent your Click Bank ID from being stolen
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