Selling Everyday on Clickbank

There is a prevailing mythology about the Clickbank marketplace that it is virtually an effort free profit machine. Its easy to get the wrong idea because it is a marketplace where if you get your product out there into the Clickbank marketplace, there are over 150,000 eager affiliates ready to pick up your product and begin to sell it. Those affiliates don’t need to tell you that they are going to sell your product or get your permission. Just by virtue of being in the Clickbank community gives them liberty to sell your product. So in theory you could put a product out there and see its sales soar with no more effort than that.

But even if you get some marginal or good sales from your products using that approach, you don’t want to settle for marginal or good. You want to get the maximum sales potential you can from your listings on Clickbank. And that means you don’t just sell one day and put your product on auto pilot. You sell every day on Clickbank and you reap the rewards in terms of higher sales, higher profits and a better rating because you are being aggressive about your sales. And when your products rise in the sales numbers, they get noticed by more successful affiliates in Clickbank and you get to a larger audience. It's all about establishing momentum and then keeping it.

One way to raise your profits on your product has more to do with production than it does promotion. If you own the product you put out there so you are not selling someone else's product, 100% of what you get from Clickbank after the affiliate cut and Clickbank's fees are yours. You can either have the product made for you and buy the rights to it completely or make it yourself.

A good example of this approach is in the marketing of an ebook. If you write it entirely yourself, you have complete ownership over it and all of the profits are yours. But even if you have a killer idea for an ebook that will sell like hotcakes, not all of us are writers. But there are starving artists out there on the internet job services who for a few hundred dollars will put together an ebook that will read well and deliver a great concept to your customers. And by having the book ghostwritten, you purchase complete ownership of the rights to the book and you can market it and reap all of the rewards all for yourself.

Within Clickbank, there are a wealth of tools that you can use to keep tabs not only on how well your products are moving but on the relationship of advertising to product movement and how your commissions look to be sure they are healthy and not undergoing any form of commission theft that is sometimes possible in Clickbank. So part of selling every day isn't so much just paying attention to sales but to the variables of sales such as the success of specific affiliates and the level your product is reaching as a desirable product to promote.

There is something to be said for simple positioning and learning to help your product move up so more affiliates pick it up. So after you get your product into the system, make it a major ambition to get familiar with all of the Clickbank tracking and reporting systems. These reports can let you stay on top of your product's performance on a daily basis and if you see change happening, you can adjust accordingly.

That is the kind of dynamic product management that will result in stronger sales. If you see your product take a turn in the statistics that is not healthy, you have the chance to intervene and make adjustments or even pull the product if it’s a serious enough situation. On the other hand, if you see a sudden surge in popularity and sales and a greater participation in the product, you can do your part to make sure the affiliates are enabled to jump on the band wagon and make your product successful. And while the subtle changes to how you position your product and manage advertising is not exactly selling every day, it is making sales work better for you every day and the outcome of greater profits is the same.

Safe Selling on Clickbank

In the non-internet world, retailers are always fighting a war with shoplifters and people who would take your product without paying for it. You would think that this kind of thing would not be a problem in an online world. But in Clickbank which is the largest internet marketplace in the world, one of the biggest problems is stopping people from downloading a digital product and then not following through with payment.

Like any other retail setting there are security weaknesses in Clickbank as there are with any software environment. But with some proper caution on the part of the vendor at the individual level, you can find ways to plug those security holes and keep your product secure so every time it gets downloaded, you get paid.

In reality we sometimes are our own worst enemies when we become Clickbank merchants because we do some things that undermine the security Clickbank already has in place. The first thing to recognize when you market on Clickbank is that it is off limits to put links to your product files on Clickbank on one of your other website pages. Don’t try to extend the marketing by driving traffic to your Clickbank pages in this way. For proper security, the only way your customers should be able to download your product is after going through the normal Clickbank payment pages which enforce that payment is made before delivery. This is one very simple precaution to keep someone from getting to your content and bypassing the payment procedure.

Another good reason not to put links to your product on your web site is that it will cause this back door to your products to appear on the search engines as links others can use. Google will find the links and index them and they could appear fairly high in search engine rankings and that is very dangerous for the security of your product.

Some risks that your product page could get leaked are outside of your control. There are internet thieves who would collect your thank you page and product URL where and post them on newsgroups and forums devoted to underground theft of online products. The actual amount of thefts you might have from that happening is fairly small. The real problem is if those postings get picked up and listed on a search engine. Then you could have a serious security risk.

There is one step that will eliminate the search engine problem which is the bigger risk of your thank you or product pages for Clickbank getting "out there". That is to contact your web hosting provider. They have a way at the server level to build a customized security file that is checked by the search engines to exclude certain files form becoming indexed. By adding the URL for your products page on Clickbank as well as your thank you page, even if those links get listed, you stop the bleeding in its place so the amount of losses will be quite minimal.

However this approach must be used with extreme caution. The file that many web hosting servers used is called the robots.txt file. The problem is that hackers are very aware of that file as much as search engines are. And if a hacker can find that file, and they can, that opens the door for the locations of your product files to be stolen and then posted on another web site which opens the whole can of worms all over again.

The best thing is not to reference those locations at all so if there is going to be any leakage of their location, it will be through hackers whose influence is minimal at best. That way at least you are living a clean life and doing what you can. And by watching the Clickbank FAQ and updates notices so you are always up to date on any new security updates they are putting in place.