Finding Affiliate Products
Locating the Best Affiliate Products
Determining your niche market is, of course, your first step. You want a niche that shows heavy online search activity, but does not have a massive amount of competition from other vendors. The next step is to locate products associated with your market that you can sell or use as promotional material. This is not as difficult as it may appear. In fact, finding affiliate websites to offer these types of affiliate products can be done fairly easily. One of the most useful affiliate website is Clickbank, which is located at www.clickbank.com. Unlike some other sites that only offer a few product options, Clickbank offers you hundreds of popular and powerful information products from which to select. To make your work even easier, the products are categorized by subject and topic.
When you are choosing Clickbank products, make sure you use the helpful tools they provide. These tools are shown as statistics and are located beneath the items. Using these numbers can help you select the best product for your needs.
Let’s look at these stats for a second. First of all, you will see the $/sale statistic. This is the amount of commission you earn with each approved sale for that particular item. The next stat is the %/sale, and this represents the total percentage of the sale price that you earn in commissions. Keep in mind that this percentage level will change between various products. Generally, the majority of information products pay out close to fifty percent as the commission. There are some, however, that pay out between seventy and eighty percent.
The next statistic to look for is the % refd field. This is an important bit of data as it represents the percentage of sales made by product affiliates. The higher this number is the better for you as that means the originator of the material is doing less of his or her marketing of the product. In other words, affiliates are making more of the sales, which means they are making more money A low percent number in this area is often a red flag and the product should be investigated further before signing up for it.
The next stat to pay attention to is called Gravity or Grav. This is simply the number of specific affiliates that have made commission money off this particular product. Keep in mind that this is not an actual numerical total but rather a weighted sum. During each eight-week period, Clickbank will increase this total amount by between 0.1 and 1.0. A low Grav number will often result in some online vendors avoiding the product as this might indicate the product is not selling. However, you should remember that a low Gravity may also mean the product is new and not yet had a chance to gain a lot of vendors who are promoting it.
A general rule of thumb is that products that are higher on the list are the ones doing the best in sales. But this does not always make them the best choice for you. Newer products that have yet to gain their footing can often be better choices, with higher conversion rates, because they offer the customer new or updated information.
As is true with any sales campaign, high-priced items are often more difficult to promote and to sell. Generally speaking, most consumers are more comfortable spending in the mid-range when it comes to online sales. It is true that higher priced products often result in higher commissions, but take this with a grain of salt. Personally, my approach is to offer products in the range of $30 to $60. My own experience has shown me that products priced much lower than this do not provide enough commission, and the products that are more expensive than this are hard to sell. You, of course, can explore and set your own price points.
Getting started with Clickbank is easy. You simply need to open up your own account with them, working as an affiliate. Clickbank affiliates are paid every month, normally by company check. As an affiliate, you can always check on your sales and other transactions with ease. Signing up is free and fairly easy to do. With each sale that you make, Clickbank will deduct a very small fee to handle its costs, and this fee is deducted right from your account. These account fees are common in the affiliate marketing industry, and Clickbank has one of the lowest.
To get started, just click here: www.clickbank.com
