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Go back to Best Clickbank Product part 1

So this is what I look for in a sales page:

1. Does it look professional?

It’s true that some ugly sites convert well, but unless you have evidence of this I think a professional looking site inspires more trust. You don’t want the graphics to be too distracting, but you want it to be laid out so that it is attractive, clear and easy to read.

2. Does it keep your attention as you read?

When I was looking at the diabetes product sales pages to answer Ann’s question, I thought that one of them definitely had too much scientific information. I was losing interest, even when I put myself in the position of a diabetes sufferer. I didn’t need to know what was happening in my pancreas, I just wanted a cure!

The moment you realize that your attention has wandered, look at the sales page and try to see what caused it. Sometimes it’s something personal to you (e.g. a name makes you think of a friend) but many times it’s something that will cause your visitors to lose interest and click on that nasty little X at the top of their screen.

Personally, I never buy from sales pages that have nothing but a video on them. I don’t have patience or time to sit through it. I’m not interested in the vendor’s story. I want to skim through a sales page in a few seconds to see if the product interests me before I watch anything. I’d assume my visitors would feel the same so I would avoid promoting video-only sales pages.

It would be different if you do most of your own promotion through video, e.g. if you have a video blog. Anybody who clicks through from your video blog must like video, so they would be likely to respond well to a video sales page. You have to think about YOUR visitors and how you have brought them to this point.

Of course, look for a clear call to action on the sales page. The ‘Add to cart’ or other buy button should be easy to find even if you are scrolling quickly.

And it’s just a little thing, but I give extra points to sales pages that have today’s date at the top. I know this is just a piece of javascript, I even know the code, but when I’m thinking of buying a product I still get the feeling that this must be a bang up to date and relevant website because it shows today’s date…!

3. No popups or leaks

Leaks are when the page diverts your visitor so they take some other action instead of buying this product right now.

If your visitor goes off the sales page through a banner ad or some other site that the vendor owns, you almost certainly won’t get credit. Clickbank doesn’t work that way. The exceptions are:

(a) upsells (after the visitor buys the first product) and downsells (e.g. if a discount is offered when the visitor tries to click on the X). You do get credit for those.

(b) if the home page lists a lot of different products on the same domain they are probably all in the same Clickbank vendor account and one hoplink will get you credit for them all, but check them.

In case you don’t know, here’s how to check the Clickbank cookie: click on your hoplink to land on the vendor’s website. Then click through from the buy button on the sales page to the Clickbank payment page that asks for your credit card details. At the bottom it should say [affiliate=xxx]. If your Clickbank ID is shown in place of xxx, you will get the credit.

What if the page pops up an opt-in form?

In theory that should be OK but it’s a little risky. Your visitor has been cookied with your ID and that should survive provided the vendor’s emails send people direct to the product home page with a naked link. But if the emails contain the vendor’s own Clickbank hoplink, it will overwrite yours. Then the vendor is stealing your visitors and you won’t get credit.

You will need to sign up to the list yourself to check this out. First cookie yourself with your own affiliate link by clicking through it, then click on the links in the emails the vendor sends you and check that your affiliate ID still shows on Clickbank’s payment page.

Of course there is a chance that the visitor will delete their cookies after their first visit to the sales page. Then you lose them. That’s one of the risks of affiliate marketing and it can happen with almost any merchant. It’s just too bad.

Because of this possibility, some affiliates prefer not to send people to any sales page containing an opt-in form, even if the vendor is honest. Others consider that the opt-in will increase conversions (that’s why the vendor has it there) so the affiliate will still be better off: even if a few visitors delete their cookies, more of the others will buy. The truth is, your results will depend on the effectiveness of the vendor’s follow-up emails. You already signed up to the list so you can judge them for yourself.

The other 4 tips are here:
Go to Best Clickbank Product Part 3

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing | 7 Comments »

Question from Ann: “I bought your Diabetes PLR articles and they’re great, but I’m having trouble deciding on the best Clickbank product to promote. There are many ebooks in Clickbank, all offering a different ‘cure’ for diabetes. Without being an expert, how do I choose? Do I rely on gravity? Should I offer a choice by promoting several products, or will that just confuse my visitors, who will be thinking that the different methods can’t all be right?”

That’s an edited version of a question that I received last week. When I replied, Ann said that she found the points I raised very useful, so here’s an expanded version of them.

First, to find all the Clickbank products for a particular niche, I use cbengine.com. I find it returns more relevant results than searching on Clickbank’s own search tool. Just type the niche name in the ‘Keyword’ box in the right sidebar.

Then gravity. I don’t pay much attention to that. I like to see that some sales are going through, but very high gravity just means a lot of other affiliates are promoting. That is not necessarily important.

It’s more a question of whether the sales page looks likely to convert for the traffic you send it. Clickbank will not tell you the conversion rates so you have to either run your own tests by sending traffic to different products, or base your decision on your own criteria.

So my main questions are (1) will the product convert and (2) will buyers feel they got good value?

If you are promoting to a subscriber list, I think question 2 is even more important than question 1.

I’ll go into more detail on these points in my 7 tips to find the best Clickbank product to promote, starting in my next post.
Go to Best Clickbank Product Part 2

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing | 15 Comments »

There’s an area near my home town that’s full of PYO (‘pick your own’) fruit fields and orchards, and it’s their boom season right about now. So to join in the action, here’s my Pick Your Own PLR articles poll!.

My latest pack was Bodybuilding PLR . What shall I write about next?

There are lots of choices below. You can also leave more suggestions in the comments section and I will add them into the poll.

Don’t forget – you’ll need to sign up to the Flamillion PLR notification list so that I can let you know when new packs are available (if not already a subscriber). Join here (it’s free):

Join Flamillion PLR

You can vote for up to 5 topics but you have to vote for them all at the same time. You cannot come back and vote again. Vote now:

Thank you for taking the time to vote in my plr articles poll!

Filed under: Private Label Rights | 13 Comments »

It’s time for a rant …

You may have noticed it is becoming more and more common in IM launches for the sales page and launch emails to use blatant lies and broken promises to imply scarcity.

For example, a UK marketer launched a new product last week. He advertised that ‘only 349 copies will be sold’. 71 had already gone in early bird sales to a small list, so there were 278 available at the moment of launch.

The next day it was ‘only 47 copies left’.

Now, given the number of people who were promoting this, I think it’s very unlikely that he only sold 231 copies in the first 24 hours. But there’s no countdown on the sales page, so without seeing his Clickbank account we cannot know for sure.

However, the day after that, no way can he claim there are any copies left. The last 47 must definitely be sold by now. The product is coming off the market … right?

Wrong. Instead, he sends an email saying that because this product has been selling so well, ‘the gurus’ have been begging him to keep it on the market so that they can make more money by promoting it. And of course he has to do whatever ‘the gurus’ ask …or that’s the excuse. So he’s going to keep selling it, but in 24 hours he will increase the price.

He even names these ‘gurus’. I happened to know one of them, so I asked him if it was true that he had asked for this product to stay on the market.

No, it was not.

And now 4 days later the product is still available, still at the launch price and – unbelievably – the sales page still claims that only 349 copies will be sold.

So he didn’t limit copies to 349, he didn’t raise the price and he lied that this was because named gurus had asked him to go back on his sales page promises.

That’s 3 blatant lies in 1 product launch.

And this is not an isolated case. This is typical of big product launches these days.

Does it matter? Well yes, I think it does.

First it means that the number of people using the technique described in this product is not going to be restricted after all. I don’t know if that will affect the effectiveness of the technique. Quite likely it won’t. But why disappoint buyers by leading them to believe they were getting something exclusive in the first place?

The result is that anybody who bought the product feels scammed and loses faith in it … so they will be much less successful with it than they might have been. (That’s why I’m not naming the product: I’m told it’s a good product and I don’t want to stop you using it if you own it.)

And everybody who received those launch emails, whether they bought the product or not, loses faith in internet marketers.

I advertise limited numbers of copies of many of my article packs and I really do limit them. The software that I use counts them down, and when they are all sold it displays a ‘Sorry, sold out’ page until I get around to taking them off the website.

So when other marketers make false promises to their customers about how many copies of something they will sell, it means that visitors to my website are less likely to see the value of my products. They won’t believe what they read.

Plus it can damage the reputations of the honest marketers who promoted that product to their subscribers in good faith, especially those marketers who were named and blamed for his decision to keep on selling.

(So take care if you are promoting ANY newly launching product to your list of valued subscribers, even if you have seen a review copy and know that the product is good. The product owner might just turn around and bite you in the a*** .)

I think it’s very sad that this kind of deception is becoming so common.

Sure, there’s a Clickbank guarantee on the product, so anybody who feels scammed can get a refund. But does that make it OK?

Filed under: Internet Marketing Scam | 23 Comments »

MySQL database backup only 20 bytes? Eek! That’s an empty backup. Here’s how to fix it if that happens to you.

I updated all my cPanel passwords following the hacking last week. A tedious thing to do when you have a lot of sites, but worth doing from time to time.

However, there was a problem. After the password changes I realised that my automatic backup was registering just 20 bytes (i.e. nothing in there) for all of my MySQL databases.

The databases hold things like sales data for my PLR articles sites, customers’ download links, all the posts on my niche blogs … important stuff. So I wouldn’t want to be unable to back them up.

It took me a lot of internet searching to find fixes, but once found, they were very easy.

1. Easy fix for 20 byte MySQL database backup problem

This worked for 95% of my sites.

• Log into your cPanel
• Click on ‘MySQL Databases’ (not the wizard, the other one)
• Select the database(s) and click on ‘Repair Database’
• Run your backup again.

In a few cases you might still only have 20 bytes. If so, try this:

2. Slightly more complex fix

• In cPanel main menu, click on File Manager.
• Run a search for a file called my.cnf (it is usually in a folder called /etc)
• If you have the file, open it up with the edit option. You’ll probably see that it still has an old cPanel password in there. Update it with your current password and save. BUT don’t overwrite the database password if that’s in there, unless you changed that too.
• Run backup again.

Note: Don’t include in your password any special characters that have a meaning in html (e.g. # !) because they may be read as html commands in my.cnf.

If you don’t have my.cnf, you might need to create one. But the above 2 options plus dealing with special characters solved all of the MySQL database backup only 20 bytes problems for me, so I can’t tell you how to do that. Look for some sample my.cnf files online maybe?

Filed under: Internet | No Comments »