Succeeding or failing as an affiliate marketer can often be traced back to the products you choose to promote. At first, selecting a product to promote seems simple enough. You sign up with ClickBank and choose from any of the thousands of products available from over 12,000 vendors, then create a HopLink and slap it on your website – done!
But then, a couple of weeks down the line, you begin to wonder why you haven’t made any sales. You start to get a sneaking suspicion that maybe you should have spent more time choosing the right product to promote!
Understandably, the sheer selection of products on offer at ClickBank can be completely overwhelming to a newbie. How do you know if a product will sell well? What about competition? What do all the numbers mean?
Although there is no 100% watertight method for finding a profitable product, there are a few things that go a long way to increasing your chances of success.
Here are six research steps we recommend for finding a profitable ClickBank product to promote:
1 – Brainstorming a niche – The first thing you need to do is think about what market you’d like to work in. Choosing a market related to your hobbies, skills, passions and experiences is an excellent starting point (after all, you’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about it!). Are you a cat lover? Have you had experience with a particular health problem? Did you ace languages at school? Do your friends come to you for relationship advice? Having an existing knowledge of a niche can be a big advantage when you come to marketing it, because it’s much faster and easier to write persuasive and credible copy for your sales pages when you know what you are talking about.
So, have a scroll through ClickBank’s Marketplace and create a shortlist of niches you think you could effectively promote. Of course, ultimately you need to choose a profitable market over one that you simply like talking about, so these next steps will help you whittle your list down.
2 – Understand your customers – Let’s say you added ‘playing guitar’ to your niche list in Step 1. If you wish to pursue this idea further, then it’s very important that you understand (1) who in this niche is buying, and (2) what they are buying. The easiest way to delve into the minds of your market is by browsing forums related to your niche. This is a great way of finding out buyers’ needs, wants, and problems. For example, some people in the guitar market will be looking for free guitar sheet music; these people probably won’t be interested in buying something from you. Others want to learn guitar fast so they can participate in an upcoming performance; these people are much more likely to want to buy something to help them achieve that goal. Reading guitar forums will help you absorb what matters most to people interested in playing guitar, which in turn will help you choose the best products to promote to them.
Some other things to consider while you read: How can you target impulsive buyers in this market? How narrow is your niche? If it is too narrow you may find your target market is too small to make sales. If it’s too broad you’ll find it difficult to get your site ranked in search engines so prospects can find you.
3 – Selecting best-selling products – By now, you should have a good understanding of who your market is and what they are looking for. It’s now time to go back to ClickBank and search for some good products to promote that will meet their needs.
ClickBank uses a measure called ‘gravity’ to represent how well each product sells, based on how many sales have been made and how recent these sales were.
A very high gravity (i.e. 100+) will generally indicate that there is a lot of competition in this niche. Don’t let that put you off. Competition is good because it means there’s lots of demand for products in that niche. It also means that there are potentially a lot of people with lists who you could form partnerships or JV’s (Joint Ventures) with.
I should point out that sometimes a low gravity product can still be worth promoting – it might simply be new, or an undiscovered gem. So while gravity is a helpful indication of selling potential, you shouldn’t reject an otherwise high-quality product solely because of its low gravity score.
