How To Select Clickbank Products To Promote In Any Niche - A Step By Step Guide

With thousands of products available, Clickbank is one of the biggest affiliate networks on the Internet. And the fact that commissions are higher than any other affiliate network makes it incredibly popular as well.

Many internet marketers are interested to get into a particular niche that they are familar with or have researched. However they face a challenge when it comes to product selection. The fact that most of the niches have more than one product further compounds the problem.

This step by step guide will teach you how to select Clickbank products to promote in any niche.


Search ClickBank MarketPlace

Let's say you have decided to promote products in Dating niche. Now here's how you can select good products to promote.

1) Visit the Clickbank Marketplace at

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

2) Enter the search criteria as shown below

I have applied the following Search Criteria

Category - Society & Culture

Subcat - Love & Romance

Keywords - dating

Sort By - High Gravity

Similarly you can select category and keywords based on the niche that you are interested in. Remember to sort by "High Gravity".

3) Click on the "Go" button and you'll get a list of products. As you can see there are lot of products in the Dating niche.

4) The next step is to select products from the above list.

Here's what to look out for while selecting a product:

$/Sale - This is the amount that you'll earn from each Sale. Look for a product that offers at least $20 in commission. This should be sufficient to cover your advertising costs.

% refd - This is the percent of sales that have come from affiliates. Look for a product that has %refd of 70 or above. A lesser %refd indicates that the product is not popular among affiliates and the sales are coming from merchant's own promotions.

Gravity - This is an indicator of how many affiliates are promoting the product. This is only an indicator and not an absolute number. The higher the gravity, the more affiliates are promoting it and vice versa. Look for a product that has gravity between 20 and 100 (A gravity of more than 100 indicates that the competition is high).

Note - Gravity also depends on a niche. Some niches have lots of products but all of them have low gravity. This doesn't mean that the products are not good. It simply means that the products in that niche is not promoted by many affiliates. You can very well select a product that has gravity of less than 20 and earn decent profits.

Similarly you can promote products with gravity of more than 100 to cash in on market trends. A good example would be
"Water 4 Gas" niche that has products with high gravity. Since gas prices are going up, people are looking for ways to save on gas price. This is a good opportunity to promote "Water 4 Gas" products even though they have very high gravity.

Based on the above criteria, I selected 3 products (marked in red in the snapshot above) that I would be interested in promoting. (Note that I did not select Product # 3 as %refd is less than 70%. I did not select Product # 2 as it is not a dating guide).

But our research is not over yet. We need to dig in a bit more to see if the products that we have selected are worth promoting. Next Tab.

Analyze Products

The next step is to analyze the performance trends for the products that we have selected. Before we do that we need the merchant id of the products that we have selected.

It is very easy to find merchant id for any product. You will see a "Create Hoplink" link below each product description.

Clicking on the "Create Hoplink" link brings up the following window. Enter your clickbank ID and click on "Create" button.

You'll get a special link with your Clickbank ID embedded in it.

The merchant id for the product appears in the hoplink after your clickbank ID. In the above example, the merchant ID is GUYGIRL (underlined in red).

By using this method, I found the merchant IDs for the products that I selected. The merchant IDs are

GUYGIRL

ALEXANDER2

UNICADES

Next we have to analyze the performance of individual products over a period of time. This is crucial to judge whether the products that we have selected are indeed the best ones.

To check the performance trend of a Clickbank product, head to CBTrends

http://www.cbtrends.com/clickbank-products-performance-trends.html

Enter the Vendor ID of the selected products (one at a time) in the space provided and click on "Click to get the performance trends".

CBTrends will give the performance trend for the product that we have selected. If the product is in Clickbank for more than 6 months, it will give the trends for 6 months. Else, it will give the trends for the period that the product has been on Clickbank.

Comparison of Performance Trends

Here is the perfromance trend for the product with Vendor ID GUYGIRL

As we can see from the image, the product is gaining in popularity as well gravity over a long period of time.

An increase in gravity is a very good sign. You should always promote products that show an increase in gravity.

Based on this we can say that this product appears to be the best product to promote. But before we finalize this, let's see the performance trends of other products.

Here is the perfromance trend for the product with Vendor ID ALEXANDER2

Here the popularity and gravity has varied a lot. Even though it appears that the gravity is increasing, product 1 is a better bet since it shows a consistent increase in gravity. But let's check the third product as well.

Here is the perfromance trend for the product with Vendor ID UNICADES

The performance of this product has been pretty erratic and right now it is going down in popularity as well as gravity.

Declining gravity over long period of time is never a good sign. You should not pick such a product to promote.

So based on the above analysis, the first product is indeed the best product to promote as all the indicators are in its favor.

In some niches, you will find that the product with highest gravity is actually declining in popularity and gravity whereas a competitor product with lower gravity is gaining in popularity and gravity. In such cases pick the product that is gaining popularity as it is getting more popular and you can benefit by promoting it.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, Good luck!