If you have a blog or website promoting your MLM or Network Marketing business, some affiliate marketing on the side can bring you in some extra revenue and is an opportunity to provide a wider range of products to your customers. For example if your in a health products-based MLM you could include affiliate products such as personal development programmes, fitness programmes or even eCookbooks full of healthy recipes.
One of the easiest places to start affiliate marketing is ClickBank. I like ClickBank because they have a large range of products to chose from and the website is simple to use. You can also join ClickBank as a vendor and other affiliate marketers will sell your eBook or web course for you. You don’t even need your own website to start selling products from ClickBank. Here are some step-by-step instructions for getting started on ClickBank.
1. Go to ClickBank.com to open an affiliate account
2. Sign up by clicking on the “Affiliates” tab.
3. After completing the sign up process return to the home page and click on the “Promote” tab
4. This will bring up a list of all the products. You can search for products by category from the bar on the left of the screen or use the search button at the top to search all products.
5. Once you have a list of products you can sort them in several ways to help you decide which to promote. The “sort” button pictured below, has the following options:
Popularity: This ranks the products in order of which ones are promoted the most by other affiliate marketers. Usually a product is popular because it’s selling well which is good but if thousands of other marketers are selling it you’ll have a lot more competition.
Gravity: Gravity is based on how many sales the product has and how recent they were; a gravity rating of over 30 is best.
Avge $ per sale: This is the average payout made for each sale to the affiliate marketer. This is not a good way to sort products as how big the payout is may not reflect how many people actually buy. Ideally you need to promote a product with a reasonable commission – you’re going to have an uphill battle making millions by selling $2 products.
Avge % per sale: This sorts by the percentage of the sale price gets paid out to the affiliate. Like the $ per sale this is a good thing to help your your decision when stuck between two or three products but not a good way to sort them to start with.
Future $: This lets you know if you will get any future sales i.e. if the customer signs up for a subscription or monthly payment. These can be good if you can find them because it brings a residual income in the long term.
Total $ per sale: This is the price the product sells for; this is not the amount you get paid. The amount you receive as an affiliate is the avge $ per sale. Remember if several products are sold (i.e. upgrades, bonuses, downgrades) then your actual commission may not reflect any of the figures in the information given that’s why averages are calculated instead.
% referred: This is the percentage of people who saw the product ad who then decided to buy the product. If you have a small list you may wish to go for a higher conversion rate to counteract this.
6. The best way to sort is by popularity or gravity. Vendor Spotlights are another way to help you find a good product as they are highlighted articles by ClickBank about certain products. You’ll see the vendor spotlight link under the “Promote” button
7. If you are planning on e-mailing people your product link look for a vendor with pre-written sales e-mails which you can cut and paste – easy! Go to the vendor’s website where you should be able to see afiliate tools like e-mail letters, buttons and banners.
8. When you’ve found a product you’d like to promote click on the green “Promote” button.
9. A new screen will pop up asking for your account nickname which you entered when you signed up. You can also enter an optional tracking ID but you don’t have to worry about it. When you click on create it will bring up a link which you can cut and paste to use. You may want to shorten the link using bitly.
10. You can promote your products by e-mailing your list of customers and prospects, pasting the link on your website or blog or posting the link on your social network board like FaceBook, Twitter or MySpace. You could also make the link part of your e-mail signature. Or, if you’ve bought the product for yourself and loved it, why not write up a review on your blog? Soon you’ll be laughing all the way to the (Click) Bank!
