eBook & Internet Publishing News
• • • • •

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services. We may earn a commission if you purchase a product/service after following a link from this website.

Being a ClickBank vendor is a very powerful method of selling downloadable products such as software, eBooks, or access to a private member’s website. A big advantage of using ClickBank is the company’s affiliate network - you can set a percentage commission your account - and ClickBank affiliates (there are thousands and thousands of them) can link to your site to earn commissions, and help you generate more sales. A successful ClickBank affiliate program can dramatically increase your website’s traffic and sales.

That said, ClickBank’s affiliate system does have an important and frustrating limitation - namely that all your affiliates must link to the same exact landing page. This is usually fine if you are only selling one product, but is a serious problem if you want to sell multiple products and want to have product-specific landing pages that your affiliates can link directly to.

In fact, this is such a serious problem that some ClickBank vendors resort to opening multiple accounts with ClickBank simply to address it. This however creates issues in itself, each ClickBank vendor account has an initial activation fee of $49.95 (which soon adds up if you have 5, 10 or 20 products, let alone 50 or 100), as well as creating an administration hassle. Moreover if you split your sales across multiple accounts, then you will dissipate your potential for increasing your ClickBank marketplace listing’s "gravity" - and since gravity is one of the main things affiliates look at, may never attract a critical mass of affiliates.

Our new PHP Script, available to download now, CBMultiLink offers a simple solution to these issues…

Put simply, CBMultiLink allows you to offer multiple landing pages to your affiliates, all from your existing ClickBank vendor account!

• You can offer product-specific landing pages for each of your products
• You can offer audience-specific landing pages for a single product, if you want to give your affiliates a choice of sales-letters
• You can even put your landing pages on different domains or websites!

And remember, because this is all done from your existing ClickBank account, there are no additional activation fees payable to ClickBank, and all your affiliate sales contribute to driving up your marketplace gravity!

Finally, I should mention CBMultiLink uses standard ClickBank hop links and tracking (which gives affiliates confidence), supports ClickBank’s tracking IDs (known as "tid"), and, best of all, can be installed and activated in just minutes.

Here is a video explaining the script, and showing pretty much the entire setup procedure:

Please click here to find out more about CBMultiLink.

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank vendor:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank affiliate:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Imagine for a moment that you are in one of the following situations:

• You are a ClickBank vendor selling your own downloadable product such as an eBook or Software, and have set-up your "pitch page" where you are offering your product.
• Or, you are selling any other product online, and have set-up a sales-letter type web site that leads to the order form where a customer can purchase your product.
• Or, you have a “squeeze page” (a page where customers can give you their details and join your opt-in email list).

What are the two most things that you can do improve your success - to get more sales or leads?

1. You can try to get more visitors (”traffic”) to see your pitch page, sales letter or squeeze page. Of course, that is important, and must be done - but it’s hard work.
2. And the one that the pros do but amateurs neglect - you can try and improve the conversion rate of your page - that is to increase the percentage of visitors who buy your product or sign-up to your mailing list.

So how do you increase the conversion rate?

There are lots of things that you can try - you can change the headline on your page, change the text, use different testimonials, change the layout, use different examples, change the color scheme, and even change details of the product itself such as adding or removing bonus items, or changing your price (for example, some people claim that prices that end in “7″ are better than other numbers).

The difficulty in changing most of these things are that customers behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways. You may think a different headline or color scheme works better, but you can’t immediately know for sure whether your changes are going to increase or decrease your conversion rate.

The only way to know for sure whether a particular change will increase or decrease your conversion rate is to test and measure the results.

Unfortunately, testing and measuring can be a difficult task. A lot of people will make a change, and simply see whether, say, this week’s are better or worse than last week’s. The problem with that approach is it often gives the wrong results - visitor numbers, and how they reach your site can change from week-to-week. Moreover, the time of year, and what happens to be in the news can make a big difference to people’s behavior.

There is however a solution to this conundrum, it’s called “Split Testing”.

What you do is set up several versions of your pitch pitch, sales letter, or squeeze page, each differing from the others in only or two aspects. For example, if you were testing color, you might have 3 pages to test - red, green, and blue backgrounds. Or if you were testing headlines, you might simply compare 2 pages with different headlines. Or if you wanted to test headlines and color at the same time, you might have six combinations:

1. Headline 1, Red Background
2. Headline 1, Green Background
3. Headline 1, Blue Background
4. Headline 2, Red Background
5. Headline 2, Green Background
6. Headline 2, Blue Background

Once you’ve set up the pages, you measure the conversion rate of each to find the best one and that becomes your new standard sales letter.

What’s more, once you’ve done that, you can then try a second split test, measuring new parameters. So for example if you found “Headline 2, Green Background” was the most effective sales-letter in a six way test, you might then try a split-test like this, in order to see if you can find an even more effective, higher converting, improvement of your sales-letter.

1. Headline 2, Green Background with Original Sales Text, Original Guarantee Text
2. Headline 2, Green Background with Revised Sales Text, Original Guarantee Text
3. Headline 2, Green Background with Original Sales Text, Revised Guarantee Text
4. Headline 2, Green Background with Revised Sales Text, Revised Guarantee Text

And so on, and so on… the idea is that over time you can iteratively improve your conversion rates and get the most leads and sales from your traffic.

Improving your conversion rates has two beneficial effects:

1. You get more leads or sales
2. Your earnings per visitor (”EPV”) is higher

Let’s look at the second one of those - earning per visitor - why is it important?

Imagine for example, you earn $20 gross profit (after your cost of sale/goods) for each sale that you make.

Now consider two scenarios:

• If your conversion rate is 1%, then your gross profit per visitor is 1% of $20, which $0.20
• If your conversion rate is 3%, then your gross profit per visitor is 3% of $20, which is $0.60

Now imagine you decide to advertise: In the first scenario, you would need to find some very cheap advertising (less than $0.20 per click-thru) to still remain profitable. Whereas in the second scenario you have much more room for manoeuver, and can probably purchase a lot more click-thrus (from Google AdWords and elsewhere).

Of course in reality, I wouldn’t advise you to blow all your profits on advertising. But the point is even if you were to buy clicks for $0.10 (a bargain price), if your earnings per visitor is low, advertising would eat up a huge chunk of your profits.

So are you ready to start split-testing?

You’ll be pleased to know that one of the new features in the lastest version of our PHP ad tracking script - Click/Counter Tracker, is a powerful split-testing feature. Check out this video, explaining how it works:

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank vendor:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank affiliate:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

As you probably know, we offer software at CoverFactory.com for creating eBook cover graphics and box shots. That is the 3D-style graphics that are often used to represent eBooks or downloadable software.

Once created the graphics can be used within an eBook (for example on the intro page, or as the splash graphic shown when the eBook is starting), or on websites, advertising materials, etc.

I’ve recently been experimenting with creating video demos of some of our software, so with new further ado, here are the videos. I won’t pretend they are highly polished studio products, but nevertheless I think that you may find them useful.

Video 1:

Video 2:

And if you want to download a free trial of CoverFactory, or check out some graphics made using the software, please go to CoverFactory.com

Answers 2000 is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an updated version, 3.00, of our PHP Top Site script. The script offers a powerful means
for webmasters to gain free traffic by running their own top site or top sites.

Example Top Site:

The idea of a top site is the operator creates one on a chosen theme, such as “Top 50 Aircraft Sites”, “Top 25 Rap Music Sites”, etc., and other webmasters join and list their sites within the top site. All participating webmasters gain traffic from the top site, but those who send the most traffic to the top site (as well as the top site operator) tend to gain the most free traffic.

The Answers 2000 Top Sites allows top sites to be created on any theme at all, is fully customizable, includes anti-cheating mechanisms built-in, and includes a members’ area for participating webmasters, and password protected administration tools for the operator of the top site. Moreover it allows the operator to create multiple top sites on different themes, even a single website.

Full details at http://www.scriptrocket.com/tstopsite.php

Answers 2000 is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an updated version, 3.00, of our PHP Click/Counter script. The script is the ideal solution for marketers wanting to track their traffic and marketing campaigns, and includes the ability to operate unlimited ad trackers. unlimited invisible web visitor counters, conversion-rate measurement tools for sales-letters, and split-testing tools for multiple sales-letters. The latter is particularly important as it provides a powerful and easy-to-use method of splitting testing multiple sales letters or squeeze pages so as to produce the best results.

The split-testing features have been especially designed so as to be easy to use with ClickBank, and are an ideal tool for ClickBank vendors wishing to fine-tune and improve the conversion rates of their sales-letters.

Full details at http://www.scriptrocket.com/tsctrack.php

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank vendor:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

Here are some other articles that you might like if you are a ClickBank affiliate:

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more