Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank vendor and affiliate. We may earn a commission if you buy one of the products mentioned in this blog post, or if you join ClickBank as a vendor.
If you have written an eBook, or created another product, gone through the process of setting up a ClickBank vendor account, the question soon arises what to do next? Some people expect that they can just sit back and wait for the money to roll-in, but this rarely happens…
Our company has been with ClickBank for over 14 years, and sold all kinds of different products through their system. The fact is that in all that time, our direct sales have always been vastly more than all my affiliates combined - so the first thing that I would say: You’ve got to do your own marketing.
Some people say that affiliates will find and promote your website if your products are any good. My our experience says otherwise. I simply don’t believe it’s true “affiliates will find you if you’re good”. They may, but they don’t always - we’ve sold thousands and thousands of products, to a highly satisfied customer base, but affiliate-driven sales have always been a small part of our total sales.
I suspect that the same applies for other vendors too. Yes there are some poor quality vendors listed with ClickBank, but there are also tons of really good vendors (look beyond the Internet marketing categories), sometimes selling lots directly or through 1 or 2 affiliates, who fly under most affiliates’ radar because they never reach a critical mass of “gravity”, etc.
Let’s be honest though, from a vendor’s point of view, while it would be nice if affiliates drove tons oif sales, you don’t have to make it that important. A vendor’s real goal is to make sales, and there’s lots of ways to do that - it doesn’t have to be from affiliate traffic.
Some here are the things that I would suggest a new vendor do:
1. Promote your website to drive sales
2. Protect your ClickBank product against Thank You Page and Download theft, as much as you reasonably can without annoying legitimate customers.
Yes, there are some hardcore pirates who will never buy - but these aren’t the people you are interested in. There are plenty more people who will pirate if it’s easy to pirate, but will buy otherwise.
And doing this doesn’t have to be hard - it can be easy for - and completely transparent to your customers - if you use, CB Thank You Page Protector to do this for you.
3. Email every new customer after every sale to (a) say thank you, (b) give them your contact details again, (c) remind them what they’ve bought, (d) remind them that you’re a real person, (e) remind them how the charge will show on their billing statement, and (f) to start to build a relationship which eventually allow you to sell other products to them.
(a) to (e) will help reduce charge-backs and refunds, sometimes drastically so.
(f) will add to your bottom line.
And for the record, you can automate these emails using CB Thank You Page Protector.
4. Always work on improving your conversion rate, presentation, etc. Ideally, you should use split-testing, as shown in the video below, to fine tune your pitch pages so as to maximize conversions.
5. Did I say, promote your website to drive sales….
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