Autopilot Money Guide Blog

By monetize your landing pagesI mean running something like Google Adsense on them. You should of course have your landing pages monetized by having affiliate links on them (otherwise what’s the point of having a landing page?) I personally have seen a lot of affiliates running adsense on their landing pages and personally think it’s a stupid idea.

If you’re paying for the traffic in the first place, in order to get people to buy the products you’re marketing, why would you then get them to click on competitor ads? That makes no sense at all. For the measly few cents that Google will pay you for the click, you’ve lost the sale of a profitable product. Nice work. Also, if you’ve ever heard of Google’s content network, your competitors can CHOOSE to run their ads on your site. Again, you’ve written an ad, had the user click on it, paid for the click, and now some other affiliate out there is going to reap the reward.

One case where it does sort of make sense is when you arbitrage ads. What I mean by this is using a second-tier ad network and paying less per click than you get through Adwords. Personally I think the margins are too small to be worthwhile, and second of all, most second-tier ad networks have anti-arbing policies. This means that they look at your page’s content to see if the page is nothing more than an article optimized for adsense. Lastly, most of the second-tier traffic is crap. It’s expired domain and exit traffic, which is totally not targeted for the products you’re trying to sell.

If you want to make money online using Google and Clickbank, I would strongly recommend both The Rich Jerk and once you’ve read and digested it, Affiliate Payload. The first one will give you great grounding on affiliate marketing concepts, and the second one is very advanced material that will take you to the next level.

Best of luck,
Steve.

You’ve decided to start trying to make autopilot money selling Clickbank products, but how do you find a profitable Clickbank product? That’s the key, isn’t it? There are literally thousands of Clickbank products, but how do you find the ones that will make you the most money?

You should consider three things: gravity, commission and dollars earned per sale. To get these numbers, check out Clickbank Marketplace and use the search tool on the right-hand side to generate a list of products sorted by rank. I usually pick the top 10 of something, like B2B or Health, for example. Once you’ve generated the list, click on it and you’ll see the three numbers you’re after. You should also check the actual product out. I personally don’t sell things that can screw up a person’s credit, like loans and I also stay away from scammy-looking products like making money taking surveys. That’s just a personal preference of mine.

Gravity refers to how popular a product is, not how many have sold - as I understand it, gravity is related to how many affiliates are currently promoting the product. We want products with a high gravity. Usually I pick ones that are over 150 or 200. You may be thinking that you want products with lower gravity since there is less competition. That is true, but it also means that there’s not enough data on whether the product will sell. If you find a product that looks interesting and you think might be popular, bookmark the CB Engine page and wait for a couple weeks to see if the gravity goes up. Let other people test out the new stuff and waste their time.

Commission is pretty obvious. It shows you how much money you’ll make on each sale, and in the future for re-bill (subscribed) products. Finally the dollars earned per sale is the net amount on that product. This is basically the commission minus any refunds and such. You want this number to be as close to the commission value as possible, since it implies the product has few refunds, which means more money stays in your pocket.

One profitable Clickbank product that I’ve been having quite a bit of success with is Affiliate Payload. If we run through the formula, CB Engine says it has a gravity of 364.25, a commission of $42.14 and a dollars earned per sale of $40.02. If we assume that the difference in commission and DEPS is entirely due to refunds, that gives us a refund percentage of 5%. It’s a tad high, but not enough to throw up red flags. One product that I probably wouldn’t bother with is Google Snatch 2. It has a commission of $52.23 and a DEPS of $36.19, giving it a refund rate of 30%. That’s way too high for my tolerances, and probably means that the product doesn’t deliver.

The last thing you need to keep in mind with regard to profitable Clickbank products is the amount of money you’re willing to spend to acquire a customer (dollars per acquisition.) Let’s say you’re spending $50/day on a particular campaign, and sell two products a day. In order for the product to be profitable, you need to have a commission of more than $25. This isn’t factoring in any refunds, which as you’ve seen the refund rate can be quite high. A refund rate of 5% is actually manageable, since it would mean you’d need a commission of $26.25 to break even. The one with a 30% refund rate - fuggetaboutit.

Anyway, I hope this article helped you out. Please let me know if this article helped you out - I’d love to hear from you!

Steve.