May 20, 2008
Clickbank Questions and Answers
Since I wrote my large making money with clickbank post on this blog a while ago, I have received numerous emails asking how I make money with clickbank. I made a video a while ago saying I was going to answer some of those questions and to add your questions to the comments section under the video.
I had a fair amount of comments and its taken me a while to get around to publishing the answers! I haven't done any videos for a while as I need to get a system set up first. Videos take a long time to plan, record, edit and publish.
Here are some of the answers to the questions.
How do you find a niche market?
Thats a good question. There are 2 ways I go about it. The first is to look for a new topic, or subject… maybe a new website in a certain niche has just established itself and there are people looking to learn how to use that specific website.
Take Clickbank for example… 2-3 years ago, not many people had heard of clickbank. If you had set up a Clickbank support Portal 2-3 years ago, and had evolved with Clickbank as they grew, you would have a very important website on your hands now.
You could show strategies, tips, tricks, advice etc to help people make money with Clickbank. Usually, when there is money to be made in a certain topic you will find lots of ebooks and software based on that subject.
For example, how to make money with clickbank, using adwords to make money with clickbank etc… you will also find software to promote.
The people who are coming to your site are looking for ideas and ways to make money with clickbank and are open to buying clickbank related products and software that will help them with their 'problem'.
The other way to go about finding a niche market, is to look what people are searching for and how many products there are in that niche… There are hundreds of affiliate networks which you can find affiliate products to promote. If you find a niche or industry that has lots of products, chances are, it's a very lucrative niche… but on the other side of the coin, it will have a lot of competition also.
Is it better to buy websites or build them yourself?
I personally like to buy established websites. The best way to do this is by first researching the market, look at the products available, the amount of traffic to the market, the type of sites and competition in that market. I would then look at individual sites, analyse their Alexa Rank, their backlinks in Google and Yahoo, are there any comments being posted on the site, is the site kept up to date, I would search for the site in Google to see what things are being said about that site.
How does the website currently make money? Through advertising, through sellings its own product, selling other peoples product, adsense?
Once I know all these things, I will send out an email to several sites in the industry to ask them if they would be interested in selling. If they respond, I would then take it to the next level and do some more market research.
One thing to be careful of, and I know this from experience…. you will rarely get a bargain from buying a website through SitePoint Marketplace, DigitalPoint Forums or any other website broker. The people selling these sites are looking to get the best price for their site, and you pay a lot more than the site is actually worth…
I purchased this blog through sitepoint.com - I'm glad I did, but some of the other blogs that have been selling recently, have been going for a lot more than they are really worth.
The benefit of buying an established website is that much of the initial ground work has already been done for you. The site will be fairly well established, lots of incoming links, good search engine traffic, existing visitors, good relationships with other sites etc.
What timescales are involved to get to a similar level as you? (I know this hugely depends on commitment)
This totally depends on the niche you are in. If there is a hungry market, lots of products but not much competition, you could be talking a few weeks to make your first sale, but if you go into a fairly competitive market you will have to do a lot of hard work… anywhere between 3 months to 2 years before you start to see the fruits of your labour.
The income you state is that from multiple sites of the same niche or one website? Is duplication the key?
My income is from several niches, but a large portion of it is from one niche with several sites within that niche. I built up a network of sites within a niche that has a lot of products and a hungry market. I have started to duplicate the process of creating focused niche portals with articles, blogs, forums, products, reviews, videos, directories and other things to a specific niche market.
A couple of examples of this are making money with ebay auctions, and making money with clickbank niche. There are lots of products and lots of people interested in these products.
Whats the best ways to build a list and get traffic?
My preferred method is natural search engine traffic… these are the people who are looking to buy specific products, or are looking for specific information. The key to this is building backlinks, ideally one way backlinks to your site by writing a lot of good quality, unique articles and submitting each unique article to a different blog, or article directory.
Video is also a great traffic builder. If you can position yourself as an expert in your chosen topic, and record numerous videos, submit them to the video sharing sites and do this regulary, you will notice a lot of traffic coming to your site.
What cost are involved to start up and on going costs?
Depending on how much time you have, you would be best to do all the work yourself which would be much cheaper than outsourcing the work.
In your early days, you should do much of the work yourself as you get to understand whats going on, and you get to learn the process, what needs doing, what works and what doesn't etc. If you outsource the work you dont get the hands on experience which you will need to be successful in the future.
You need to think about:
- Hosting costs
- Domain name costs
- Learning materials
- How much is your time worth?
- Subscriptions
Learning to build and market a website is one of the best trainings you can learn today.
If you have any further questions about making money online or making money with clickbank, please drop me a comment at the bottom of this post.
Filed under Make Money With Clickbank by Ryan Shamus
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Are there any weaknesses and strengths between a free blog hosting site and a pay blog hosting site. Do some cap the amount of traffic going through your personal blog? Do some blog hosting sites have certain limitations on advertising banners? Or which in you opinion are better to use.
What are your favorite places to be backlinks?
Hi Dan B,
Thanks for the question… I prefer paid blogs or on my own server. The reason is that if you are building up a website and its hosted on wordpress, you are relying upon them to keep your blog and not delete it. You are also building up their site when you get backlinks and not your own.
If your blog is on your own site, then everything you do to promote it is for you! All your activities go towards building your site up and not someone elses.
Also on some free hosting platforms like wordpress, they do not like commercial blogs, so if you start to make money from your blog or add affiliate links etc, they will remove your account
Blogger is fine though.
I do like to use free blogs if I want to get some extra backlinks to my site. If you set up a free blog like wordpress or blogger, write some articles and then create backlinks to your main site with your main keywords in, this can help your main blog site rank for your keywords.
Hope that helps.
Hi Fred,
One way backlinks are best if you can get them, so submit UNIQUE articles to squidoo, hubpages, ezine articles, other article directories and guest blog on other blogs. Social bookmarking sites are the in thing at the moment, so use http://www.socialmarker.com to submit articles to the bookmarking sites.
Also by setting up a small network of mini blogs hosted by blogger or wordpress, write content for those blogs and then add backlinks to your main site. If you are in a small niche or have a local business, you can dominate that niche fairly easily by using this approach.
Do you first buy a clickbank product before promoting it? I decided to do this and found the book to be less than worth it and when you consider how much cheaper you could get a similar hard cover book at chapters or amazon with fantastic content, I wonder sometimes. After purchasing, I decided not to promote it, because I could not in good consciense promote something I felt was inadequate and far too pricey, this one in particular was a whopping $37. Too bad though, because of this kind of quality, more and more people are weary of buying ebooks. What are your thoughts?
Thanks Ryan,
How many visitors do you generally think a niche sites needs to earn say $5 a day? 2000 or so?
Thanks Ryan,
How many visitors do you generally think a niche sites needs to earn say $5 a day? 2000 or so?
Have you been more successful with niche sites heavily promoting one product or promoting a bunch of products?
Hi Chantel,
I usually approach the vendor for a review copy rather than buying. If you have a fairly good site or a good affiliate record in that niche, the vendors will usually offer a review copy.
There are 2 ways I do it. I have a directory on my site that offers every product in my niche. Its basically just a list of all the products in each category. I dont review these ebooks as it would take forever.
If I do a mailout to my list, I will always review the product because I am then recommending something. I will get hold of a review copy, read through it, weigh up the pro's and con's and then decide if its a good idea to promote.
Some ebooks are rubbish as you said… In one of my niches, ebooks can cost up to $150! As you said $37 may seem very expensive in another niche.
So, if you are going to do personal recommendations, make sure you review the product first and there is a lot of crap out there.
As we are thinking of using Clickbank and most of us will have new sites….. would it be ok to purchases the product for review and then return it once the review is done (as clickbank offer 60day money back guarantees). Would this get you a bad rep with the publishers…. even if you brought further sales.
Hi Forest,
To earn $5 per day from selling products? Average? It depends on how niche and focused the site it… My main site gets around 1000 people per day and makes $100-$300 per day. I know someone who has a slightly better business model than me, and basically every visitor who goes to his site, either clicks on an advert, an affiliate link, another link to another one of his sites or closes the webpage.
Every click apart from the little x in the top right corner will make him money long term. He does pretty well with that site with half the amount of visitors.
If your niche site is ultra specific and the people coming to the site need a solution, you could make $5-$30 per day with 100-200 visitors.
So again, there is no definitive answer
Your second part of your comment… I promote a lot of products on my sites but only 20% of those products make 80% of the total income. Its the old 80/20% rule.
So, once I figure out what sells, I position the best sellers at the top of their category or on the front page etc.
Thanks Ryan,
I am seriously considering changing the direction of my site NewandReviewed.com after all your help. Maybe I can tag it something like "Looking at new ways to make money with ebay auctions" or similar. Have you had success when the web name does not relate directly to the products?
Hi Forest,
Yes, its fine to have a domain name that doesn't directly relate to the products. It should work well.
One bit of advice for you or anyone reading also just so you dont make this mistake in the future…. All the big companies like ebay etc do not allow you to have a website with the word ebay in the title. It is a trademark.
I set up a website a while ago with ebay in the domain name and after about 6 months of hard work of building it up, I received an email from ebay asking me to remove the site because it breached their trademark, so I lost a lot of work because of this.
For some reason, I never thought it would be a problem but it was and there are lots of other big portals or sites that you would have the same problems with.
I'm not sure about Clickbank as I have seen a fair amount of sites with the word Clickbank in the name.
Hi Ryan,
Please help me get started using clickbank. I really wanted to earn money from this. I like cellphones and computers as my niche. ebooks will also be a good idea.