Wondering how to make your first sale on Clickbank? Clickbank is a great place to start as an affiliate. There’s thousands of products to choose from and digital products tend to pay more than physical products, too. Still, you need to do your homework first because you can struggle if you choose the wrong product to sell, or the wrong marketing strategy to sell with.
So what is the “right” product to sell and what are the “right” marketing strategies?
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank
Since most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit to a website it’s a good idea to use email marketing with your selling strategy. On average, studies show that it takes 6-8 touch points before someone will buy online.
With digital products and from an unknown seller this is so much more the case. On a popular website such as Amazon, there’s a lot more trust. But with digital products such as you’ll find on Clickbank, you need to build more trust with your audience to make those sales.
Building trust on a website can be tough, especially when you consider that most visitors only stick around for a few minutes. After that they are gone forever. By capturing their email details you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which does just that – builds trust.
When someone trusts you, they are much more likely to buy from you. Build trust with email marketing by delivering value driven email marketing messages. Access an email marketing autoresponder here for free.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Product Choice
With email marketing you can send visitors to a landing page or website and collect their email address by offering something of value in exchange. Ebooks, video training or some kind of “value add” can be used for this. If you don’t have anything to offer, create an ebook on your topic of choice. This leads us nicely into the next topic – product choice!
Your choice of product has a great deal to do with your success as an affiliate marketer. Choose a bad product, and no amount of trust building will matter. Promoting the wrong product to a badly aligned audience is another potential issue too. So getting very clear on this will save you a lot of problems later. (See also customer avatar worksheet pdf).
Ideally choose a product which aligns with who you are – your values and interests. That way, it’s much easier to create content around the topic – such as your ebook lead magnet, for example. Once you have picked your topic, you can head to the Clickbank marketplace to look for a suitable item to sell.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Product Choice
Find a product which you want to buy yourself. This is pretty important because if you are picking a product you want to sell, it’s so much more difficult selling it when you aren’t even interested in buying it yourself!
You can also look for products which are already selling well. This can be seen using the Clickbank gravity score. A high gravity product will already be selling whereas a low gravity score can indicate a new product or one which which hasn’t sold; this can also mean it’s not a successful product to choose. Too high a score can mean it’s a competitive product too though, so choose one which is suitable accordingly.
If you’re aligned with a particular product on a personal level, it can be so much easier to be an ambassador for that product, if you fully believe in it and align with it. This will help when you’re creating content around your topic later.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Marketing Strategy
So you’ve picked your product and you have an email autoresponder! What next? To actually draw in paying customers you will need some kind of marketing strategy.
You need to offer them something worth signing up to to build your email list and then give them some value by remaining on your email list. Why build an email list? Simple, without one you must sell on a website, and statistics show that most people take 6-8 trips to a site before they actually buy. So building an email list is vitally important because it gives you more opportunity to sell to your subscribers over a longer period of time.
On a website most people are gone in a few seconds. On a list you can sell to them even months or years after they join. So whether you’re going to use paid marketing to attract an audience, or build content, you should definitely get an email autoresponder. Get one here if you haven’t done so yet.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Organic Traffic Vs. Paid Traffic
To build organic traffic can take some time and commitment. So expect to be working on a website or video channel for several weeks/months before you can reap the rewards. A simply organic strategy is to build a niche website around your topic. Over time, you should attract visitors through the search engines: Google, Bing etc.
You can also build a YouTube channel or use other social media platforms to find your target audience and attract the right kind of visitors. Clear out your diary because this takes time and you’re going to need to be patient.
Here’s another reason why you should pick a topic you are passionate about before you choose a product. In the right topic, you’ll work much harder and for longer, because you’ll love the process. If you only want the end result, and/or are misaligned with your product or topic, it’s going to be much more difficult to sustain your efforts.
Paid traffic is a much faster route, but you’ll need a marketing budget to test out your ads and build your list. If you’re going the paid marketing route, use a landing page builder such as Convertri to collect emails from. It’s super fast and you’ll save money in the long run because you’ll get a cheaper lead cost when using the best tools for the job!
Send targeted web traffic to your landing page and collect emails to build your email list.
Building Up Your Emails
The power of email marketing can be ignored by affiliate marketers at their peril! Without it, you’re relying on passing traffic most of which won’t convert into a sale. With email marketing you can maintain content with prospects over a much longer period. To make sure that your leads keep opening up your email messages though, you’ll need to deliver some kind of value through your messaging. If it’s clear you’re only spamming your subscribers trying to sell a product over and over, what’s their reason for opening your messages?
But if you deliver useful messages designed to help them overcome a specific problem, and understand the value of your product, then they are more likely to keep opening them.
With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages and deliver content automatically. So once you’ve created the content once, it can run on autopilot; delivering messages to your subscribers on a regular basis as they subscribe to your email list.
Put Value First And Focus On Helping
When you try and sell first, you can easily put off your potential customers. Remember they don’t know you. Imagine walking into a shop and being bothered by a pushy sales person. Your first reaction might be to walk straight out again. The same is true with selling online. Instead of trying the “hard sell” with your Clickbank product, put value first. In what ways can you help someone with your content and email marketing campaign first?
Here’s another reason why you should choose your product carefully. If your product doesn’t offer real value to someone and massively help them with a specific problem, there’s no incentive to buy. With the right product you can genuinely offer up your products knowing they are super valuable.
Trust is built online by being authentic and genuinely helping people through your content and email marketing campaigns. Once your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you, if your products are a good match for their needs.
Stay The Course
As much as we would all like to make sales easily online, it just isn’t all that easy! You’ll need to stick at your course for some time. Unfortunately most affiliates will quit long before they put in the the time and effort needed for success online. There’s a 95% drop out rate among affiliates. Why do affiliate marketers fail? This is for a number of reasons but essentially there’s no (financial) rewards for affiliates until they make the first sale. So if your motivation is tied up only with the financial reward, you’re on a timeline to struggles-ville!
If you can make the journey more intrinsically motivated and enjoy the journey, you’re going to stick at it for much, much longer. This extra time period is what you need as an affiliate. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. So, your first 1000 subscribers could be an early goal to set yourself for a start!
