A Simple Way of Making Money online - Make Money with Clickbank and Youtube

Anyone who reads this blog should have a basic idea on some of the methods I use to make money online. Most of my online marketing strategies basically consist of generating laser-target traffic using specific video content uploaded to different video sharing sites. Anyone who has done some online marketing shouldn’t be unfamiliar with this approach, considering the fact that video sharing sites can be useful tools for expanding an affiliate’s marketing range. Video marketing is without a doubt one of the most effective ways to reach people, present your content, and market various products to a large audience (and of course those are only few benefits of websites such as Youtube).

Today I will share with you one of the simplest ways of using Youtube in conjunction with ClickBank to make money online. I’ve already covered tips on how to choose ClickBank products. So if I you haven’t read them, you can find them here.

Advantages of this Method

·         It’s a free method. All the traffic is generated from videos uploaded to Youtube.

·         You don’t need to invest much, and you probably won’t spend a dime promoting Clickbank products.

Disadvantages

• Although, it might not always be the case for everybody, you will probably fail the first few times. Patience is the key.
• Success with this method depends enitrely on how motivated you are. And as for many other methods, your persistent effort will determine the value of your reward.

Requirements for starting off

For this method, you will eventually need a Youtube account (obviously), a ClickBank account, an easy-to-use video editing software, a camcorder (optional), and a blogger account (optional). I use Sony Vegas for my video editing, but I’m sure there are some other software that you can download for free if you can’t afford to buy one.

Before going any deeper, I would like point out that this method is not something new since it has been around for a while. As a matter of fact, many marketers have used and are still using it to make money online.

Steps

1.  You will start by creating a Clickbank account. You will then choose a product following the tips that I have covered in my older posts.
2. Create a short URL blogspot blog at blogger.com using your product keyword (this will be used as a landing page).
3. Write a short review article that promotes the Clickbank product you selected.
4.   Create a Youtube account.
5. Create or find some relevant video content to upload.
6. Edit the videos and watermark them with your blogpost blog URL
7. Do a keyword research using Youtube free keyword tool.
8.  Upload your videos using your keywords as titles, descriptions, and tags (do not spam).
9. Create an hoplink for the product you want to promote.
10. Paste the hoplink in the review article on the blog you created for promoting the product.
11. Using TinyUrl, mask the hoplink by creating a shorter version of it.
12. Copy and paste the short hoplink provided by TinyUrl in the description box of each video (on the first line)
13. Create an annotation for each video indicating the viewer where to click
14. Upload more videos on a regular basis
15. Rinse and repeat.

Basically, the idea is to generate a growing amount of hops by targeting a certain niche and uploading videos related to that specific niche. For those of you who don’t know what an hoplink or an hop is, it’s simply the affiliate link provided by ClickBank for a product, and an hop is a hoplink click.

Why  blogspot blogs?

Although it is something neglected by many marketers, watermarking videos is a good way of promoting websites and generating what’s known as “type-in traffic” (direct traffic, direct navigation, etc). Therefore, using a free blog as a landing page and watermarked videos to promote a product is a great idea. Displaying the blog URL within your videos can trigger the interest of the viewer to type it into the address bar of his/her browser, and thus will eventually increase your chances of making a sale, even though the annotation and the TinyUrl in the description are efficient enough.

Finding video content

You can record and edit your own videos using a cheap camcorder and a video editing software. However, you can always download videos from Youtube (Youtube Downloader can do the trick) or other sources and edit them so that they are unique and relevant enough to be used for promoting a product within a specific niche.

TinyUrl

The affiliate links provided by ClickBank (hoplink) are really long. So you might want to use TinyUrl to hide and shorten them.

What kind of products should I promote with this method?

I can say this only from my personal experience with this method. I’ve had a lot of success with fitness products so far.

When I launched my video marketing campaign, I uploaded videos every day. I wanted to reach an average of one hundred hops per day, but I was surprised to notice that I made my first sale when I reached only 11 hops. My highest daily earning now is $198.37. This was reached with only one product.

I hope this is helpful to anyone who wants to make money with ClickBank…Good Luck

Online Marketing Lesson 3 - Make Money with ClickBank (Avoid Sneaky Vendors who Might Steal your Commissions)

This is one thing all ClickBank affiliates should know before promoting any Clickbank product. This might be one of the reasons you can't make money with ClickBank. It appears that some vendors have found ways to steal commissions from affiliates. Yes, you read it right. Keep on reading and you will find out how.

Note: Keep in mind that this is not the only way you can get your ClickBank commissions stolen.

How I found out about it

I promote between 5 to 10 ClickBank products at once, and usually I get pretty good conversion rate for each of them. However, recently I noticed that one of the products I was promoting didn't convert as well as the others (no sale). I didn't quite understand why considering the amount of hops the product was getting. So I searched the internet for some help. After browsing through numerous articles and forum posts, I started having a better understanding of what was really happening to my hops. I suspected that someone was stealing my commissions! So I went back to the vendor's page, and that's when everything was clear to me.

I realized that some of the visitors I was sending to the vendor's page were actually buying the product, but not through my hoplink. How? Every time a visitor was sent to the vendor's page, an opt-in form offering a discount or free stuff would pop up. The visitor would type in his/her email, and submit the form. The vendor would then send the visitor an email with a link [directing the visitor] to a payment process without my ClickBank code.

So what have we learned from this?

In the first part of my tutorial, make money with ClickBank, I've outlined tips on how to choose ClickBank Products. So, this is a great opportunity to add one more tip to the list: Test products that have opt-in options to make sure you will get the commission when you promote them. But how? There's a simple way to do this. Let's say for example that you find a potential money making product that you want to promote, but the page has an opt-in option. All you have to do is find a promotional article for that product, follow the hoplink (or just follow your own hoplink), and enter the required information preferably using a secondary email address (not your main one). Now open your inbox and check if the vendor has sent you any link to a payment process other than ClickBank. And if it is a ClickBank order page, make sure that the name of the affiliate who directed you to the vendor's page is at the bottom of the page.

I hope this was helpful...Have a great day

Online Marketing Lesson 2 - Make Money with ClickBank Part 2 (The Beginner's Guide)

In the previous part [make money with ClickBank part 1] I introduced ClickBank and outlined tips on how to choose the best products to promote. In this second lesson--which will hopefully gives you a better understand of what I’m trying to share with you--I will provide advices on a strategic level and talk about some of the best promotion tactics.

If your goal is to make money with ClickBank, you will have to do some research and plan your strategy. The key [or should I say the real “secret”] to making money with ClickBank is a good strategy backed with actions, determination and a bit of dedication. Indeed, it takes some time and effort to successfully market with ClickBank. This, however, does not mean you need to be a full-time affiliate in order to earn with ClickBank. There is a lot of people who have full-time jobs and still find the time to do some online marketing. So it all depends on your willingness to devote some of your spare time to attaining this goal. And since your way to earning with ClickBank is a process of trial and error, I would recommend you test different marketing strategies (not just the ones listed here), and proceed to selecting and combining the most effective ones so that you may develop a better approach to ClickBank Marketing and build an effective strategy. This said, let’s begin.

Conversion rate
This is something you need to keep in mind before and while running your marketing campaign. Conversion rate is the percentage of hops or visitors that convert into sales. In other words, if you promote a ClickBank product that converts at approximately 1%, you will need at least 100 hops to make a sale. The conversion rate of a product can help you estimate how much you can earn depending on the number of hops you receive for that product (my highest converting product right now is about 1.8%).

How to Know the Conversion Rate
The conversion rate depends on many different factors. For instance, two affiliates promoting the same product, but with different approaches are unlikely to have the same conversion rate, and consequently won't get the same result. Therefore, a product that worked for me won't necessarily work the same way for you since it's difficult to know its conversion rate with accuracy. This is why, in general, the best way to know how a product converts is to test it yourself and analyze the data using ClickBank Analytics. Nonetheless, You can get a good conversion rate if (1) the sale page of the product is good, (2) you get a laser-targeted traffic, (3) and your presell is good.

Now what do I mean by “laser-targeted traffic”? One of the most important things in online marketing is to figure out what exactly people are looking for and then provide it for them. For example, if there’s a huge demand for a particular product, all you have to do is find what and where the starving audience (target traffic or target audience) is. Once you know that, the next step is to capitalize on that specific opportunity by sending the traffic to where you can market the product to them.

How to Promote ClickBank Products 

There are paid methods and free ones. I usually don’t pay for promotion or advertising. My hops are generated purely from free traffic. Nonetheless, I have to admit that paid advertising is more efficient, much faster and requires less work. So If you’re a noob or have a small budget, I would recommend that you start with free methods and progressively work your way up to the top.

I. Promote ClickBank Products with Adwords 

This is without a doubt one of the fastest ways to make money with ClickBank. The idea is to create a domain with a landing page, and then pay Adwords to send some target traffic. The purpose of the landing page is to convince the customer to buy the product by getting him/her excited or emotionally involved. Your domain should include (but should not be limited to) a promotional review, your encrypted hoplink, and of course, proof that the product actually works.

One of the advantages of advertising with Adwords is that you don’t have to worry about your rankings since your ad positioning entirely depends on the terms or keywords you target. So If you are familiar with online marketing, you should know by now you will have to do your keyword research as well using the Adwords keyword tool.

Steps:

1. Choose the right product
2. Do a keyword research to estimate how much you can possibly spend for the promotion on a daily basis
3. Set up your landing page
4. Run a good Adwords campaign
5. Monitor your progress, test different landing page designs, and opt for the one that converts the best

II. Email Marketing 

With this method you can promote products to hundreds and thousands of customers at once by sending out tons of emails using an email marketing service or an email autoresponder service. This is what’s known as email marketing or email promotion and internet marketing automation. I’m sure most of you receive promotional emails every once in while. So you pretty much have an idea of what I’m talking about.

Before launching an email marketing campaign, it’s crucial to first build an email list. In other words, You need to collect as many emails as you can. There are many ways of doing it. For example, You can use pop up ads on your site that promote your free ebook. This would require the visitors to enter their emails before downloading a copy of the ebook. Having an idea of what the visitors may be interested in since they’ve downloaded your ebook (remember what I’ve said earlier about target audience), You can then promote products by sending them promotional emails.

Below are some paid email marketing services:

Aweber.com



Getresponse.com



1shoppingcart.com


You can also try these two free email marketing services:

Freeautobot.com

Sendfree.com

III. Promote Clickbank Products with free blogs (article marketing)

Free methods usually mean that you have to invest more time and effort working. For this method, the idea is to (1) select 5 to 10 ClickBank products, (2) do a keyword research, (3) write 2 or more articles for each product, and (4) post them on multiple free blogs (using Blogger or Wordpress). The ideal is to target small niches and focus on getting high in the searches.

IV. Promote ClickBank Products with article directories 

This is another type of article marketing. It requires a lot of patience and months of solid work.

Steps:

1. Choose 5 or more ClickBank products
2. Do a keyword research
3. Write as many articles as you can for each product every day
4. Publish your articles on as many article directories as possible
5. Re-direct your readers to either the vendor’s page or your landing page

Here is a list of some article directories:

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
ideamarketers.com
marketing-seek.com
workoninternet.com/Submit_Article.html
pubs.acs.org/hotartclarticle-hangout.com
webarticles.com
articlecube.com
articles4content.com
article-emporium.com
buzzle.com
impactarticles.com
articlesfactory.com
articlecity.comcertificate.net/
niche-article-directory.com
jogena.com/articles/articleform.htm
news.collectors.orgarticle-niche.com
blogtelecast.comsuperpublisher.com
articletogo.com
articleworld.net
impactarticles.com
articlealley.com
article-buzz.com
free-articles-zone.com
newarticlesonline.com
directorygold.com
dir.salon.com
articlefever.com
content-articles.com
softwaremarketingresource.com/
marketing-article-directory.html
articlecentral.com
article-directory.net
article-emporium.com
ebooksnbytes.com
ideamarketers.com
internethomebusinessarticles.com
site-reference.com
stickysauce.com

V. Promote ClickBank Products with ebooks 

You can write little ebooks in which you provide useful information and promote products at the same time. You can then submit them to as many ebook directories as possible.

Here a list of some ebook directories:

wisdomebooks.com
jogena.com/ebookdir/ebookdata.htm
brandable-ebooks.com
ebookdirectory.com
ebookgiveaways.com
free-ebooks.net
ecourseweb.com
mindlikewater.com
ebooksearchengine.com
ebookpalace.com
e-bookdirectory.com

VI. Promote ClickBank products with Youtube videos and others (internet video marketing)

I’ve covered this topic before in some of my previous posts. Promoting with Youtube is without a doubt a good way of making money online; however, it’s little harder to find a target audience since most people on youtube are just casual viewers. I’ve experienced ups and downs with this strategy. One of the advantages of video marketing is that you don’t really have to create your own videos. For instance, it’s possible to download any Youtube Video, edit it and re-upload it on multiple accounts.

Steps: 

1. Find a niche that you can market on Youtube
2. Find a related ClickBank product
3. Search for videos that you can use to promote that product and download them
4. Re-upload re-edited versions of those videos or upload review videos
5.Include your hoplink in the descriptions of each video and disguise it using tinyurl
6. Create annotations with little messages to show viewers where to click

Other methods:

• Promote with forums
• Promote with Google groups
• Promote with Hugpages, squidoo, etc.

Note: For those of you who have signed up to ClickBank and haven’t noticed yet, it’s now possible to change your ClickBank password. Also, you can now know how many people actually click your Hoplinks using the recently-introduced ClickBank analytics!
ClickBank Dormant Account (Important) 

If you haven’t made your first sale yet, your account is considered dormant. After 90 days of no earning, your account will subject to a charge of $1 per day. So my advice would be to do your best to at least make your first sale because you will be charged more after a longer period of time ($5 per day after 180 days, and $50 after 360 days).

I will finish this post by encouraging you to experiment and wishing you a good day. Thanks for reading…
Read part 3

Online Marketing Lesson 1 - Make Money with ClickBank (The Beginner's Guide)

First off, I would like to apologize to my readers for not updating this blog more often. I was a little busy working on a new blog which will be revealed pretty soon. Also, I've been experimenting with new stuff. Every once in a while I try new ideas and sometimes it takes a lot more time than I may expect. Consequently, it's hard for me to write more articles for this blog.

This post is mainly based on what I've been doing for the past few months. I spent a lot of my time searching for the best ways to make money online. My main focus was building an effective strategy for marketing with ClickBank.

In the least likelihood of your not knowing what ClickBank is, let me explain for newbies. ClickBank is an electronic marketplace where people sell digital products. In other words, it's simply a bunch of authors selling ebooks, videos, software etc.

You can register as an affiliate and make money promoting other people's products. It's indeed very profitable and requires little work. The best part is that you don't have to create and sell your own products, or even handle payments. Basically, all you have to do is send traffic to a vendor's site. And every time a referred customer buys a product, you get paid a commission or a certain percentage depending on an arrangement. This is exactly what affiliate marketing is.

Can You Make a Decent Income Promoting ClickBank Products?
Yes, Absolutely! You can earn pretty big commissions (50-75%), sometimes even more than 100$ per sale. It's maybe not as easy as most affiliate marketers and gurus claim (especially when they want you to buy their products or their magic bullet ebooks), but it's certainly possible to make thousands of dollars on a weekly basis by simply building an effective strategy. I'm sure some of you have already seen those screenshots with massive ClickBank earnings, haven't you?

Getting Started
Not a Clickbank Affiliate yet? Well, ClickBank is extremely easy to use for both affiliates and vendors, and signing up is far from being a complicated process. As an affiliate, you're not required to have your own website and can instantly start promoting products of your choice.

Note: You can find an article about how to sign up here.

ClickBank Marketplace

Marketplace is a section of ClickBank website where affiliate can find thousands of vendors' products to promote. They are classified under 9 different categories (Marketing & Ads, business to business, etc). It is also possible to narrow searches by using the sub-categories box, the keywords' box, the sort by box, etc.

ClickBank Hoplink


Hoplink is your affiliate link provided by ClickBank. It is in the following format:

http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/

The link takes the customer to the vendor's site where he or she can purchase one or more products, and the affiliate automatically gets credit for the referral.

Note: Hoplinks generated from the marketplace do not show the affiliates and the vendors' nicknames. These hoplinks are an encrypted version of the older format.

How to Choose ClickBank Products

In order to be successful with ClickBank, it's vital to promote profitable products. And there are few factors that can help you select the best ones.

Gravity, $/sale, %/refd
You should be able to understand and interpret these stats before deciding on which product(s) you want to promote.

Gravity (grav): This number gives you an idea on how popular and competitive the product is. The higher the number, the more affiliates promote that product and the more competition you have to deal with.

$/sale: This is the value you earn as an affiliate every time a sale is made through your link.

%/refd: This is the percentage of sales made through affiliates.

Now how can these three elements help you choose a product?
One of the things most marketers or gurus would tell you is to go for the first product or the one that has the highest gravity (and I know I've also said the latter in this blog). This, however, doesn't work all the time because overcoming the competition can be very hard. So unless you are an experienced affiliate marketer, I suggest you choose a product with a gravity between 20 and 100. Also, you want it to be at least $20 per sale (minimum 50% commission per sale). Finally, the percentage of referred should be less than 80%. See example below

Only Promote Quality Products

It is always important to know the product you want to promote. In some cases, you will have to buy the product yourself in order to be sure about its quality. If, for example, a site makes promises that sound too good to be true, it's advised to purchase the product, test it, and write a objective review before endorsing it. Doing this will give you more credibility, especially if you want to build a long-lasting relationship with costumers. Always remember that a satisfied consumer is more likely to buy another product through one of your links again.

Look at the sales pageThis is extremely important. The sales page should be appealing to the eye. Always choose the sites that are professionally designed or at least the ones that grab the attention of the customer for better conversion rates (more on this later). Also, you have to make sure that the page shows proof that the product really works (testimonials) and offers a money back guarantee.

Avoid “Make Money Online” Niche
Internet marketing products are very hard to sell. This is simply because there is too much competition. The internet is over saturated by moneymaking products. I suggest you stay out of that niche and take advantage of the wide variety of products ClickBank offers.

This is the end of the first part. The next part will be about how to build your strategy ;)

Video Marketing Lesson 2 - Introduction to Making Money with ClickBank and Video Sharing Sites Part 2

This is the second part of make money with ClickBank and video sharing sites. You can find the first part here. This short video marketing tutorial will teach how to promote ClickBank products on video sharing sites. I would also recommend that you read my other tutorials so that you may learn the basics for making money with ClickBank.


Note: Since Youtube is the largest video sharing site on the web, I will use as a default example for this tutorial.

Let's begin!

The first thing you need to learn before launching your promotion campaign is to find a target audience. You can't just upload random videos and expect to make a lot of money. Sometimes it's even better to find a target audience before choosing which products to promote. Any experienced online marketer would tell you that you must target a particular niche (or at least find a way to drive a target traffic to the vendor's page). This is a very crucial step in this whole video marketing thing – Finding a target audience.

How to find a target audience

This can be as simple as reading comments and adding to your friend list users who may want to buy your products. And if you've already uploaded videos, you can use Youtube insight to learn a little about who is watching your videos (age, gender, etc). This can help you monetize your videos by promoting products that are more appealing to your audience.

Another thing you might want to do is build a friend list by sending out hundreds or even thousands of friend requests. Why? Because you will be able to promote products by sharing your videos with them. This is not an easy task and can be very boring. So you might want to use bots such as Tube Toolbox to automate your Youtube marketing.

Where to find videos

You can create and edit your own videos using Camtasia and Sony Vegas or just download videos from different video sharing sites like many already do (You can download any Youtube video with Tube Toolbox). However, if you can't afford arming yourself with these marketing tools, you can always use Windows Movie Maker and Jing. Jing is free software similar to Camtasia that you can use to snap pictures and record videos of your computer screen.

Putting all the pieces together

The next step is to upload your videos. One of the reasons many fail at making money with Clickbank this way is because they forget another important aspect of video marketing – Optimization. You must optimize your titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and tags. For keyword ideas, you can use Youtube keyword research tool. This can help you target a particular niche. I recommend you use at least 15 related tags for each of your videos to help Youtube categorize them. Also, Videos that have good thumbnails usually get the most views. So test each of your thumbnails for a period of time to know the ones that are the most effective.

The last step is to put your link in the description of each video. This can be either your hoplink or a link to your promotional page. It is also advised to use Tinyurl to disguise your affiliate link.

In general, if you want to make money online, you must be persistent. Many find it very hard to make money with Youtube because of the time and work it takes to create, and upload videos. And that is only a small part of video marketing. If you can get more than 1000 hops per day with your videos, you can earn a good amount of money depending on how targeted the traffic is.

Video Marketing Lesson 1 - Introduction to Making Money with ClickBank and Video Sharing Sites

If you are new to the world of affiliate marketing, it's essential to first have a basic understanding of what affiliate programs are. My previous post was just an introduction to making money with affiliate programs. In this article (which I consider as a second part) I will focus on a very lucrative source of income, Pay Per Sale (Also known as Cost Per Action). Today I will share with you how to make money with a very well known online retail outlet—ClickBank.

What's ClickBank?

ClickBank is an online marketplace where people sell digital products (ebooks, services, memberships, etc). It's probably one of the most popular affiliate networks and the best choice for a beginner.

It's easy to understand the way it works. The website has a large inventory of products from which a registered affiliate can choose to promote. Once you sign up, you can earn between 50 to 70% commission (sometimes even more) for every referred visitor who buys a vendor's product through your link. According to their published stats, they make a sale every three seconds, serve over 200 countries, and their clients have made over 1 billion dollars! You're probably now wondering where to click to get a piece of that pie, aren't you?

Update: ClickBank has re-designed their website, which means the screenshots below may not be the exactly the same when you sign up.

How To Sign Up

It's easy, fast, and free. I will guide you through the process. Go to the ClickBank homepage and click on “Sign up” at the top of the page. The form that appears should look like this.

After you're done filling out all the required boxes, read the client contract and check the box next to “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions” if you wish to continue. Then click "Submit". A confirmation link and a password will be emailed to you. So log in to your email account and complete the process. Remember that you will use the provided password to access your ClickBank account, so make sure not to loose it or let anybody else know it.

Now log in to your account. Your page should look like this.

How to Find Products

Update: The ClickBank marketplace has also been re-designed. However, the principles for finding good products is still the same. 

The next thing you need to do is to find some products to promote. Click “Marketplace” at the top. You should see this:

You can browse through 9 categories (Business to Business, Marketing & Ads, etc). The interface also enables you to search with keywords. But here I would like to show you how to get the best products. For every category, sort by “High Gravity.” The products that will show up are the top promoted or best sellers. You can even narrow your search by using specific keywords.

You have to find things that are related to site or that you are familiar with. Once you see the ones you want to promote, you can visit the seller's site. If you're interested, click “create hopLink.” A page will pop up where you can enter your nickname and your tracking ID if you have one. 

Click “create” below the two boxes and the next page will give you a code that you're supposed to copy and paste  wherever you wish in order to send customers to the vendor's site.

It's very important to know what you will be advertising. In some cases you will have to buy the product yourself and write a critical review (negative and positive). There is a lot of good stuff at ClickBank, but there is also a lot of junk. So be careful what you recommend to people. You might loose your credibility for convincing your readers to buy something that is not worth the price.

How to Promote Clickbank Products With Youtube

You can promote ClickBank products with video sharing sites (such as Youtube) using simple, but effective video marketing techniques. Not taking advantage of the traffic popular video sharing sites  get everyday would be a waste. You have to consider those viewers as potential prospects. If you make a real good review video on a product, they will probably buy it and you will be paid a commission. All you have to do is to upload a video that promotes an item and put your hoplink (your affiliate link) in the description area. Soon enough people will start visiting your pages if they are interested.

I hope this helped you. Post a comment if you want share anything (As long as it's relevant)