Affiliate Marketing - Remaining Focused

When it comes down to it there is no doubting the fact that Affiliate Marketing is harder than it looks. The problem some people have is that they try and sell too many products, and before long they lose focus on what they were trying to do in the first place - make money online!

The Marketplace


What most Affiliate Marketers do is to find that perfect product to sell. It sounds easy, especially when sites like Clickbank have all their products listed in different categories and you can also sort by popularity etc. Before you know it you have found your particular category and have also found out which products are most popular. Easy, next step is to start selling this product (or even the top 10 products in that category by popularity). Wrong!

Commission Rate ($/sale)

When you are looking at each product that you wish to affiliate with the commission rate is especially important. If the publisher (seller)is offering less than $30 per sale to each of his/her affiliates then it is most likely that your profit margins are going to be low (unless you can sell the product in bulk!). Remember however that you can still ask for a higher commission rate by emailing the actual seller of the product. You will be amazed at the response you can sometimes get back. Of course if there are future dollars to be made through the sale (e.g commission from ongoing memberships) then a $/sale of less than $30 can be acceptable.

% of Total Sale (%/sale)

This is again another important piece of information that should tell you how generous the publisher is. If you can keep to a figure of 70% or above then you know you are being given the best possible chance of actually making a profit from the sale. Remember however that if the product has high conversion rate, the total commission per sale can be less than 70%. We'll come to that in a minute.

% Referred (%refd)

This reference is related to the % of total sales made for that product that have been made directly though an affiliate site (link) or as Clickbank says : "Fraction of publisher's total sales that are referred by affiliates". There is no rule to say that a higher % in this category is bad, however you have to remember that the higher the figure the more competition you have from other affiliates. If this figure is higher than 70% then you are going to up against some strong opposition.

Gravity (grav)

This is based on the number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank will add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added. Again there is no set rule about what this number should be, but you should be looking for at least 100.0 +. This would suggest that the product is actually being sold in the marketplace (e.g people actually want to buy the product!). Sales figures can be misleading however, and you should be selling products that you are comfortable in selling.

Where to Now?

Now you have filtered out the good from the bad, the next step is to be satisfied that the product is linked in with the theme of your website. I'm always puzzled to see a website that is based around the sale of car insurance acting as an affiliate for cleaning products (do you get my drift!). It simply makes your site look like less of an authority site and more of a mismatch of unrelated products.

There is no doubt that there are some very good products out there that require good affiliates, but remember who your competition is and remain focused. Don't simply promote a product because it is the most popular in Clickbank!

By: Chris Wainwright

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Chris Wainwright Marketing Tips, Techniques and Quality Product Reviews www.marketing-scamfree.com or visit my blog at : www.marketing-scamfree.com to keep up with all the latest online marketing news

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