Affiliate Marketing – Don’t Be Led Astray by Clickbank Gravity

by HB Consult on May 14, 2010

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you are probably familiar with Clickbank. Clickbank is a large Internet marketplace and publisher of downloadable information products. You can buy ebooks and software at the website, but most people use the web site to either publish information products or to find products to advertise as an affiliate. Clickbank offers tools that make it simple for both publishers and affiliates to easily make sales of the products offered there.

Affiliates normally search through the Clickbank Marketplace to find suitable products to advertise and Clickbank provides numerous statistical measures that show how successful a product may be in the marketplace. A lot of affiliates, particularly individuals who are new to on the internet marketing, automatically choose the products that have the highest popularity or “gravity” without realizing that doing so may really make it  difficult to create sales.

Gravity is a score that shows how trendy a particular product is in addition to other marketers and how well the product is selling. The formula for determining Clickbank gravity is proprietary, but the higher the number, the more popular the product. A lot of new entrepreneurs make the mistake of selecting high gravity products when they would be more favorable off selecting a product with a more modest score.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with selecting a trendy product to market, there are a couple of potential pitfalls of making use of high gravity as your criterion:

Products with high gravity tend to be new and have usually been available for just a few weeks. Because of that, it can be tough to determine if the product is actually of high quality. Generally it takes a couple of weeks for customers who are dissatisfied with a product to return it for a refund. Everyone may be buying a product this week, but the same buyers may be returning the product for a refund next week.

You’ll face a variety of competitors if you elect to market a popular product. The score itself indicates that the product is being heavily marketed, so that means you will find yourself competing with a number of marketers, both established and new, in trying to earn your commission rates.

Today’s hot product is tomorrow’s forgotten product. A variety of “hot” Clickbank products have sharp sales spikes when they are new, just to see sales drop to nothing in a handful of weeks’ time when something more suitable comes along.

The Clickbank marketplace has tens of thousands of products for sale. Some of them are new, but a number of them have been around for a long time and have an established track record of good sales over a prolonged period of time. If you are new to marketing, you might be ideal served by taking a few time to find high-quality quality products that have been around for a while. You probable will not face the stiff competitors that you could encounter with more popular products and you will also be promoting a product that you know will be a regular seller for you over time.

While there are many useful and potentially profitable products for sale at Clickbank, it frequently pays to market a product that is not among the most trendy, as less competition means greater profit. Sometimes less is more.

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