ClickBank Case Study – Conclusion

Yup, it works.

So after just over a week, I’ve earned $100 from a spend of $55, an ROI of nearly 100%. So how did I turn $55 into $100 with literally half an hours work a week. Schimples.

First I headed to ClickBank and looked for a niche I knew something about (there’s plenty of niches on CB; dating, gaming, DIY projects etc), it’s pretty easy to find something that remotely interests you. I won’t tell you what I chose as the site is still bringing in numbers and slowly growing, plus you won’t learn anything that way.

Next after picking my niche, I looked for the top 3 performing products in that category. Using Google’s external keyword tool, I got a big list of related keywords and search queries and decided on a domain name that would do well in the SERP’s.

Next I setup a WordPress blog on the domain with a slightly customised skin and decided what posts to write – this is an important part of the site. It’s important to remember that the customer has a problem, and you’re trying to sell him or her a solution. For this reason I find it’s often best to make the post title questions the customer is likely to ask; “What’s the best way to lose weight?” or “How can I get more miles per gallon”.

Posts written, I setup a small campaign in Yahoo Search Marketing using keywords I’d been researching before to get post titles. That’s it.

I left the site running and checked it once a day for sales. Using ClickBank analytics I could see that 2 of my 3 products had a conversion rate of around about 5 %- 7%, but one had only 1.2%. I axed this offer from the site and promoted the other two even more, this made my overall sales increase.

So there you have it, about an hours work in total, half an hour a week of checking on the performance and I doubled my money. You can too. Less reading more work. GO!

ClickBank Case Study: Update #2

So if you’re following my little ClickBank case study, here’s another small update for you. So as you know I got bored of SEO pretty quickly (I’ll learn it properly soon I swear) and since I got 1 sale from SEO, I decided to pour that money back in and put a bit of PPC power in to this project. I’ve made a small campaign on Yahoo and targeted 2 different products in the search results. Here’s what todays end looks like;

Not bad, so far ClickBank has returned $39.99 and I’ve spent just over $20, giving me almost double my money. Not bad to say I’ve been out of the affiliate marketing game a LONG time now and I’ve never profited from ClickBank.

I’m quite embarrassed to say since this was just a quick throwaway case study, I haven’t used any tracking so god knows what keywords from what ad group got me a sale but I kinda wish I’d used tracking now. Schoolboy error. Expect a post on why tracking is key soon! Needless to say tomorrow I’ll get some tracking in place so I can tweak this bad boy to give me some more sales, if it remains consistent I’ll consider split testing the campaign by running it on both Yahoo and Google to see which gives me the best ROI.

Stay tuned!

Google Pulling Plug On IE6 Support

The date has been set, the axe has been raised and in a few months Google will be saying goodbye to IE6 support. Hallelujah!

For years designers and developers have despised the question “is it IE6 compatible?”. By far one of the worst pieces of bodge-job software that’s ever shipped from a company that’s also adorned our screens with such treasures as Windows 2000. Yah.

Pretty much every web designer in the world, myself included, has been urging the public to ditch this joke of a browser and please use something that can actually render a page properly such as FireFox, Safari or Chrome. Thankfully, Google is now joining the cause by ditching support for IE6 by axing support for the ancient disaster from Google Sites and Google Docs. The move is part of their “Modern browsers for modern applications” campaign, and rightfully so.

Nowadays every other website embraces some form of Web 2.0, AJAX is everywhere, even the most basic blogs have a touch of jQuery dotted around. Combine with that with how far CSS has come these last few years, making advanced designs designers never thought would be able to leave photoshop a thing of present day.

Since IE6 had such a big user base, largely in part because it shipped default with Windows for years, whilst designers and developers had the technology to create fantastic modern web applications, since such a vast amount of internet users were using IE6 a useful web app was often pointless as half the web couldn’t use it.

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A reply from Ken Segall

This post is in regard to a post I wrote on “Why I Was Wrong About The iPad“.

For those of you not familiar with Ken Segall (probably because of most Apple’s staff choose to stay out of the limelight with the exception of Mr. Jobs), he’s the guy who created the name “iMac” and came up with the Think Different campaign that helped turn Apple around and make it the innovative company we’ve grown to love.

I’m a big fan of Ken Segall’s and I’m always reading his blog (mainly because it’s in my RSS reader), I commented on an iPad post of his linking to mine so he could read it, not that I expected him too. Usually when you comment on big bloggers blogs, you grow to not expect much, however Ken was kind of enough to shoot me an email with his thoughts on my post and the iPad in general which I thought was awesome. I thought I’d share the email with you, I’ve sent Ken an email asking if he minds me sharing this.

Good article. Your transformation from doubter to believer (so quickly!) is interesting. I’ve had a similar journey, though I didn’t start from too negative a place. I was simply expecting the big publishing revolution that didn’t arrive.

But in the last couple of days, I’ve come to see it very much as you do. It’s a very different device, and one that some people just can’t relate to. Yet.

The idea of being able to create documents, but not have a visible file system is outrageous to some — but if you think about it, why we do really need to bother with all that? iPad puts the experience up front and shields you from the distraction.

The apps are going to be incredible, once the developers get going. An awful lot of people will likely have to eat their words. (Thankfully, not you.)

Good luck!

Ken

I think it’s great when people you look up to read the little guys blogs and even take the time out to reply, so if you’re reading this post, thanks a bunch Ken. It’s great motivation, this last week I’ve not been enjoying blogging as much but today’s been a fantastic day and I’m back for good.

ClickBank Case Study: Update #1

Hey guys, so my site has finally been indexed by Google. I’ve been researching keywords to use for this niche and found a few favorites. I’ve done the basics, meta tags, tried to keep a good keyword density, wrote articles with popular searched titles. I’ve also wrote 1-2 hub pages and squidoo lenses that link to the site. So far I’ve got around 40 unique hits to the site, 1 has converted in to a sale!

Looks like CB might not be so bad afterall, but this is only one sale, so let’s see how it goes from here. I plan on trying to build some more backlinks, I may also add a bit of PPC now I have $20 to play with. I know originally I planned to use SEO, but I’m only investing money that I’ve earnt so far so really I’ve still invested $0 (apart from the cheap domain that was like 9 bucks).

A little more info on my site. It’s a wordpress blog with a good (I think) domain name, I’ve used a popular skin not modified in any way. I’ve wrote posts that answer common questions from the niche and then sprinkled in posts that promote products (solutions to common problems). There’s a few comments on those posts too, the site looks quite active.

Hopefully I’ll drive a bit of PPC traffic to the site and see how that goes, keep you posted!

Dan

Why I Was Wrong About The iPad

Apple’s latest product, the iPad, has hit the scene with a flurry of mixed reviews. In all honesty, if you follow me on twitter you’ll know, I didn’t like the iPad or particularly see the point in it at first. As everyone else is saying, I simply thought of it as “an oversized iPod Touch”. But once you get over it’s iPod-esque appearance, you can see what Apple’s thinking and why they chose to make their debut tablet the way they did.

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If You Haven’t Seen Avatar, You’re Missing Out

Holy shit. That’s all I can say.

I mean seriously, I went to go see Avatar in 3D at my local cinema last night and to be honest I set my self up for disappointment. It sounded terrible; blue alien people, magic tree’s – the lot. I expected to be bored after 20 minutes and not care for the plot.

Was I wrong. The graphics made Jurassic Park look like a cartoon. It’s hard to describe how picture perfect they looked. Some of the scenes it’s extremely hard to distinguish between what’s an actual physical prop and what they’ve computer generated. Even if you’re not impressed by the amazing avatars or the animals and wildlife, even the human technology (holographic touch screens, holograms and vehicles) looked 100% believable.

I’m not going to go too much in to it because I don’t want to ruin it for you, but go see it and I guarantee you’ll be blown away. Even if the plot isn’t your kinda thing, the amount of work and effort that’s gone in to that film is just unfathomable.

If it doesn’t beat Titanic at the box office the world is fucked up.

Can You Profit From ClickBank?

It’s well known, it’s popular and it’s claiming to have paid it’s affiliates a sum close to 1.5 billion dollars, a substantial amount by anyones reckoning. But how easy is it to make money using this simple market place for affiliates?

Well hopefully we’ll soon find out. I’ve personally never used ClickBank, I’ve heard great things about it from smaller affiliates and terrible things from bigger affiliates. There’s plenty of pitfalls with ClickBank, the most notorious being the great refund issue. Incase you don’t know, CB deals with electronic products (mainly eBooks, sometimes software etc) and the catch is that with 99% of products, customers can demand a refund (and I’ve been told they surely do!).

Despite this, googling for “ClickBank” on image search will give you a TON of pictures of peoples accounts (like the one above, minus the slanty effect) full of cash, profiting from CB.

To see what CB is really like and how easy it is for the average joe to profit I’ll be using it over the next week or two to try and profit from a niche that I’ll reveal if all goes well. I’m not going hardcore, I’m just going to whip up a little sales site and try run some pure SEO traffic to it and see if I can get any conversions. I’ll keep you all updated every now and then to let you know how it’s going, if all goes well I’ll reveal everything about the campaign here so hopefully you can learn something and go away and earn yourself some cash.

Dan Walker – Researching for the masses.

Avoiding the Inevitable

I have three essays due (about 20 pages in total), two posters that need to support two of the essays and three exams due. This is my day;

My mind is getting creative when it comes to boredom.

Less Reading, More Doing

Something I noticed myself doing a lot of last year and then picked up on, I’ve noticed many other startup affiliates falling in to the same pit. What I’m talking about is spending hours and hours on affiliate forums, ’super affiliate’ blogs and so on – reading about how to make thousands but not actually doing anything.

I couldn’t agree more that reading about others success is an inspiration and a great motivator, but there comes a time when it starts negatively affecting your own work.

If you find yourself falling in to this trap, what I do now is set my favorite blogs in my RSS reader, read new articles in the morning and any that contain useful information I can use in my work, read it and try and immediately put it in to action. If you don’t have much time, bookmark it for later. Put your own work first, rather than reading about others.