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ClickBank is a minefield of shady offers and over-hyped information products.

But within the ebook jungle there are several world-class products that you can promote to your email list or website visitors.

I’ll you how to sift through the low-quality junk so that you can find top-notch products that you can make money from while adding value to your site’s community.

Your first step is actually to go to your own site to get an idea of what types of people tend to visit your site and read your content. For example at Quick Sprout, we obviously have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of small business owners, a lot of bloggers, a lot of social media professionals that tend to visit Quick Sprout most often. It’s just a good idea to go to your site and just think of the type of people that visit it, because that’s going to guide you when choosing your Clickbank products. Once you’ve done that, your next step is to create a simple but effective spreadsheet just to keep track of all the products that you’ll be looking at.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. We just want the product name, the gravity, which I’ll explain in a little bit, how much the product costs, and a link to the sales page. This is what you want, because what’s going to happen is when you head over to Clickbank and click on the Marketplace tab at the top of the homepage, there are dozens of potential products that you could promote on your site. Unless you have this spreadsheet, it’s really hard to keep track of what products you’ve seen, their price, their gravity, and all the other variables that go into choosing a Clickbank product that I’m going to go over in this video.

Once you’ve landed on the Marketplace and you have your spreadsheet setup, your next step is to take a look at the categories in the left-hand sidebar. For a site like Quick Sprout, it’s pretty straightforward: Business, investing, computers, internet, e-business, and e-marketing. Those are categories that would fit well with the audience at Quick Sprout. Depending on what your site is, you may have a category too that really jumps out at you. You don’t just want to stop at the categories that fit best, you want to look at other categories that might be in line with something else your target audience wants. Sometimes, you can find your best products using that. You definitely want to start with the categories that seem to make the most sense.

What we’re going to look at is one category, e-business and e-marketing. When you click on that category, Clickbank automatically sorts the results by popularity. Popularity is basically how many sales that product is getting. As an affiliate, you definitely want to sort the results by gravity. Click on this little dropdown menu and choose Gravity. Gravity is complicated, but it’s basically how many different affiliates are making sales from that product. That’s important for you as an affiliate, because the more different people are making money from that product, that really shows that it’s a proven winner.

Next, I’m going to walk you through the information that’s in this box, because this is a lot of information in this little box and it can get overwhelming if you don’t know what all these terms mean. The first thing you want to pay attention to is the average amount of money per sale. This is not how much the product costs; this is how much an affiliate makes on average for one sale of that product. When you look at the stats line, this basically drills that down into a little bit more detail. The initial sale is $20.65. Why does this go all the way up to $26.80? That’s because there’s a re-bill feature. What that is, is basically they buy the product, and then there’s an add-on or another option for that person to sign up to some membership site, and that’s how much they make on average from the re-bill. If you average everything together, this is how much the affiliate makes with everything considered.

The average percentage per sale is the average commission that you make. In this case, for every sale that they make, you get half, and it’s the same story with the average percentage of re-bill. No matter what; when you sell, you get 50%. Typically, the average percentage for a sale and the average percentage for a re-bill are exactly the same. The Gravity, again, is basically how many different affiliates are making sales, in this case over 300, which is very good.

The other things you want to pay attention to are these little icons. If you hover over them, they actually explain them. It basically shows the language, whether it’s one-time billing, recurring billing, or both, so if you see both icons it’s both; whether they have a $1 trial, which is a feature that not all products in Clickbank have, whether there is PitchPlus, which is basically an up-sell, and finally, whether or not they have basically a separate HopLink target URL, which is your affiliate link that can bring people to a mobile-optimized page. You can have your regular HopLink which will take people to the general sales page, or if they have this special one, it means they have a link that will go directly to a page that’s designed for mobile devices. This isn’t really crucial unless you have a lot of people that use mobile devices, plus more and more sales pages are responsive, so you don’t really have to worry about this.

If this looks like a product that you might want to promote, you want to head over to your spreadsheet and enter all the information here in the different categories. Of course, you want to take a good look at the sales page to make sure that product is a good fit for your audience. To do that, click on the link at the top of the box. In this case, the sales page is a video, which is very common for Clickbank products. You just want to watch the video and see if it’s something that your audience would appreciate. If you get to the point where the product seems like a good fit, the sales page is a good fit, then you want to buy the product just to make sure. A lot of times on Clickbank, there are products with really great sales pages that make all these promises, and then when you buy the product, it’s actually not very good. Just to make sure you don’t burn any bridges with your audience, just buy the product. It’s usually pretty affordable, just to make sure that it’s something that they will appreciate if they end up investing in it.

The next thing you want to take a look at is the bottom of the page. At the bottom of almost every page for Clickbank products, whether it’s a video sales letter like this or more of a text-based sales letter like this, there’s usually a little affiliates link. Basically, that’s a link to a number of affiliate resources that help you promote the product. You want to look for that, and then click on the link if it’s there. You want to take a look at basically what they offer you; so whether it is some banners to help you out, whether it’s a dedicated affiliate manager. If they make you sign up, you usually don’t have to do that. They usually have this ‘Already a member? Click here’, and you can just click on that and get access to the resources right away. In some cases, they have contest like this, and a lot of times they actually offer you a lot of things that can help you, like swipes and banners. Just look for things like banners, or creatives as they’re often called, and just take a look at them and see if they would be a good fit for your site. If not, no big deal; you can always go to Fiverr and get a banner made pretty cheaply. In general, I’ve found the more stuff that they give you to help you promote their product, the better, especially because when you’re first stating out, you don’t really know whether or not this is going to go well. It helps if they give you a quick banner that you can just throw up on your site to test the waters and see how well it converts on your site. If you see that they give you a lot of support in terms of creatives, then that’s a good sign that they’re going to be helpful when you actually sign up as an affiliate. Even if you don’t see a lot of banners, it’s not a deal-breaker; it’s just something that helps make the process of promoting that product a bit easier.

That’s all there is to finding Clickbank products that are a good fit for you site. As you can see, the most important thing is to see whether or not it’s something that your audience would like, and then you want to check out the sales page and the product to make sure that it’s legit. See whether or not they offer a lot of affiliate support.