ClickBank Part-8

One thing many merchants love about putting products out on the Clickbank market is they really don’t have to recruit affiliates to sell the product.  Clickbank has some 150,000 affiliates scanning the product listings every day and picking up new digital products to sell.  Among this army are some of the top names in internet marketing who could be looking at your product and picking it up to sell to their very large customer base.  

You would think that with this huge number of affiliates that you would be guaranteed some good sales if you put virtually any product out there.  But believe it or not, it's still possible to list your digital product in the Clickbank marketplace and for it to just "sit there".  For one thing, your product is competing for attention with some 10,000 other products.  And the products that already have strong sales and good affiliate association are the ones that are in high demand.  If your product enters at a dead stop, it’s a hard path to get it into the "fast lane" so the good affiliates take notice of it.  

Moreover, among those 150,000 eager salespeople, there is a fair share of bad ones.  And if your product gets picked up by rookie affiliates or those in the market but who are not skilled at what they do, your product can just "lay there" making you wonder what went wrong.  So anything can do to draw affiliates to your product and to even recruit your own affiliates is entirely justified to get your sales moving in Clickbank.

Many merchants remain satisfied to just allow the nature of Clickbank to bring affiliates their way.  But to get aggressive and actually get out there and draw affiliates to you gives you some ownership of the process.  Not only do you accelerate the process of becoming successful within the Clickbank environment, but you also develop relationships with affiliates and work more in partnership with recruited affiliates than you would if you simply relied entirely on "random" affiliates picking up your product and beginning to make the sales you need.  

Identifying new affiliates and making them part of your affiliate network takes some creative thinking but in many ways, you already have all the resources you need at your disposal.  Your primary objective is to build lines of communications that would not exist if you simply left the Clickbank affiliate arrangement to operate as it is.  The assumption of the Clickbank culture is that merchants and affiliates do better if they do not have to communicate because you can focus on creating more products and affiliates can focus on sales and not having to be accountable to dozens of merchants if they are promoting a lot of product.

Of course, this formula does work in a lot of cases, particularly if your product becomes part of a catalog of hundreds of thousands of products for some very large affiliates who move a lot of digital products under the Clickbank system.  But that doesn’t mean there is not plenty of room within the Clickbank system for a partnership relationship between affiliate and merchant.  You already may be in such relationships outside of Clickbank with affiliates you work with through your website.  That body of salespeople is a natural place to go to recruit affiliates to sell for you in Clickbank.  By approaching them to consider becoming part of Clickbank and selling your product there, you can sweeten the deal by offering a higher commission and the lure of such a large catalog of products there that they can become more prosperous selling in the Clickbank marketplace.

The ideal situation is to cultivate a large body of affiliates, some of whom do sell your products "anonymously" and others with whom you are in a relationship.  You can recruit affiliates for future product announcements and by simply thanking affiliates who made your last product offering successful and offering to keep them in the loop when you put more products into the marketplace.  By building a mailing list of successful Clickbank affiliates who like your work and want to know when you have something new to offer in Clickbank, you will slowly build a "team" of salespeople with a good focus on your marketing approach and how they can join in your success as a merchant by seeking you out when you have something new to offer.