Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I talked about why it’s a good idea to become an information product vendor, and how to get started in the process. In this final installment, I’ll answer one of the biggest questions new vendors have:

How do I attract affiliates to market my product for me?

The challenge is to find affiliates, to let them know about your product, and convince them to promote for you! The single biggest thing you can do, is to NOT “release” your product until the affiliate resource section is completed. The affiliate resource section contains all the tools you create (or have outsourcers create for you) that help your affiliates promote your product.  These include banners, graphics, email copy, Adwords ad text, keywords, and much more.

The best way to figure out what you should be doing here is to see examples. Sign up to be an affiliate for best selling ClickBank products and see what they provide their affiliates with. One place I can recommend is our affiliate resource site (www.blueprintaffiliates.com). Signing up there will show you several affiliate resource sites and examples of tools for many different products.

Not having a solid affiliate resource section is the single biggest mistake we see product creators make. They focus so much on building their product that they leave the affiliate resource section for last, or they launch their product without it thinking they will “get to it later.” You only have one chance to grab that affiliate’s attention, so make sure you put your best foot forward when you do get that chance. That means having everything set up and making their job as easy as you can right from the first time they see your product and consider promoting it.

Another great strategy for getting affiliates is to give them something that they can give away for free to their audience, such as a free mini report that they can edit and give away, which includes their own affiliate link to your product. Potential affiliates LOVE this kind of thing, as it gives them valuable content to give to their traffic sources. People are always on the lookout to provide value to their audience, and if you can help them with that, they will consider promoting your products.

Track down potential traffic sources and find out what they’re promoting and why. Go to the places where your traffic will be. For example, let’s stay with our organic gardening theme.

Do some searches and find the top organic gardening blogs or forums, etc. Look at what they’re promoting to monetize their sites. Contact all of these people, and keep in mind that you must be relentless here! Find cool ways to catch their attention.

Once you have their attention, pitch your product. Tell them why they should be promoting YOUR product instead or in addition to the ones they currently are. You must sell affiliates just like customers. Remember what I was saying in the beginning—it only takes a small number (sometimes 1!) of super affiliates to really make a lot of money, so this is time well spent.

Here’s a trick to catching people’s attention. EVERYONE Googles themselves at some point. If you’re trying to reach John Smith because he runs the top organic gardening blog and he can reach your target audience quickly, bid on his name in Adwords.

When he Googles himself, have the ad come up and say “John Smith, you should tell your readers about this!” or something like that and send it to a page you’ve created on your site that is an “invitation” for him to promote. Some kind of variation on this theme can be fun and WILL get someone’s attention. Please do not do this for my name

Often you can find “complimentary” marketing opportunities. Let’s use that home theater example. Reach out to the product creator of the best selling home theater information product and let them know about your new 3D product. As I described, this is a product that would be of interest to this person’s audience and is not a directly competing product, but is complimentary. There are often MANY of these kinds of opportunities to be found.

Finally, tell everyone on affiliate marketing forums and blogs that you’re launching your product. Put it in your signature. Just get it out there!  Do everything you can to get it in front of as many potential affiliates as you can.

One last tip: send an email to everyone that buys, asking them if they’d like to get the product they just bought for free. All they need to do is sign up to ClickBank as an affiliate and get two others to purchase the product, and they’ve paid for their copy! You can build a small army of low volume affiliates this way.

Hopefully these little pearls of wisdom will go a long way towards helping you on your journey from affiliate to vendor! Best of luck to you!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 1
2. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 2
3. 5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed why moving from affiliate to vendor, or doing both at the same time, is a great idea. I also discussed how to pick a topic or niche. In this part, I’ll answer a couple of other common questions I get asked.

Don’t I have to Be an “Expert”?

This is something I talk about often with our customers who are starting a search engine management consulting business. They feel very insecure, as they think they have to be the most knowledgeable expert in this field in order to begin marketing their services. That’s simply not true.

In order to be valuable to someone (a customer), you simply need to possess information that they don’t. That’s it. Not ALL the information, or the LARGEST resource of information, or anything like that. Knowing more than your potential customer and being able to present that information to them creates the value.

This can even be true when you are less of an “expert” than your potential customer. Let me give you an example. I’m a complete home theater nut. Projectors, TV’s, Pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, sound formats, Blu-ray, etc.

I consider myself an expert on all of these things. However, I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on the latest home theater craze: 3D. It would be VERY valuable for me to have someone prepare a report (an information product!) on the various standards, equipment, and integration techniques for this technology. This is called information or content aggregation, and it’s essentially a research project. It just requires going through all of the available information online and in print, etc., and aggregating (summarizing) all of the content out there in one cohesive package. This would create a highly valuable product for an expert like me, and could easily be researched and created by a non-expert.

Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself?

Information products are excellent candidates for outsourcing. You can outsource the entire thing, or just the pieces you want help on. There are many people that make a full time living online creating information products for people. These are people that truly enjoy research and writing and the whole creation process, rather than trying to find ideas and markets and trying to sell their own products. The key is to find out the parts of information product creation that you enjoy and that you’re good at (very often the same!). These are the steps to do yourself, and the others are perfect for getting others to do them for you.

How do I outsource ?

The first challenge is to find a place where there are contractors waiting to do work for someone like yourself. There are several options, but we find the best overall place to go is Elance. The quality is very high, and there are plenty of choices there.

When picking someone to work with, I recommend you pick a person that specializes in creating information products, and someone that has a portfolio of examples you can examine to determine their quality level. This is not to say that someone completely new wouldn’t be able to do a good job, but you have to ask yourself if you have the time to risk your project to a complete unknown. Usually, it’s better to pay an experienced person a bit more to lower your risk.

One thing everyone wants to know about is cost, so I’ll give you an example. We recently outsourced a whole information product that required a lot of research (50 page ebook and a 1000 word sales script) for about $750 USD. This will give you some idea of the cost. It’s incredibly reasonable, and only takes a few sales to make your money back.

The biggest thing to focus on during the outsourcing process is managing expectations. The key is to ensure that you know what you want, that your outsourcer knows what you want, and that he/she can deliver what you want in the timeframe specified at the appropriate cost. This is harder than it may seem!

If you spend a LOT of time upfront specifying what you want, you can typically be successful in managing expectations.

Here are the things to focus on:

Deadlines – Make sure that the work can be completed in the timeframe by which you need it.

Chapter titles and summaries – This may seem like you’re having to do a lot of the work, but it’s time well spent. It doesn’t have to be the final version of the product, but the more you can give your outsourcer about what you expect, the better the whole process will be. You can be clear that they can still exercise their creative powers (that’s one of the reasons you’re hiring them) and make changes, but it’s a starting point for both of you to work from.

Voice, tone and style – In some markets, a casual or fun tone and writing style is important. In others, you need a more serious one. Make sure your outsourcer knows what you’re looking for.

Overview of the audience – Give your outsourcer as much detail as you can about the potential audience. This will only help them as they craft your product.

100% original content – Make very clear that you need original content. Research from sources is just fine, of course, but the finished product MUST be their own work product.

Specify font size, margin size and spacing (and/or just use word count) – A 50 page document can be a very small amount of content if the fonts are huge and lots of spacing is used! Ensure that you’re getting the amount of content you’re paying for.

Table of contents/Index – Do you want or need these?

Check in regularly – Don’t wait until the product is completed to check on progress. Request regular updates over the life of the project and check each chapter as it’s done. This will ensure that you’re on the same page.

Revision policy – Ask and make sure you understand what the creator’s revision policy is. What if you don’t like what’s being done? How many times and what scope can you change and still stay at the same price point?

These are the biggest things to get correct up front and to track during product development. In order to help, here’s an example (PDF / Word) of the product spec sheet that we use to communicate back and forth with outsourcers.

These tips on getting started and outsourcing should help get you on your way to creating a great product, but check back tomorrow for the final part, when I’ll talk about how to get affiliates to promote your product!

Update: Part 3 is now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 1
2. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 3
3. 5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

When I first started out in Internet marketing, my focus was on affiliate marketing. Specifically, I was really concentrating on marketing ClickBank products. I was able to make a wonderful income doing this, and became one of the top affiliates for one of ClickBank’s best sellers. At that time, I was making this product owner approximately $1 million dollars per year.

That was wonderful, as I was making that too (with a 50% commission split), but as I found out that I was only the 4th (!) largest affiliate for this product owner, something occurred to me. I was working VERY hard, and wouldn’t it be nice to be the product OWNER and have 100’s or 1000’s of “me’s” running around and promoting my product instead of just benefiting from my efforts ? How about if I just had the top 4 affiliates of this vendor? It was a pretty compelling question, and one that set me out on a journey to become a vendor as well as an affiliate.

Fast forward to the present, and my company has sold 10s of millions of dollars of our own information products over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE affiliate marketing and I do it every single day… but having your own products is a very special feeling and a nice distraction and diversification from the “daily grind”! The information product market is enormous (by many counts approximately $4 billion dollars) and ClickBank themselves have a healthy 10% or so of that market. This makes them the ideal place to launch your information product business.

We teach a lot of folks how to build information products, and when people are just starting out they seem to share a lot of the same challenges:

• What topic or niche do I pick?
• Don’t I have to be an “Expert” ?
• Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself? How do I outsource?
• How do I attract affiliates to market my product for me?

I think giving advice on these four large “problem” areas is a great way to help you start to move from affiliate to vendor.

What topic or niche do I pick?

Information products are pretty simple. First, you identify a market or a niche. These are groups of people who share a common interest. For example, organic gardening. That’s a group of folks who are all interested in a very specific activity. The goal of a marketable information product is to simply find out what that group “needs” and deliver it in the form of an ebook, videos, software, or some combination of these digital products.

So, in my organic gardening example, perhaps we could create an information product that educates and makes recommendations with regard to the proper fertilization techniques for organic gardening. The idea is that you find a market, you find out what the market wants or needs, and then you deliver it in the form of an information product.

So what constitutes a great market? In a perfect world, I would say it’s three things (you don’t always have to meet ALL of these conditions to have a successful information product).

First, you want an “evergreen” market.  An evergreen market means that it won’t be going away anytime soon. The classic example of that is weight loss. For the foreseeable future, everyone will want to continue to try to lose weight.

Second, you want a market where there are searchers online looking for information. This can be determined by looking at Google’s external keyword tool and the volume of searches for the main and related keywords. In our example, we could input “organic gardening” into the tool and see that there are plenty of people looking for information out there.

Finally, we’d like to see a market where there is the potential for people to buy multiple products or multiple related products. This means that as you continue to build your list of customers, it is more valuable as you could sell them more items over time. People interested in losing weight is the perfect example market. It’s evergreen, there are plenty of searches, and people will typically invest in multiple products and related products.

We know what a perfect market looks like, but where do we find ideas? I’ll tell you my biggest “secret source” for finding ideas . The “Dummies” books and the “Idiot’s Guides” books. There are THOUSANDS of titles that have been created for these two franchises. Each of these thousands of books cater to a market that is perfect for an information product.

These companies have already done the market research and the analysis to determine that there’s a great market for  these kinds of products. All you have to do is find one that interests you, and then decide on your particular “slant” on how to enter that market. For example, perhaps you found organic gardening (that’s a great market and there are Dummies books for that), and after some brainstorming and checking existing material and online search volume, your topic will be “organic gardening to feed a family of 4,” or you could go with our fertilizer example from earlier. That’s the way to use these resources for ideas that can blossom into a great information product.

In the next part of this series, I’ll answer the common question “Don’t I have to be an expert?” and talk about how and why you should outsource. Be sure to check back tomorrow for much more info!

Update: Parts 2 and 3 are now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 3
2. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 2
3. 5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

A common fear among Internet marketers these days is the dreaded “Google slap.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to Google significantly lowering the Quality Score of AdWords ad/advertisers, or banning them from advertising on AdWords outright.

Since Google slaps can be a big concern for ClickBank affiliates and vendors, we’ve made a concerted effort to work with Google to identify what causes them to lower the Quality Score of particular ads or landing pages. Now we’d like to share what we’ve learned with you so you can ensure your advertising and landing pages meet Google’s quality guidelines and maintain a positive Quality Score.

We’ve condensed the information we’ve learned directly from Google into the following videos, which discuss topics like the purpose of Quality Score, what goes into Quality Score calculation, specific techniques and page elements that Google frowns upon, and what to do if you’ve been “slapped.” As we learn more about this issue, we’ll continue to share it with you. Feel free to leave comments with questions or concerns, and we’ll try to get them answered for you.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Google Gives Advertisers the Power of Remarketing
2. Strategy for Success: Create a Privacy Policy
3. A New Advertising Frontier for Affiliate Marketers: TV Ads?

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

We’ve talked a lot recently about the emergence of online video in affiliate marketing, and how powerful it can be for selling or promoting digital products. It seems like everyone’s using it and having great success, but we’re aware that a lot of people still don’t know where to get started with creating, filming, editing, and uploading online video to their Pitch Page or affiliate page.

To help make online video marketing easy and accessible for everyone, we asked long-time ClickBank vendor and web video expert Gideon Shalwick to make a series of videos for ClickBank affiliates and vendors who need help getting started, or want to make their videos more professional and effective.

He created 3 easy-to-follow videos, each under 10 minutes, that cover extremely important topics like what camera, software, and equipment to use, how to plan and write the content for your video, how to make it look professional, and much more! If you’ve wanted to get into the profitable world of online video but don’t know where to start, these videos will show you exactly what you need to know.

Video 1 – Equipment you need for creating high quality online videos quickly

Video 2 – Preparing for the recording and planning out your content

Video 3 – Recording & editing your video, and uploading it to your site or Pitch Page

These videos contain lots of great information and detail, so be sure to check them out! Gideon regularly updates his online video marketing blog with the tips, tricks, and techniques he’s used to succeed in Internet marketing, so it’s a great resource for anyone looking to make a splash with online video. He also encouraged anyone who still has questions to leave comments on the videos and he’ll help answer them. You can also leave comments here with any additional video-related topics you’d like to see in the future.

Thanks Gideon!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. 7 Keys to Big Video Profits
2. First Official ClickBank Video
3. ClickBank Video: Create a Customer-Facing Ad

Written by: Benjamin Ravaru, Guest Author

Many years ago when I started marketing online with the usual web-page sales letters, I was living in fear that one day everything would move to video. If that happened, would the little guy still be able to compete with big companies and their video budgets?

Fast forward to 2010, and the answer is an emphatic YES.

There’s an explosion of homemade videos online. YouTube has become the 3^rd most-visited website in the world. Video gets higher conversion rates and builds a deeper relationship than print ads. But the really exciting news is that it’s easier than ever to make videos at home.

Cameras are cheap. You can buy a Flip or Kodak Zi8 for under $200 and record great HD videos at home. Keynote and PowerPoint make it easier than ever to create beautiful screen-casts. Tools like Camtasia and Screenflow make it easy to capture your videos and put them online in the cloud using a service like Amazon S3. You can then play them back with tools like Flowplayer or JW Player.

There are more sources of great content than ever before, including royalty-free music, photographs, and videos on sites like iStockPhoto.com.

But even with all of these tools, not all videos are created equal, and not all videos convert. So what are the keys that will guarantee your video is a success? To achieve big video profits, I recommend the following:

1. Great Script: Take time to sit down and write a script for your video. You might be a great narrator, but you need to think of your video as your spoken sales letter or sales presentation. A great script with a killer intro makes a huge difference in whether your video converts into sales.

2. Interesting Hooks: Make interesting promises and deliver on them, or have nice visual effects and/or music. Anything that can hold people’s attention is worth its weight in gold in these times of multitasking and short attention spans.

3.  Keep It Clean: Make sure to remove the noise from your audio recordings and use image enhancing effects for your photos. You want clear sound and sharp contrasts. It doesn’t cost any money to do this, just a bit of time. It will really separate your video from the mass of videos out there and give you that professional edge.

4. Easy to Read Text: Make your text high-contrast, so it stands out against the background of your video. Big, black, bold text is a good rule of thumb, unless black won’t show up against your background.

5. Reasonable File Size: Resize your video to be between 500×300 and 800×600. Any less than that and the video is too small; more and it’s too big. When compressing your video, use the H.264 compression codec with the compression settings set to “best” to ensure a good file size.

6. Promote Other Video Products: As obvious as this may sound, it’s best to use video to promote an offer that uses video on its sales page too. Having a nice video presell as an affiliate and sending people to a non-video offer can kill conversions. The feeling of continuity and flow is important.

7. Always Be Testing: This is true of any selling or promotional techniques, and it holds for video too. Don’t get complacent, and always fine tune your scripts and videos. You can always improve your conversion rate and make more profits.

About the Author

Benjamin Ravaru is a ClickBank vendor who has used video to sell and promote ClickBank products, including his own product Xocoslim. For an example of his video tips in action, click here.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Nuts and Bolts Guide to Great Online Video
2. Using Video to Promote Your Business
3. First Official ClickBank Video

Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Author

In my years as a super affiliate, I have seen some of the best and worst that copywriting has to offer and almost everything in between. ClickBank is awash with sales letters and copy for vendor products and it’s not always obvious which ones will convert to sales at first glance.

Even the ugliest site will convert browsers into paying customers if the copy is well written and does its job as it should – and if the copywriter understands how to sell to the niche in question.

In this post, I am going to teach you the copywriting elements that are vital to the success of any sales page (no matter how good or bad the design and graphics). The end result should be that your customers feel they simply have to buy the product you’re offering, without delay.

The Key Element of Converting Browsers into Buyers

One of the most important elements to concentrate on when promoting your own or someone else’s product is your sales copy. The better your copy converts, the more products you will sell and the more you will attract affiliates to sell your product for you. It’s all a virtuous cycle – and arguably your sales copy is the most important factor in the entire mix; perhaps even more important than the product or the affiliates you recruit.

If you can write a great sales letter, one that converts into sales, then you will have other marketers ‘eating out of your hand’ in a bid to promote your ClickBank products. Get it wrong and you won’t get any traction in the ClickBank Marketplace, and your product will stagnate and die.

The starting point of writing killer sales copy is to understand your market. By that, I don’t mean reading a few articles and assuming you know the market. You really have to do a bit of leg-work to understand who you are talking to, establish what they want, and research what’s already out there and what isn’t.

Find a gap in the market and fill it. Visit forums and find out what people are talking about, what their frustrations are, and how likely they are to spend money to get a solution to their problem or need. Read your competitors’ sales letters and sign up to their e-mail newsletters. Listen to the problems they talk about that the average customer has (e.g., “Aren’t you sick of diet pills that don’t work?”), along with which benefits they push hardest (”Lose weight without hunger pangs”). This will highlight important clues as to what is on the mind of your target audience.

So do your research and work out what is going through their heads. In other words, you really need to resonate with your potential buyer. If you can do this you can establish empathy with your potential buyer. If you do this, you are well on your way to a winning formula for your sales copy.

Getting Started

Now, before you exclaim, ‘But I can’t write copy,’ know that it is actually easier than you think. In fact, the transition from never having written a word of copy to being a ‘monster’ copywriter is perfectly achievable in just days – but only if you follow and implement some simple but extremely powerful copywriting rules.

The Short Cut To Copywriting Success

One of the fastest ways to get yourself from 0 to 60 writing great sales copy is to leverage the years of experience of some of the great copywriters who have already tried, tested, and proven the elements of copywriting. In short, we are going to cheat a little by building up a big pile of other marketers’ copy and swiping it (a.k.a. “the cheat sheet”).

Note: before I proceed, I want to be very clear on something. I am not suggesting you break copyright rules by copying other people’s work – you simply cannot do that – it would be copyright infringement. But the good news is, we don’t need to. Instead, we can examine and discover the successful elements, phrases, hooks, and buzzwords that are being used, and spin them to work into our own copywriting. In other words, we are going to extract the most important elements and rework them into our own sales letters. This is not only lawful – but its common practice in successful copywriting circles. The trick is to go to other niches and take elements from the most successful sales letters there for your own inspiration.

For example, let’s say you want to write copy for a bodybuilding product. You might come across a Forex sales letter with a headline that reads:

“Just In: Renegade, Grass Roots Trader Exposes Forex Loophole and Siphons Off $3,000 In 30 Days.”

You have a lot of words you can work with and use here, such as renegade, grass roots, exposes, loophole, siphons, etc. So if your niche was bodybuilding, you could work those words into your own headline:

“ Renegade Bodybuilder exposes muscle-building loophole and packs on 8 lbs of muscle in 3 weeks.”

The idea is to take the words and adapt and fit them to your own copy, whilst keeping the same elements of newness (renegade), something uncovered (loophole, exposed) and, very importantly, how quickly something can be achieved (6 days / 3 weeks). This method should not only be used for your headline, but also for your sub headers and the body copy of your sales letter.

Benefits Are Vital

Why? Because it’s a proven fact that people will buy something based on its benefits. Benefits are simply what the customer gets out of buying a product – in short, they’re the reason that people decide to buy a certain product. For example, if you have a product on making money, people will buy because of the perceived benefits that making money will bring, such as being able to pay off debts, improve their lifestyle, and by doing so appear more attractive to people around them. If it’s a more advanced guide, benefits might be very specific – for example, if it’s a blogging guide, one benefit might be “generating a flood of backlinks to your blog.”

Also, there’s a deeper psychological aspect here. Whilst people think they just want to make more money, in truth the benefits they will gain from doing so are much deeper than it at first appears. So it’s not enough to just sell the ‘idea’ of making money – this is far too general and unfocused. Instead, you should sell the benefits that will have a knock-on effect as a result of making money. So the more you understand the deep reasons behind why people want something, the more likely you are going to be able to tap into a person’s psyche when writing sales copy.

Check Out What’s Working

The best place to start when researching what is and isn’t working in a given niche is to check out the top performing products in that niche. This is easily achieved by heading over to the ClickBank Marketplace and doing a keyword search in a given niche. Alternatively, you can check out affiliate niches or the top ClickBank products on my site, Affiliate X.

For example, let’s look at dating. We know that Internet dating is a huge market that continues to grow repidly, but what about digging deeper into the dating niche?

Doing a search in ClickBank on any aspect of dating will bring up the top performing products, which are easily identified by their high gravity score. Take a look at the headlines of the top performers. The headline is the most important part of the sales copy. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention at this point, you will have lost them forever. A headline should be compelling, intriguing, and raise curiosity so the reader wants to read on. In the same way, the sub header should pull the reader in with a taste of what’s to come.

Generally, a good formula for a headline is: “How [someone like the customer] [got the kind of benefit the customer wants] in [x days].” For example, “How a 27 year old renegade Forex trader made $1,000 with a breakthrough new robot in 10 days,” or “How a 21 year old scrawny kid stacked on 13 lbs of chest muscle in 31 days.”

Remember that empathy is a powerful copywriting tool. If you can identify with the reader and show that you understand their problem or need because you have been “in their shoes” yourself, that helps build trust. Explain your situation and how you worked to discover a solution, and now you want to share it so that others don’t have to go through the same hurdles and problems that you did.

Empathy in any situation is beneficial, but in copywriting it’s essential. For this very reason, your story (i.e., how you arrived at this point) should make up a major part of your copy. It’s important not to underestimate the value of empathy within your copy – get it right and your copy will result in insane conversions.

Don’t Ignore The Competition

When writing your copy, you may be tempted to ignore the competition and hope that potential buyers will see your product for what it is and just buy it. Don’t make this mistake. Instead, explain in your copy why your product is better because it covers an angle that isn’t covered in competing products.

Try to think of a unique selling point that makes your product different from the others out there. Maybe it’s a better value, easier to understand, quicker to implement, or has better proof. Whatever the unique selling point is, elaborate on it and make it stand out. Just put yourself in a reader’s shoes – if you wanted to buy a product on dating women or learning to play the guitar – would you just check out one product? No, of course not; you would check out what’s available from a selection and then choose the best one.

Which brings us nicely to…

The Power of Proof

The number one reason why people don’t buy a product is because they don’t believe its claims. How many times have you thought to yourself, “that sounds too easy” or “that sounds too good to be true?” This is why it’s so important to demonstrate empathy within your copy.

However, the second element that cannot be overlooked is proof that your products does what it says it does. If you can provide screenshots of profits you’ve attained using the product, or a live working example, or even testimonials from existing customers, then you are on to a winner. Once you have the proof, it will be easier for potential customers to identify themselves with the benefits your product will deliver and they will want it for themselves.

To Conclude

It’s important to understand that in order to write great copy that will convert into sales, you DON’T need to be an experienced copywriter. It’s as simple as breaking down the sales copy of highly converting web pages out there, and carefully working out why they are selling. That’s just something that comes with a little digging and a bit of experience.

It doesn’t matter what niche the sales copy is in. You can swipe the buzz words and curiosity elements within the headlines, sub headers and sales letter body and rework those to your suit your own niche. Well thought-out copy and strong proof will almost guarantee your sales pitch will convert into sales. Once you have mastered these essential elements, you’ll be able to create copy that converts in any niche you choose.

About the Author

Chris McNeeney is the owner of Affiliate X – a resource for ClickBank affiliates with affiliate tools, affiliate videos, and training information.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. 7 Critical Elements of Sizzling Salesletter Copy: Part 2
2. 7 Critical Elements of Sizzling Salesletter Copy: Part 3
3. Improve Your Writing and Thrive

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

In the ultra-competitive affiliate marketing landscape, it’s a good idea to always be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to promote products. Somewhat ironically, a great new space for affiliate promotions is actually an advertising medium that’s been around a long time: television.

Up to now, advertising on TV was far too expensive and complicated for the average marketer. However, Google recently introduced Google TV, which allows practically anyone to create TV spots within their AdWords account and run them on national cable TV. One of the most amazing parts is the low cost- as low as $20 for an ad spot!

Considering the huge potential reach of television, this can be a great way to advertise your own product or separate yourself from other affiliates who are promoting the same product. And considering how powerful and relatively inexpensive video creation tools and software packages are today, it’s reasonable for almost anyone to create a simple TV ad they can test out.

If you’re not sure you’re capable of creating an effective TV ad, check out this Copyblogger post on the topic. It’s written from the perspective of promoting a blog, but the same idea applies to ClickBank products or affiliate websites. It has some great advice on making your ad compelling to viewers.

One important thing to remember is that if you’re an affiliate who’s using this service, you shouldn’t try to promote a basic HopLink, since advertising on TV requires that viewers be able to remember the website so they can type it in. HopLink URLs are too complicated for this purpose, so your best bet is to send traffic to an affiliate landing page, such as a review site, blog, or other content-based site, where you then recommend one or more ClickBank products to your visitors. Try to keep the URL of your site as simple and memorable as possible. If you’re a vendor and want to send traffic to your own site, you can just send people directly to your Pitch Page URL.

If you’ve been struggling to make AdWords work for you due to the level of competition or pricing, it’s worth checking out Google TV to see if it could be an effective new way to promote products. Some of the best strategies for affiliate marketing success are testing out new promotional techniques and being an early entrant into new marketing spaces before they get overcrowded and too competitive. Who knows- you could end up being the next advertising mogul!

Do you think TV ads could work for your promotional efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

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Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

When you’re searching for new products to promote as an affiliate, one of the things I always recommend looking for is whether a vendor has an affiliate tools page. These pages can be one of the easiest ways to quickly develop effective promotions for a product, especially if it’s a new niche you’re just starting to explore.

How Affiliate Tools Can Help You

Though affiliate tools pages come in many forms, most of them include a selection of useful information about the vendor’s product that will make your life as an affiliate much easier.

Typically, they include information like:

• Suggested keywords for SEO or PPC advertising
• Image or text ads you can use to link to the vendor’s site
• Ideas for article marketing content
• Strong selling points of the product
• Information about the best target audience for the product
• Embeddable videos with information or sales pitches
• FAQs

All of these items can save you valuable time, energy, and money when crafting your marketing efforts. They can help you quickly develop effective marketing campaigns, rather than having to put in hours of keyword research or spend your own time developing topics for articles.

How to Identify Vendors with Affiliate Tools Pages

The easiest way to find affiliate tools pages for ClickBank vendors is to search in our Marketplace. Look for vendors with a “Vendor Spotlight” link under the Promote button in their listing. It will look like this:

In the Vendor Profile box, if they have an affiliate tools page, it will be shown at the bottom of that box. Not all vendors who have a Vendor Spotlight will have an affiliate tools page, but most do.

You can also easily find vendors in your niche by performing an Advanced Search in the Marketplace. Near the bottom of that page, you can select to only see vendors who have an affiliate tools page.

Some vendors may also choose to list their affiliate tools page in their Marketplace listing, but this is much less common and isn’t as easy to find as the previously listed methods.

Finally, some vendors may have an Affiliates link on their website, typically in the footer. If there’s a particular vendor you want to promote but who doesn’t have any affiliate information, you can always try contacting them to ask for any insight or tips they have for promoting their product.

Taking advantage of affiliate tools can be a great way to make your promotional efforts easier and more successful. If you’ve never explored vendors’ affiliate tools pages, be sure to check some out today!

What affiliate tools do you find most useful? What do you wish more vendors included in their affiliate tools?

Take a look at these related posts:

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Written by: Nathan Hangen, Guest Blogger

If you’re a blogger who’s thought about creating and selling your own product, you’ve probably heard that in order to make sales you need to get a lot of traffic. What I’ve learned, though, is that there’s a difference between getting a lot of traffic and getting valuable traffic. There’s even a difference between getting a lot of valuable traffic and getting a lot of paying customers.

For some reason, people automatically assume that if you build up your traffic, via comments, email, social media, etc., you will automatically start seeing your bills get paid and your bank account grow.

I wish!

The truth is that converting traffic into customers is a lot more difficult than it seems, especially if you don’t have a solid product to offer up to that traffic. The following steps will help you develop and launch your first product, while keeping your readers happy.

Step 1: What are You Selling?

Sure, you need traffic in order to sell stuff, but how are you going to sell anything unless you have a good product?

You’re going to have a hard time converting traffic into sales if all you’re offering is a “me-too” ebook or the same PLR content as everyone else. Make sure you take the time to develop a product that can really solve problems and offer practical advice to your readers.

Step 2: Identify Your Market

Technically, you should do this part first, but as I’ve learned over the past few years, you sometimes won’t know your market until you’ve tried to sell something and failed.

I’ve had a lot of failed products, but instead of just quitting and closing up shop, I’ve learned to re-evaluate and adjust based on what I learned from my mistakes.

My Experience

For instance, when I had the idea to write Beyond Blogging (co-authored with Mike Cliffe-Jones), I didn’t have an audience in mind; I just had a general product concept.

From there, though, I spent time sending surveys and talking with my readers on Twitter and in my blog comments. This isn’t something you can skip—you have to really get in the trenches and hang out with your audience.

In doing that, I learned what my audience wanted, which was a product that was inspirational, wasn’t a typical “how-to” blogging book, and had information and advice they could use right away. I used my research to create my product specifically for this group of people, instead of trying to make my book “everything for everyone.”

Step 3: Respect Your Audience

Some people are successful using “hit and run” sales tactics, but that’s not my style. Quite frankly, that shouldn’t be the style of any blogger that wants to build a long-term relationship with their audience. Blog audiences are fickle, and if they start feeling like your values aren’t in line with theirs, they’ll drop your blog in a heartbeat.

How To Build Relationships While Selling

Building relationships is easy, but it takes time and dedication. It starts in your comment section, by providing your readers with replies and feedback to their questions or concerns.

From there, you should make sure your email newsletter so that it provides maximum value to your readers. Keep in mind that value doesn’t always mean commercial-free content. Sometimes, value means relevant affiliate offers. People don’t mind this as long as you aren’t contacting them only when you have something to sell.

Finding the balance between selling and relationship building is tough, and will likely take some trial and error to get right. Some people will absolutely never want to be sold to, and it’s OK if you lose a few people as long as the vast majority of your audience sticks with you. If you get lots of feedback that people aren’t interested in what you’re selling, you might want to consider whether your product is really addressing the needs of your audience.

How I Sold to My Readers

When I started selling Beyond Blogging on my site, I spent a few weeks telling my subscribers and my blog readers that I was working on a really cool book.

I built up anticipation over time so that they not only knew it was coming, but so that I could pre-qualify them ahead of time.

Once the launch started, I gave my readers a head start to an early link and a discount code. They appreciated that I rewarded them for being a regular reader of my blog, reinforcing our relationship.

Although I sent reminders every few days until the end of the launch, I never acted desperate or forceful. Again, readers responded well to being treated like we had a valuable relationship, rather than just being targets for sales.

Lastly, I didn’t harass them or annoy them if they didn’t buy. When the launch was over, I simply added an email to my autoresponder sequence and went on with my blogging as usual.

If you spend all of your time promoting products, people are going to get tired of hearing from you. If you mix it up with good advice, you’re not only helping them, you’re creating a need and a desire to learn more. It’s like building blocks. You’ve got to build them up one level at a time.

The Results

When all was said and done, we sold 5 figures in the first 24 hours, and doubled that by the end of the launch. Our names were all over the blogosphere, and people were asking their favorite bloggers to do a review, without us having to prod them. That’s some true social proof.

From there, we’ve built a strong customer list that still wants to do business and is ready to learn more. Our next step is to use what we’ve learned to take them to the next level with a more advanced product, resulting in a second product with a built-in audience.

When it comes right down to it, you need traffic, but you also need to make sure you’re making something worth buying. Don’t go with big ideas—go with what people need. Once it’s ready, launch with as much hype as your audience can tolerate, while still maintaining the integrity of your relationships. After all, we’re building businesses here—not selling used cars!

What strategies have you used to turn your readers into customers? What mistakes have you made that you’ve learned from? Please share them in the comments!

About the Author

Nathan Hangen teaches people how to build digital empires, helps them rock through their workday, and works with small businesses to implement digital marketing campaigns.

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