Written by: Allen Baler, Guest Author

There’s no question that ClickBank vendors face increasing challenges these days, including:

• Higher refund rates, even if your product is solid
• More competition and “copy-cat” products
• Higher traffic costs, as well as the risk of getting “Google slapped”
• Super affiliates demanding higher commissions and bonuses

Smart ClickBank vendors are addressing these challenges by taking advantage of a relatively new, under-the-radar feature in ClickBank; the ability to offer their customers physical products such as DVDs, CDs, or printed books.

These “hard copy” versions can be offered as an upgrade, upsell, or even included free with every digital order.

Why Should ClickBank Vendors Offer Physical Products?

Many vendors think that physical products are too complicated to set up, are too expensive to produce & ship, and require too much administrative time.

The truth is that physical products can significantly improve an info-publishing business’ bottom line and is usually well worth the effort!

Based on our experience in developing and managing the physical products programs for top ClickBank vendors over the last 2 years, vendors offering physical products have increased net profits as much as 28%, cut refund rates to as low as 1.5%, and have increased customer satisfaction. These results have had a powerful impact on these vendors’ overall bottom line.

Here are the top 5 benefits we have seen with ClickBank vendors that have implemented physical products:

#1) Significantly lower refund rates
How many times have you had a customer refund because they were having trouble downloading your product? Or had a customer ask for a refund because they were confused because they saw a “virtual product shot” of a book or CD on your sales page and thought they were getting something physical, not a digital file? Offering a physical product component to your offer can eliminate both problems and will significantly reduce your refund rate.

#2) Higher perceived value among prospective customers
Your digital products might be state-of-the-art and contain great information, but for most of your customers there is significant perceived value to receiving something tangible in the mail that they can actually hold in their hands. This allows vendors to build the value and legitimacy of their products.

#3) Differentiation from the competition
By offering physical products, you offer greater value to your customers than your digital-only competitors. Discerning customers who are shopping and comparing offers will often decide to buy from you because you offer “more bang for the buck” than a competitor who only has a digital product.

#4) More money per visitor
Physical products work great as an upsell or post-sale purchase! Conversion rates can be as high as 30% and top vendors who push a significant volume can add many thousands of dollars in incremental income with their physical products. Increasing your profit per visitor enables you to afford higher bids for traffic and test “slap-free” traffic sources.

Here’s a tip that can jump-start the sales of your new physical product: offer your new physical version to prior customers who bought the digital version with a discounted price for a limited time. A couple emails is all it takes to get a nice surge of sales and we’ve seen these promos convert as high as 40%.

#5) Easier to attract super affiliates to promote your offer

Adding more money to your bottom line through physical products means you can offer higher commissions to your affiliates and offer bigger bonuses to attract super affiliates. Also, your lower refund rate will attract the smart affiliates who recognize the huge impact of refunds rates on affiliate ROI, especially for those affiliates who drive paid traffic.

How Do You Get Started Offering Physical Products?

OK, hopefully you are starting to see the benefits, and now you want to learn more about how to actually implement it.

The truth is that adding physical products to your digital info-publishing business does require set-up work plus ongoing maintenance. Creating, producing and shipping a tangible product can be a very different experience from the all-digital world most ClickBank vendors are used to operating in.

Here are the 3 steps to get started offering physical products:

Step 1: First you’ll need to create your physical product, such as artwork and files for CDs, DVDs, layout for a printed book, etc. It doesn’t hurt to spend a little extra time and money making sure everything is polished and professional, for example by designing a nice cover or including an informative insert. Remember, this product represents you and your business! Use the highest resolution artwork and video/audio files as possible since production specs for physical printing and viewing videos on TV need much higher resolution than for the web.

Step 2: Next you’ll need to produce your physical products. You can do it yourself which is a good option when starting out, or there are companies out there that can produce CDs, DVDs, and printed books at relatively low cost. Start with small initial production quantity so you avoid inventory risk and cash flow problems of investing in a lot of product upfront. You will also need to decide how you are going to package and ship your physical products to your customers. Again, you can do this yourself or there are companies that can handle this for you.

Step 3: Finally, you will need to set up your customer service process to incorporate the physical product aspect of your business. You will need to be able to communicate with your customers about their shipments, send them tracking information as well as set up a process for handling product returns and refunds.

The good news is that ClickBank has been making the process easier for vendors by recently adding tools and features to support “shippable media” products. This makes a lot of sense as ClickBank benefits directly from lower refunds, more successful vendors and happier consumers.

Here’s The Bottom Line…

Top ClickBank vendors have proven that offering physical products yields a significant boost to their business by increasing profits as much as 28% and cutting refunds as low as 1.5%.

No, it’s not a magic pill. Yes, it does take some extra work.

But the results can be well worth it.

So if you own a digital product and want to add incremental sales and cut your refund rate, consider developing physical versions of your products now!

About the Author

Allen Baler is the owner of Reboot Fulfillment, a company that since 2008 has designed, sold & shipped over 200,000 physical product shipments as the strategic partner of top ClickBank vendors. To learn more, watch the video presentation on how to increase profits with physical products.

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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
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Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

We have a new episode of Affiliate Marketing Today for your listening pleasure! In this episode, Dush Ramachandran and I discuss the benefits and challenges of going international with your affiliate marketing efforts, and give lots of advice on how to get started in the process.

We discuss things like how to find partners to work with, licensing English products for translation into foreign versions, the differences between translation and localization, and much more!

Listen now

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Episode of ClickBank’s Affiliate Marketing Today Show: Secrets from a ClickBank Super Affiliate
2. New Affiliate Marketing Today Episode: Building Relationships in Affiliate Marketing
3. Online Retail Giant ClickBank Expands Services to International Markets

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Brad Wiskirchen, CEO of ClickBank, as well as its sister company Kount and parent company Keynetics, was recently interviewed by Susan Bratton, host of the popular DishyMix podcast series on Personal Life Media.

In the wide-ranging interview, they go in depth on topics like ClickBank’s growth and success, opportunities and challenges facing affiliate marketers, secrets to success that Brad has learned from our clients over the years, and much more. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about our CEO and his insights into ClickBank, be sure to listen.

Check out the interview with ClickBank CEO Brad Wiskirchen now!

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Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Blogger

When I first got started as a ClickBank vendor several years ago, I faced one of the major challenges that faces all new ClickBank vendors: how to find and attract affiliates to promote my product. Since then, I’ve sold several very successful products through ClickBank, and have learned what it takes to get affiliates to promote your product, which is absolutely key if you want to make a lot of sales. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned over years of finding and attracting affiliates.

First Things First

An extremely important step in attracting affiliates that many new vendors don’t know about or ignore is promoting your offer yourself before seeking out affiliates. The reason for this is that you need to make sure your offer converts. Otherwise, all your efforts will be wasted. Many affiliates, especially highly successful ones, will only give a product one chance. If it doesn’t convert into sales for them, they’ll stop promoting it and probably won’t try again, especially if they spend money to promote it.

Pay Per Click traffic is a great way to test how well your product converts. The goal is to get a conversion rate of at least 1% – ideally closer to 3%.

This may sound like unncessary groundwork, but it really is a vital first step: the importance of having a high converting offer can’t be stressed enough.

If your offer converts, recruiting affiliates will be a piece of cake. Any affiliates you bring on board will make money and continue promoting you. Their efforts will quickly pull in many new affiliates, and so on – its a virtuous cycle. Your offer will go viral if your conversions are high, as other affiliates start to see what their competitors are promoting.

However, if your offer does not convert you will have a tough time keeping any new affiliates you do manage to enlist. Your offer will likely stagnate and then disappear for good.

So be sure to run a simple PPC campaign to test your conversion rates before reaching out to affiliates. You can get more info on PPC at my Affiliate Videos page.

Next Steps

Now that you have a proven 1-3% conversion rate, its time to start contacting affiliates. The good news is that some of the work is already done. With ClickBank, you are never working from a dead start.

First, the ClickBank Marketplace will introduce your new site to a potential network of hundreds of thousands of affiliates (you should submit your product to the Marketplace as soon as you are approved). Second, the fact that all payments are handled by ClickBank ensures you have instant trust with affiliates. ClickBank have paid out over $1 billion to vendors and affiliates – so your affiliates know they will be paid on time, which is important since you don’t have any reputation right now. In short, listing your product with ClickBank gives you a firm platform to recruit affiliates from. You may well even attract affiliates passively before you start work.

But a mere presence on ClickBank won’t be enough; we have to actively build on that platform and reach out to affiliates if we want to succeed.

So how do we do that? And what kind of affiliate do we recruit? To a large extent, it depends on your niche. In the fat loss niche, for example, you have many avenues open to you. There are thousands of potential affiliates, some with lists of customers (so they can promote you via e-mail), some spending huge amounts of money on Pay Per Click traffic, and others with well-visited “authority sites” that pull in masses of free (”organic”) traffic from the search engines.

Smaller niches may be more restrictive, with all the sales coming from one traffic source or affiliate type. For example, in your niche, perhaps there are 10 big e-mail affiliates (”list owners”) who account for 70% of all sales. I’ve seen it happen before. Perhaps all the action is happening on a handful of search engine keywords that can be targeted via “organic search” or “pay per click” (this is actually the norm).

I have divided affiliates into 3 types here, but there are many other traffic sources, such as affiliates who purchase ad space on media networks (”media buys”). For simplicity’s sake I have restricted the affiliate types to e-mail, Pay Per Click and organic.

Pay Per Click Affiliates

PPC affiliates are very often the easiest to reach of all, although often the most fickle (they are constantly tracking their return on investment, and so will move to the highest converting offer in a heartbeat – another reason to ensure you are converting before you recruit affiliates).

PPC affiliates basically buy traffic from search engines such as Google, so that when people enter a keyword relating to your niche (e.g., “fat loss guides”), their ad shows up on the right hand side of the search results page.

If you enter a few keywords that relate to your niche, look at the ads that appear down the right hand side. Do any affiliates appear here that are promoting your competitors’ offers? Are there are any vendors promoting their own offers but collecting leads? If so, they may be open to promoting your offer to their lists.

If you find advertisers like these, you should contact them and ask them to promote your offer.

You can brainstorm keywords to find these PPC affiliates by entering the URL of your website or related keywords using the Adwords Tool or my affiliate keyword tool. Search for each related keyword that the tool returns and look for affiliates advertising on that phrase.

Organic / Website Affiliates

Some affiliates buy traffic from the search engines via PPC, but others have established sites that actually get free rankings in the search engines. These “organic” affiliates often have a huge amount of traffic coming to their sites, and so can be superb affiliates.

The first step to finding them is to take the keyword list you generated earlier (when you were looking for PPC affiliates), enter the same keywords, and now look for webiste owners appearing on the left hand side of the results page. Visit every site and head to their contact page, explaining how your offer is relevant to their website. Some website owners may not be familiar with affiliate marketing, so you may need explain to them why it can be lucrative for them and a good fit for their audience.

You can also search for the name of a competitor’s product (e.g., “The Ultimate Fat Loss Guide”) and contact any website that has a review of your competitor’s product. If they are promoting your competitors, they may well promote you also. When contacting these organic affiliates be sure to emphasise why your offer will add value for their visitors.

E-mail Affiliates (”JV Partners”)

These are the hardest affiliates to get on board, but also potentially the most lucrative. E-mail affiliates have a list of customers that they can promote offers to. It stands to reason that many of your top e-mail affiliates will be your competitors, such as other product vendors. These guys have a customer list of their own, and may be interested in promoting your offer to their list.

If you do get them to promote, they can generate huge numbers of sales with a single e-mail. Secondly, e-mail affiliates are the key to going viral: since all the big product vendors and affiliates sign up to each other’s lists, if they do promote you, other affiliates can jump on board quickly. A high-converting offer can go viral off a single e-mail, as more and more affiliates see the e-mail blast and jump on board. That’s the power of reaching thousands of people with a single e-mail.

List owners like this are in theory very easy to find – just do a simple search on the ClickBank Marketplace and contact any vendor in your niche who is collecting names and e-mails on their Pitch Page.

However, while they are easy to find, these affiliates are also the hardest to recruit. Many of your e-mails asking for promotion will probably go ignored, much more so than the other kinds of affiliates. These guys are bombarded with e-mails like yours, and they just don’t have the time to answer every one they receive. It isn’t personal, its just business.

For this reason, I advise you to focus on the PPC and organic affiliates to start with. Then, when you have some grass-roots traction behind your offer, and you know your product converts well, you can approach the big e-mail affiliates from a position of strength.

What to Say When You Contact Affiliates

You usually only get one shot at contacting affiliates, so it’s vital that you do it right the first time. First, make your e-mail personalised to the affiliate in question. Reference their site and start by telling them your offer is relevant and will deliver value to their visitors/customers. Please do not send out a “one size fits all” e-mail. Any potential affiliate receives dozens of e-mails like yours – you need to make it personalized if you want your offer to stand out.

Next, tell them why they will make money by promoting your offer – give them your overall conversion rate, details of any affiliates you already have on board, and how successful they’ve been. Explain what is working especially well for you. Finally, close by giving them a call to action – tell them to either visit your affiliate page or e-mail you back for further information and a review copy of your product.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll repeat my advice from earlier: it’s vital that your Pitch Page converts before you recruit affiliates.

This will make it much easier to retain the affiliates who you do recruit, and also bring on new affiliates once you get your first set of affiliates on board. Once you have a high-converting offer, set up your affiliate page, listing details of your conversion rates at the top of the page. The affiliate page is where you will be sending potential affiliates, and should include your HopLink info and any resources (Adwords ads, e-mail swipe copy, etc) that affiliates can use.

You should also submit your offer to all the affiliate directories that are out there, along with the “announcements” sections of the top affiliate forums. This will take some time, but is vital to establishing your initial grass-roots foundation. Then, once your offer converts, your affiliate page is live, and you are listed in some directories, you can approach the above 3 affiliate types and start generating some real sales for your ClickBank product.

Finally, understand that affiliate recruitment is a numbers game. Look at it as a process rather than an “end game.” You’re looking to build gradual momentum, get your offer out there, and if it converts, the viral power of the Internet will do the rest. A high-converting offer only needs a little push before it gathers traction. So get to work – and build that initial buzz yourself!

About the author

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

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