The opportunist
Author: glend
The background
One constant about Internet marketing is that the newest products always convert the best – in my experience a product at launch may convert two-ten times as well as a product that has been out for a few months – and that is especially true if the product launch is massive. Generally the larger the Internet marketer behind a product, the more names he will hit as soon as he launches (some marketers can reach over a million names within the first week of launch via his JV network, hence the insane figures they do).
All this means, the “easy sales” have already bought by the time you roll into the market two months too late.
In a nutshell, timing is pretty important.
With that in mind, there are several techniques that you can use to source new / on the rise products, and then promote them using the methods I will cover in step 2.
Finding hot, new products
Firstly, it is time to return to our Hotmail account and check on the products that the gurus are promoting. By on large, many of the big names are going to be “ahead of the curve” when it comes to pushing a product. They get to launch the product most of the time, which means that you can spot the hot products a mile off.
Tip: if you see two or more gurus pushing the same product the same week as one another, chances are its new and there is money being made. It’s time to join them and share in the spoils.
A second tool way to find hot, new products is CBTrends (http://www.cbtrends.com). As the name suggests, CBTrends displays a visual graph of the Clickbank statistics including gravity, $/earned per sale and % referred.
Note: This is a slimmed down (but fully workable) version of the Rising Star method, which can be found in my Adwords Miracle handbook.
By now, you should be building up a constant portfolio of products to promote, using the many product selection methods in this guide. You may want to run any product you find CBTrends to see whether the product is on the way up, or on the way down.
You can do this by entering the product vendor’s account name into the CBTrends search page at http://www.cbtrends.com/vendor-search.php - pay particular attention to the gravity graph and the % refd graph – if both of
these are on the rise, then the product is going to get bigger and bigger.
You should run any products you have in your portfolio through CBTrends – if it both gravity and % refd are on the rise, then the product is about to blow and you should consider pushing the product hard over the coming weeks and months. I will return how we promote these products later.
In case you are wondering what a hot, on the rise product looks like, here is an example:
Note how the product is increasing in gravity, and rank.
This shows us that the product is on the up. As you can see, the sharpest increase often takes place when the product increases in gravity from 20-30 to 50-70. Typically a product that makes this jump is going to stay popular (few products, in my experience, suddenly drop down from 70 back down again).
As such, the greatest profits can be made promoting products that are rising up from a gravity of 20-30. This brings us onto the final, and most advanced of the opportunist techniques – this last one involves catching products at an even earlier stage, literally the first week that they are released. The third and final method to finding hot new products involves a tool called Affiliate Alert: http://www.affiliatealert.com . The professional version costs $50 every three months, which is why I suggest you start off using the first two opportunist methods and return to this one when you are already making some money with the Project X methods.
Affiliate Alert is a pretty cool tool that lets you search for Clickbank products by a series of indicators – including momentum and newness. In other words, we can see how fast a brand new product is selling – and jump on it while it is still insanely hot, getting in way before 99% of the market. If you have your own list, or are thinking of building one, ongratulations: you have just recouped the cost of this manual many times over, using this one technique.
We will want to search for products once per week, and choose the following search terms: “newer than six days”, and “rank on top of 20”. This will bring up a shortlist of 10-50 products that we can skim through and consider promoting, and adding to our product portfolio. You may also want to feed the products in question back into CBTrends to get a graphical view of how the product is doing.
With Affiliate Alert, we are concerned with one factor in particular: what is the rank of the product in question in its respective category. The higher the rank, the better. That said, bear in mind that all categories are not created equal. A product may rank in the top ten under the sub-category society > charity, and yet sell very few copies, as that is really not a competitive sector.
Tip: if a product ranks in the top 30 for its top-level category (i.e. “business to business” instead of “business to business > industrial” which is a sub-category), then pay very close attention indeed (it does happen half a dozen times per month or so and you can spot them a mile off on Affiliate Alert). These are products that have become big, fast, and you should take a closer look at the product – and seriously consider promoting it.
One more point: you will also want to quickly look at the % earned and $ earned categories to see if the product pays out a big enough commission to make it worth your while, but generally the rank is the most important factor to consider.
Promoting the product
If a product has proven itself as a rising star, on its way up the rankings, there is money to be made. The first thing that you should do is to start promoting the product on Adwords (using the “link cloaking” method detailed in Section 3).
What we want to do to start with is to only leech our Adwords traffic off the keywords of the product name in question; we can expand this keyword list and promote on more general terms if and when the promotion proves profitable. This should generate profitable clicks right away, and will continue to do so until the “me too” affiliates come into the market.
When that happens, you will find yourself pushed out of the market, and you will have to increase your bid (and at this point you will know if its worth doing so) and continue to send traffic through your cloaked link to the merchant page.
You may well decide to write a pre-sell using the “leech / art of the pre-sell” method – you can do this if you think the product will continue to be a star, and if the product launch was especially massive.
Tip: Affiliate marketing is a process, and not a destination. I suggest you periodically check back on your promotions and see how they are doing; check your return on investment and decide whether you want to continue your promotions with no change, drop the promotion, increase your bid but maintain, or create a full on pre-sell.
Tags: CPA affiliate, Work At Home
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November 21st, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] PART 2 – THE PROJECT X METHODS Method 1: the leech: the art of the pre-sell Method 2: the affiliate diary Method 3: the workhorse method Method 4: thief in the night: stealing from the super affiliates Method 5: copy the best part 2 Method 6: The opportunist [...]