You’ve been selling a few Clickbank products via AdWords or other PPC systems, and based on your results, you’ve decided that a particular product and/or niche is worth promoting long-term. Let’s talk about how to take it to the next level to exponentially increase your long-term profits.

Once you’ve made the determination that the niche you’re working is profitable, the very first thing you’ll need to do is buy a domain name, and set up a hosting account for the niche. A few of you have mentioned in the comments of my previous posts (and quite a few more have mentioned it in emails to me): why didn’t we set up a website to start with? Now we’ve got to go back and retool the process to fit a website into the loop.

Although domains are pretty cheap, and hosting is very cheap, I never, ever set up a website for an affiliate product until I’m convinced the niche (and the product itself) is profitable. In almost every case where I’ve worked with someone one-on-one doing this, they start putting the emphasis on the stupid website above and beyond their PPC ads. In effect, they hit analysis paralysis while trying to build the “ultimate” website for this little Clickbank product, and when they are unable to make it “perfect”, they drop the idea altogether (or something more important comes along and captures their attention.)

This system is designed to get you going in short little bursts that are easy to complete, and which do not require much thought (the less you have to think about something, the more likely you’ll be to actually do it…)

Instead of trying to set up the “perfect system” from the start, with a website, squeeze page, autoresponder series, etc etc, all I asked you to do was 10-20 minutes of product research at Clickbank, and then 10-20 minutes writing a few ad variations.

Based on some of the comments you guys have left, and the emails I’ve gotten, you’re “imperfect” system just scored you a nice little profit. So let me ask you this: if I had laid out a “perfect” system with all the bells and whistles, would you have followed through with it? Only you can answer that question, but my guess is your answer would be “no”.

If you haven’t yet gotten enough traffic to make a determination as to whether this product is worthwhile - go repeat the first couple steps with some other products until you find one that looks like a winner.

We’re going to set up a simple, one-page review website for this product with this new domain and hosting account. When looking for your domain name, try to keep it generic for your niche. Eventually, we’ll be adding other products to the mix, and we want to be able to utilize this domain later for that purpose.

Your website will consist of two elements:

  • A 1000-1500 word review of the product that you’re promoting, and
  • An autoresponder signup form.

How do you write a review? Simple - buy the product you’re promoting (if you haven’t already), and write about it. Tell your reader what’s good about it, and what is not good about it. How does it compare to other products in that niche that you are familiar with? How could it be better? Is it easy to use? Is the documentation understandable?

Although you are using this review as a marketing tool, you want to write it without the hype or the “marketing-speak” you may be accustomed to using.

Alternatively, your “review” could be a “Top 10 Gotcha’s to Watch Out For When Using X”, or “7 Secret Methods to Improving The Performance of X”, or something like that. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a boring ole’ “review”. The idea here is to create 1000-1500 words of unique content that center on this particular product.

Close the review with a simple link to your affiliate URL for the product. No flashing lights, no big, huge “buy it now” graphics, just a simple “Get your copy of X here” hyperlined to your affiliate URL (or a tracker if you prefer.)
After writing your review piece, add the full review to your new website, and include an autoresponder signup form. That’s it - nothing else. No squeeze page, no external links. A basic website design is just fine (you don’t want just a raw article there), or you can even use a blog if you wish. But it is critical that you have one page on the site with just the review you’ve written, and an autoresponder signup.

Now, get this new one-page website indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN.  You can do this easily and quickly simply by linking to it from one of your existing domains, or by some light blogging and pinging.  A one-page website can usually be indexed into the Big Three within a couple days.  Once your new one-page site has been indexed, you’ll be ready for the next step in this process… which I will cover in my next post :)