CBTool Blog

I have sometimes wondered which marketplace categories get the most affiliate attention or what gravity value is “just right” - not too low and not too competitive. I’m sure ClickBank vendors spend a while thinking what commission rate would look most attractive to affiliates. These questions can be answered - to an extent - with statistical analysis of ClickBank marketplace data and historical trends.

It just so happens I keep a local copy of CBTool database which contains exactly that information. Yesterday I spent a few hours analyzing it and in this post I’ll show you the results I came up with.

Distribution of Products by Marketplace Category
Products that belong to several categories were counted in all of them. As might be expected, “Money & Employment” is leading with 20% of all products belonging to this category.

How Popular With Affiliates is Each Category?
Gravity represents the number of affiliates that have promoted a product, so the sum of all category’s product’s gravity values shows how many affiliates are promoting products from that category. Looks like 47% of affiliates are promoting the three categories which basically contain “make money” related stuff.

Most Attractive Commissions and Prices
I rounded up all commissions to full dollars and calculated the sum of gravity for every distinct “earned per sale” value. This indicates the number of affiliates that promote products with a specific commission size. I did the same for price (estimated, ClickBank doesn’t provide that info in the marketplace so the price graph is probably slightly innacurate). Looks like most affilates promote products that pay out around $22 and cost around $33.

Vendors and Gravity

Some more numbers
Approximately 21.4 new vendors are added to the marketplace every day and around 15.65 vendors drop out daily meaning ClickBank’s marketplace grows by 5.75 products daily on average.

The categories that get the most products added per day :

• 4.76/day - Money & Employment
• 4.43/day - Business to Business
• 4.42/day - Health & Fitness

That’s it for today

White Shadow :: Jun.29.2007 :: Clickbank Stuff :: 1 Comment »

Read this first : I’m NOT selling anything here. This post simply describes an amazing idea I had today.

Many authors have tried to sell an “automated profit-generating system” of some kind. Actually I’m sure there’s at least one e-book out there with that exact title. Needless to say none of these “systems” are actually completely automated and you’d be lucky to get something more than another rehashed “affiliate marketing for dummies” fluff-piece.

What most don’t realize is that with the recent technological advances and multiple internet marketing related tools appearing recently, we are now closer than ever before to a truly automated moneymaking system. Many typical tasks the affiliate marketer faces have already been automated to some extent - keyword research, conversion tracking, content creation, etc - and if those techniques were combined appropriately we might finally have the proverbial “cash machine” on our hands.

Below I’ve described a general outline of my vision of this ultimate system. It would be a highly complex piece of software consisting of multiple modules (each of which already has existing implementations) -

1. Product Selection Module
   This component would select “interesting” products worth promoting, like highly ranked products at ClickBank or products currently becoming more popular (determined by rankings changing over time).
   Examples : CBTool, CBEngine and many others.
2. Keyword Extraction Module
   This script would visit each product’s website and extract product-related keywords from it.
   Examples : Google and most other search engines.
3. Keyword Research Module
   Once the product keywords were found, they would be passed to a keyword research software that would find more related keywords. This can be done by accessing online keyword tools (like Google’s) or using natural language processing techniques (a subdiscipline of AI research rarely utilised for this task).
   Examples : KeywordElite and many others.

4. Ad Spy Module
   The extended keyword list would be fed to a “PPC spy” script. This script would track the ads appearing on search engine(s) for these keywords and determine
   • Profitable keywords.
   • Profitable ad copy.
   • Profitable products - this one is a bit tricky. You could either take the product already being promoted (could cause URL collisions and other trouble) or select a similar product from the list generated in the first step. Product similarity could be determined by them both having similar keywords (or more advanced techniques).

   Examples : GC Detective, AdSpyPro (note : these don’t implement the product selection)

5. Ad Rewriter Module
   This doesn’t have to be a complex one - just replacing a word or two with synonyms and changing the URL/Title might be enough. You could also throw in some form of split-testing. This module would create modified ads for the keyword/ad/product combination selected by the previous module.
   Examples : Content rewriting software. I can’t give any specific examples as I haven’t used it, but I know it exists.

6. PPC Interface Module
   This component would set up the ads on the PPC engine of choice, e.g. AdWords. It would also extract various data like cost per click, average ad position and so on.
   Examples : Various AdWords wizards and management software.

7. Keyword/Conversion Tracking Module
   This one would track all clicks on the keyword level and find out which keyword/ad combinations convert to sales and which don’t. It would discard the non-performing ads and leave/improve the good ones (small automatic tess and improvements are possible with the help of Ad Rewrite Module discussed above).

   Affiliates usually can’t use Google’s conversion tracking effectively because they have no control over the vendor’s “thank you” page that is displayed on a successful purchase. So an alternative tracking mechanism is necessary - and many do exist.

   Examples : X-Ray Domination, CBTool Keyword Tracking (free), Xtreme Conversions and many more. While the existing tools don’t automatically determine which keywords are profitable (just conversion rate & income/click) that feature could easily be added because this hypothetical system already includes a PPC Interface module making it possible to get the costs/click. This means it could calculate profits/click (or losses/click) on its own.

… and there you have it! A system like that would automatically find products to promote, create ads, track and improve the results. All you’d need to do would be to configure it (like set maximum ad expediture per day and such) and let it make money for you.

While it might seem unbelievable, everything described above is already possible. Of course it would require a truly tremendous amount of programming work and would need powerful server(s) to run on - but it can be done.

With that said, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a software like that anytime soon. Even if someone could afford to spend a fortune on having it developed - and I assure you the costs would be high- it would most probably be kept secret. This system relies on the existance of “normal” marketers whose ads are used for research so it simply cannot be allowed to spread.

Another problem is that creating such a system would require lots of knowledge, marketing skill and money (as already mentioned above), meaning the author must be pretty close to a “marketing guru”. And a guru doesn’t really need an “automated cash machine” - he’s doing well already. Why would (s)he spend a huge amount of resources on what is essentially a newbies dream? Creating it and selling it to newbies would not be possible due to the problems discussed in the previous paragraph.

While possible, and automated moneymaking system is very unlikely.
Feel free to comment on this craziness

White Shadow :: Jun.26.2007 :: Rants :: 2 Comments »

I stumbled upon Willie Crawford’s blog and noticed a post about PPCDefender - a piece of software that is supposed to stop programs that try to spy on competitors PPC campaigns. Some notable examples of the “competition spy” variety are GCDetective and AdSpyPro.

I’m not impressed by PPCDefender. Software like AdSpyPro lets you find profitable keywords, ad copy and products. PPCDefender only makes a feeble attempt to protect one of these - the product, or more precisely the landing page. Someone using PPC spy software could still as easily discover your profitable keywords and ads.

PPCDefender is a simple PHP script that achieves some level of “protection” by only allowing visitors who came from Google to see the page. This is done by checking what URL they came from - the “referer” URL feature that most web browsers support. Repeat visitors will also be admitted because PPCDefender creates a cookie to identify them. An experienced programmer could easily spoof the referer URL (or the cookie) and make PPCDefender think the spy script is legitimate visitor. There are also other ways to defeat the “defender” but I won’t describe them here as it would get very technical soon.

And yes, the PPCDefender script is of course “encrypted” and anyone trying to overcome it would have to spend days reverse-engineering it, wouldn’t he? No, not really. The encryption (actually obfuscation) is trivial and it wouldn’t take more than half an hour for someone with enough PHP experience to crack it.

PPCDefender in it’s current form is only a temporary annoyance that the PPC spy programmers could solve in less than a day. The defenders author promises to keep up to date with competition spy software evolution and update PPCDefender as needed… we’ll see how that goes. I suspect he won’t have much success.

If you’re really paranoid…

If you really want to protect your AdWords ads from scripts like GCDetective you could change the Display URL and/or the Target URL for each ad frequently (at least once a day). I haven’t tried to reverse-engineer PPC spy software but I think it probably uses the URL(s) to identify each ad. PPC spies aim to find ads that run for a long time and if the URL changed often it would look like they are different ads every day. For an even more reliable protection you could slightly change the ad text, display URL, target URL and the product link on the landing page and identifiable portions of the page (like title, etc). This process can be automated with some effot but is it worth it?

I think for the anti-intelligence tools this will be a losing fight overall.

White Shadow :: Jun.26.2007 :: Reviews :: 6 Comments »

ClickBank has finally implemented recurring billing! It can be used to receive recurring payments for products and services like membership sites and subscriptions, offering lots of new possibilities for vendors.

Read more about it here :

Recurring Billing Description
Recurring Billing FAQ

I’ve already updated CBTool to display the relevant information - the “Future $” and “Total $/sale” values are available on the vendor info page (the Recurring Billing FAQ explains what they mean).

There are currently no products in Marketplace with recurring billing enabled… we’ll probably have to wait a while for those. I know I’d like to see some - getting paid every month for every customer you referred sounds better than a one-off commission

White Shadow :: Jun.21.2007 :: CBTool News, Clickbank Stuff :: 3 Comments »

Don’t buy it. If you already did - tough. All it has are two simple link cloaking methods based on HTML, similar to what one of my free cloaking scripts does + some cookie stuffing. I wasn’t impressed - well, actually I was impressed they managed to sell this stuff.

On a completely unrelated note, ClickBank seems to have skipped an update today, so CBTool hasn’t been updated either.

White Shadow :: Jun.17.2007 :: CBTool News, Reviews :: 1 Comment »

This evening I went walking at the dusk and inexplicably my thoughts turned to the unpleasant topic of the many worthless “make money” products out there (and many more coming every day). They just don’t seem to ever get anywhere. There’s one popular e-book, then another comes out, and another one, and at least a half of them promiss to give you the exact steps to getting rich and famous, or at least rich. There seems to be some misconception that drives newbies to purchase another “adwords+clickbank+magic=profit” course and lets some authors churn out one book after another. There might be more than one, but this time I’m going to go for the”plan” stuff, also known as the “blueprint”.

Let me show you what I’m talking about. Here’s an ultra-simple three-step success blueprint to becoming rich quick :

1. Create a product based on a unique idea in a hungry niche.
2. Create a professional website and ell the product on the Internet (use ClickBank or whatever).
3. Drive massive amount of targeted traffic to your site.

…and that’s how you can become a millionaire!

… what, are you still reading?! Why aren’t you excitedly rushing to implement the steps I laid out before you so clearly? Ohh, you don’t know how to accomplish them? Tough.

The truth is that while the process described above can actually work, it takes a huge amount of work and experience to be able to accomplish those steps. Also, it’s not very specific. However, a newbie purchasing a “blueprint” expects an explicit, specific instruction set, because that’s what “blueprint” means - “a detailed plan or design” (I just pulled this definition from Google). Many e-books just assume some things “happen” and don’t go into detail.

Another thing a real blueprint has and most “make money” plans don’t is completeness. If you’re the guy who builds houses you don’t have to worry about things like where to put the doors. The blueprint already has that. In fact, there are machines - robots, if you will - that manufacture hardware stuff (like cars) using a “blueprint” or a program (which is just that - a detailed plan). Newbies expect to receive something like that. They want an automated money printing press (I bet there’s a product named like that!). Well, there’s no such thing. There can be no such thing. Anyone implying they’ll teach you how to get/buy/build such a device is deceiving you.

If it would be possible to precisely and unambiguously define the exact steps to making money online, someone would write a software to do it. There’s no such (working) software in sight.

To use any of the “blueprints” available, you must have this one thing, this one ingredient no product will give you, whatever the price - creativity. And that, my dear reader, is not what real-life blueprints require of their implementator - being creative is the task of the architect designing the blueprint.

Many E-Book authors would have their customers believe they (the author) are the architect, providing the complete blueprint. All the inexperienced customer needs to do is implement “these exact steps“… “Even if you’re an total dumbass/average Joe/lazy git, you can make money with my ubercool product!”. Ah-ha. Right. That’s not how it works.

In internet marketing (and in most other parts of your conscious life, too) you must be the architect. You must invent, create and improvise. E-Books, reports, newsletters - they can give you tools, inspiration, ideas and knowledge, but they can’t give you “the exact steps to achieving financial freedom”. You’ll have to work and be creative to achieve that.

Sure, you can survive without creativity… but would you really want that?

Well, it’s 0:47 now and I’m going to watch an old episode of Battlestar Galactica before I go to sleep. Congratulations, you made it to the end of this rant!

White Shadow :: Jun.13.2007 :: Rants :: 1 Comment »

“15k In 7 Days” is an audio interview + a PDF transcript that talk about building a responsive list and just how exactly did Brian Edmondson (a little-known marketer at the time) make more than $15 000 from his small opt-in list just in one product launch he was an affiliate for.

I’m pretty sure all the “super affiliates” are going to roll out cool presells and bonuses for this one, giving you a bunch of enticing reaons to buy it from them. Go for it. It’s good. I’ll just give you some facts :

• This report tells you how to get an “optimized list” - a list of responsive subscribers and buyers, not freebie seekers.
• You’ll find out how Brian’s list generates him more than five times the income/subscriber than is the industry average.
• Why you must build a personal relationship with your list.
• How the often shunned list-building strategies like safelist advertising and giveaways can provide you with high quality subscribers instead of freebie hoarders. Just a few tricks you need to know…
• Other good ways to build your list.
• How to condition your subscribers to buy from you and not some other affiliate.
• … plus a lot more about opt-in lists and marketing.

On the topic of fluff - it’s not a “step-by-step blueprint” or something of that kind, whatever you might see someone write. There’s good info inside and you’ll need to listen/read through the interview and make notes. No “get rich in 5 minutes” plan here.

Check out 15kin7days.com for more info, it’s going live today.

White Shadow :: Jun.12.2007 :: Reviews :: No Comments »

Initially I designed the Search page so that it would look good on my screen (yeah, I’m a bit selfish ;)). The table displaying the results is optimized for large display resolutions (over 1024×768) and looks really messed up in a smaller window.

I tried to redesign it so that it would display equally well on any resolution, but without much success. So I went and created a “narrow” layout option to the search page. It doesn’t look as good, but should be readable even on a 800×600 display.

That’s it Just a short update today.

White Shadow :: Jun.08.2007 :: CBTool News :: No Comments »

Before I begin, let’s do a quick recap of what “gravity” is :

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
(Description taken from Clickbank.com. Emphasis mine.)

So, if you’re a ClickBank vendor, why would you want to increase the gravity number? The answer is that many affiliates will check your product’s gravity and historical performance before deciding whether to promote it. Product’s with a decent gravity score, and - more importantly - a rising gravity trend - are more likely to attract affiliates. More affiliates => more sales => more profits for you!

So how do you go about increasing the gravity? Only affiliate sales influence the gravity number (see above), so you need to make sure that most of your sales come from affiliates. There are two main methods to achieve this :

1. Whenever you promote your product using PPC, forums, and so on, use your own affiliate link - you can get another CB account for free and use that to promote your hoplink. Note : If you have an opt-in form on your sales page - for a newsletter or something similar - don’t use your affiliate link in the e-mails, or you might end up robbing your affiliates of their rightful commissions.
2. Redirect those visitors that arrived without an affiliate id to your own affiliate link. It’s more complex than it sounds - you should do this redirect only once per visitor. Why? If a visitor originally comes through an affiliate link (no redirection) and doesn’t purchase the product immediately, instead bookmarking your page, he would be redirected next time he visited (through a bookmarked link with no affiliate id), effectively overwriting the previous affiliate id.

I’ve written a script that implements the second method. To use it, you’ll need some basic HTML knowledge and a web host that supports PHP. Here’s what you need to do :

1. Make a copy of your sales page. For example, if your sales page is called index.html, name the copy index2.html
2. Make sure the original file has a “.php” extension. If not, rename it so it does. For example, index.html => index.php
3. Replace the HTML code of the original sales page with the code below.
4. Edit the real_sales_page and your_own_affiliate_link variables to match your setup.

Redirection code :

<?php

	$real_sales_page='index2.html'; //your sales page copy
	$your_own_affiliate_link='http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/'; //your affiliate link
	$test_cookies=true; //true or false

	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
	//           You do not need to edit anything below this line.
	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------

	if( ( isset($_GET['hop']) &&
		($_GET['hop']!='0')) ||
		( isset($_COOKIE['rdf_found']) &&
		($_COOKIE['rdf_found']=='yes')) ) {

		setcookie('rdf_found','yes', time()+60*60*24*90,'/');
		header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);

	} else {

		if($test_cookies){

			$script=$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
			if( !isset($_GET['ctest']) ) {
				setcookie('ctest','test', time()+60*60*24*2,'/');
				header('Location: '.$script.'?ctest=test');
				exit;
			} else {
				$cookies_enabled=$_GET['ctest']==$_COOKIE['ctest'];
			};

			if($cookies_enabled){
				header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
			} else {
				echo 'cookies disabled.';
				header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);
			};

		} else {
			header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
		};

	};
	exit();
?>

The above code also checks if the visitor has cookies enabled and will not redirect to your affiliate link if not. This is done to ensure it doesn’t mess with the supplemental hoplink tracking CB has recently implemented (if you want to know what that is, check ClickBank news).

I hope this information is useful to you

White Shadow :: Jun.06.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: 1 Comment »

If you want to sell more than one product - like e-books on different topics - you’ll need a way to make the hoplink redirect the visitor to the appropriate page or site. You shouldn’t dump all your products on a single page, because it’s distracting to the visitor, generates less sales and no decent affiliate is going to promote an unfocused site like that.

Unfortunately ClickBank allows you to sell multiple different items, but only gives you one hoplink URL per vendor account. To comfortably sell different products under one vendor id, you’ll need to use a trick or two. Read on.

ClickBank allows you to append additional data to the hoplink, e.g. “http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?product=product2″. It is possible to write a script (a computer program) that will use this information to seamlessly redirect the visitor to a different site for each item.

Luckily, you don’t have to do that yourself - there are already several solutions available :

EasyClickMate
Okay, EasyClickmate has a lot more features than just selling multiple products using one ClickBank account. It protects your download page, calculates click and conversion stats, can notify you by e-mail when an affiliate makes a sale, increases your ratings in search engines, provides a back-end for your affiliates to check their own stats and more. It’s also easy to install, and the author can install it for you (for an additional fee). More info at EasyClickMate.com

CB Multi-Item Manager
If you think you don’t need all the additional features of EasyClickMate or think it’s too expensive, take a look at this multi-item manager - www.richwerx.net/cbmim.html. For less than half the price, it will also allow you to sell more than one product under one account, and includes a download protector as a bonus.

Personally I’d recommend using EasyClickMate, as many of it’s features are really essential to being a ClickBank merchant and you’ll wonder how you managed without it.

White Shadow :: Jun.04.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: No Comments »