CBTool Blog

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 ::

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