Writing articles for EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com is how many people start in this business. There are two approaches. Hammer out hundreds of articles and try to write an article for every keyphrase in your niche. Lots of people do this successfully, but it takes a lot of work and requires almost daily output. It can also be draining and lead to burn out because many shotgun article writers simply repurpose their articles and write the same thing in different ways over and over and over... and over.

But what about writing one KILLER article and spending more time promoting it?  I'm talking about doing research, finding quality information and truly providing an article that is valuable to people. Not just a well-disguised sales letter as most articles are. It doesn't necessarily need to be long, but it should be loaded with useful substance. It should be a great article.

Heck, maybe even consider running the article through a copyediting service or a trusted friend to make sure it's error free and reads smoothly.

Then spend time promoting it on forums, directories, blogs, social bookmarking networks, Myspace, Twitter. Get backlinks to it. Try to to push it to the point where it becomes somewhat viral. Takes on a life of it's own. Ranks high in the search engines. The more popular an article becomes the more popular an article becomes. I know folks that have single articles that earn them 5-10k a year.

I've become a huge fan of this link service. They'll let you buy a hundred backlinks to an article. I bought 100 links the other day to a Myspace profile. I've seen increased results in the search engines. These links are just one facet of a multi-faceted backlink stategy.

http://www.cbengine.com/cbe/web.cfm?hop=pooketss

If you go the killer article route, I'd pick a medium to hot keyphrase and go for it. Ezine articles still tend to rank high, but the ones that do the best have link promotion behind them and provide truly useful information. It's important to make sure all your links don't just come from Web 2.0 social media sites as Google is now devaluing sites with only social media backlinks. You need a diversity of inbound links.

Try the killer article approach and let me know how it goes in the comments.  

Question: One thing that confuses me is that on a few products, the refund rate says 'na', while on the rest it always shows a percentage (even when it's a new product, and the rate is 0%)

What does the 'na' signify?

Answer: NA signifies NOT AVAILABLE. We are unable to calculate return rates for recurring products and vendors with multiple product IDs. Keep in mind, refund rates are not an exact science. We simply subtract the payout from the average earned to get a percentage. Occasionally vendors change product prices which will skew return rate percentages.  We're hoping in the future Clickbank makes precise return rate data available.

Matt

Question: Do many people use PLR as products to sell on Clickbank and is there a problem with multiple versions of the same PLR on Clickbank? Answer: I do not have precise stats, but yes, quite a few people purchase resell rights and sell those products via Clickbank.

Answer: I do not have precise stats on how many are selling PLR products via Clickbank, but I believe there are quite a few. As an experiment, I tried PLR selling a year or so ago with key logger software. http://www.cbengine.com/res/stat.cfm?v=spyhead

I believe I spent $400 on purchasing resell rights and while I've made my money back, I have not made enough to recoup the time I spent on website and copy.

The product didn't do that well. I did NOTHING to promote it (part of the experiment) and while the product actually has a high conversion rate and an almost nil return rate, there's nothing very unique (there are others exactly like it on Clickbank.) about it and it's a savagely competitive niche. It was an experiment and I didn't have that high of aspirations for it anyway, so the losses are not that big of a deal to absorb.

There may be PLR products on Clickbank that are selling like hotcakes, but none come to mind.

In my opinion, if you want to succeed as a Clickbank vendor you need to create your own custom product and you need to do it well. Here's the mindset I think more vendors should have. Pretend like you’re going to shop your book/program to New York publishers and that the quality of the information and writing are good enough to be deemed publishable by a major publisher. Work THAT hard on it. And if you can’t, for whatever reason, hire somebody that can. In my opinion, we need higher quality products on Clickbank. Don’t get me wrong, there are some TERRIFIC Clickbank products and the bar is rising. But I think there’s room for improvement and I hope I can inspire folks to take the challenge of excellence.

Quality is good for everyone, vendors, affiliates, Clickbank and customers. A poor quality product doesn’t do anything for anybody, including the person who created it.

We all want to take the path of least resistance and PLR products seem easier, but I’m afraid they’ll never produce the same results of a custom product filling a huge, hungry demand. And maybe, if you’re just looking for extra grocery money, a PLR product is the way to go. My key logger software is enough to buy a couple tanks of gas every month, but not much more than that.

Clickbank is like anything else. You have to work HARD, but the attractive part about it is that once you undergo the hard toil of creating a product and the hard efforts of marketing it (attracting affiliates), quality products will often take on a life of their own, attract more affiliates, snowball, climb higher in SERPS, and, at the juncture, you can relax a little and enjoy the fruits of your labor. And best of all, it beats workin’ 9-to-5.

Matt

P.S. – A better application of PLR products is to use them as BONUSES for your main product.

Kay asks: I'm kind of stuck. When someone has a new product, do they put it out on Clickbank right away? The downside is that the lack of gravity numbers (or lack of) will deter affiliates. Is that something to worry about? What's the best way to introduce a new product and get affiliates? Thanks.

Answer: For a multitude of reasons, when a vendor launches a new product they elect not to have it appear in the Clickbank marketplace. One reason could be to ramp their gravity first. While this makes a certain amount of sense, adding a product into the marketplace with low gravity doesn't deter all affiliates. In my experience, if the sales page is well done and the product has a demand; it begins to attract affiliates almost immediately. If the product converts well, word has a way of circulating, gravity starts to trend upwards, and more marketers begin to promote the product. Realize that most will see the product date and realize it's new and while some might take a wait and see approach, some will take a chance on it right away.

My father recently launched a product on CB and we put it in the marketplace immediately. While we recruited a small handful of our own high-powered affiliates within the industry the product falls under, we attracted a half-dozen new ones via the CB marketplace who started bringing sales. Perhaps if we had built up our gravity first, before adding it the marketplace, it would have enticed more to take a chance earlier. I can't say for sure, but we were suprised by the number that did pick it up. It's a niche industry and I thought people might not know how to market it. By the way, this is my dad's product. http://www.cbengine.com/res/stat.cfm?v=leadflow

If I were launching a new product, I would add it to the marketplace immediately despite a low gravity. Then I would work on recruiting some large affiliates to give it a big kick. Recruit as many affiliates as you can. Spend your first month after product launch on nothing but that task.

Several weeks ago I wrote a blog about recruiting new Clickbank affiliates. You can read that here:

http://www.cbengine.com/blog/post.cfm/how-to-get-clickbank-affiliates