There are many business opportunities out there that tell you how you can make money by advertising digital goods. You can either sell your own products or sell products written by others. ClickBank lets you sell ebooks and software written by hundreds of authors. You typically earn a commission of between 30% and 75% on the products you resell. the trick to making money selling other people’s products is in getting the public to know that you exist. Remember, you are competing with the hundreds of other individuals who also want to sell the same item. Even worse, you are often competing against the author directly.
One of the fastest ways to promote a product online is to use Google Adwords. Basically, you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad when they do a search on your keywords. The more you pay per bid, the higher your ranking is. There are other factors that come into play with Adwords placement, including the quality of your landing page and how fast or slow your landing page loads.
The trick is to determine the most you can bid and still be profitable. In order to do this, you need to know how many visits it takes, on average, before someone makes a purchase. This is your click-to-buy ratio (CBR). If you find that you get one order for every 100 clicks to the page, your CBR is 100. Next, lets look at your cost per click, or CPC. Assume that you are paying Google (or Yahoo, for that matter), 50 cents per click. Thus, in order to get one sale, you will spend $50 per 100 clicks. Since your CBR is 100, you will spend $50 to get a sale. If you are selling your product for $49, and only keeping half, you are basically losing $25 per sale.
How to Fix ThisIn order to get your CBR down, you need to look at a few things. These include the quality of your landing page, the nature of your ad, your click-thru rate (CTR) and your desired search position. Let’s start with your ad. Make sure it is focused on your desired market, and that it does not get people to click who are not interested in buying the product. In Hot Home Based Jobs, I cover this topic in detail, so I won’t re-do it here (hint buy Hot Home Based Jobs!) You also want to make sure that you are using keywords that are targeted and not too specific. For example, if you are selling my Find and Assign product (available through ClickBank), you don’t want to be bidding on the term “real estate”. Why? Because you don’t want your ad displayed to people looking to buy a home, or who are not otherwise interested in finding ugly properties and assigning the contracts (the content of the book). You only want your ad displayed to those who are seeking for what you are selling. This will keep your CTR higher, and thus lower your overall CPC (based on Google’s algorithms). A lower CPC translates to a lower cost per sale.
The quality of your landing page is also important. If people click on the ad, come to the page and either don’t find what they are looking for, or the page is too confusing, they will leave without ordering, and thus your CBR will go up. Have several people look at your web page, and determine if it convincing or not, and if the message is on target.
Remember, if you are using pay per click, you need to create your own landing page, and not simply link to your affiliate page. Google will penalize you for this, and in fact, will often only allow ONE affiliate for a given site to have their ad appear in the paid search results. Thus, you need your own domain and your own marketing web page to successfully market digital goods through an affiliate program such as ClickBank.
You can learn more about making money as an affiliate and by using Google Adwords by purchasing Hot Home Based Jobs.