Today I was doing some research on classified ads and found an interesting new way of getting noticed in the search engine listings. Of course you first have to get in the top 20 or preferably in the top 10. But once there here is a screenshot of someone who really figured out how to get most of the clicks out of his free listing:

As you can guess the search query was ‘free classified ads‘ and the top 3 paid ads have exactly this heading. But take a look at the non-paid search results. Inetgiant has counted the exact number of characters and written a meta description that fits exactly with the 2 lines in the SE listing. The first line repeats some of the main keywords in a real sentence. The second line uses special characters, with a centered layout, to attract the eye of the user. Personally I haven’t seen such a remarkable way of using the SERP listing before. Although Mr. G will probably catch on soon with this new ‘trick’. Or will they?

Using caps
Another ‘trick’ that can be seen often lately is the use of CAPITALS in Google ads. According to the TOS this is forbidden, and usually the ad isn’t accepted. Paul Bourque (our Uberaffiliate)  wrote a post about a guy who did this in combination with total Google ad domination (this advertiser ‘owned’ all ten side spots). But there are many more examples and apparently Jonathan Volk has found a way of how you can have all caps in your ads. My guess is that it works with dynamic keyword insertion in combination with the use of symbol characters. Below is another example of using caps:

I have been following this search query (’free ringtones’) for some time now. And the above ad has been around for weeks (and probably months). So Google either has problems in identifying the use of this trick or they do not care so much. I haven’t seen it in Yahoo ads until now. And when you try to write all caps in your ad it will automatically be corrected by the Yahoo ad system.

Anyway, I wouldn’t call the use of capitals in ads ‘blackhat’. It is against the TOS, but some of these ads are online since months’ in a row. It is a fact that it gets harder and harder to get noticed. Lets just say that there are very creative people out there. What dou you think?

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If you read my post about the Black Ink Project, a free affiliate coaching course provided by Jeremy Palmer, you may have decided to try to get one of the 2000 extra seats that became available. If not here is a short update about the first week of this course and a link to the results.

My motto is: ‘never too clever’. Although I have extensive experience in creating websites, my programming skills are not so ‘experienced’ and my affiliate trick hat can never be full enough, so when someone with such a rep as Jeremy Palmer throws up a course for grabs, detailing the whole process of niche selection, to web creation, to keyword tracking and even affilaite tax advice, I will jump in.

The first week has already been loaded with information. The great thing here are the live calls via Webex, where you can ask any question you want, and the forums where all the participants meet and discuss. First weeks’ program covered the following items:

• Session 1 - Finding Your Niche
• Session 2 - Getting Your Business in Order
• Session 3 - Develop a Rock Solid Business Plan
• Session 4 - Getting to Know Your Audience
• Session 5 - Setting Up Shop

Every session has its own  Recorded Webinar, PowerPoint Presentation, Action Guide and Support Forum. You can check out the results of the first weeks program of the Black Ink project on the BIP blog.

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Promoting products on Clickbank as an affiliate isn’t as easy as 123. I recently started to research the Clickbank marketplace and it’s products and have found some interesting tools / sites that can be useful in selecting products. At the end I will show a method to promote Clickbank products on Adwords and a ’secret’ tip that can be useful in reducing the cost of aquiring a Clickbank info-product.

What is Clickbank?
If you don’t know what Clickbank is: it is the main portal for selling and buying information products, mainly ebooks, in a wide variety of categories. You can promote these digital products as an affiliate and earn a percentage of the sale, somewhere between 25% and 75% of the selling price, which in most cases varies between 10 and 100 dollars. If done right, this can be very profitable for both seller and affiliate. To quote Cilckbank:

ClickBank has quickly become a global leader in the sale of digital goods online with more than 10,000 product publishers and over 100,000 registered affiliates. Each day, ClickBank completes nearly 20,000 orders from more than 200 countries around the world. ClikcBank.com is consistently ranked as one of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet.

Choosing Clickbank products to promote
There are so many products available on Clickbank that choosing the right one to promote is a not-so-easy task. There are several websites that can help you in this process. Firstly there is CBengine, which stands for … ClickBank engine. Wow It is much easier to navigate than the Clickbank site itself and has a lot more options to check for products, authors and statistics. When you signup as a member, there are even more options available to get inside information. A page I regularly check here is the Clickbank movers and shakers page.

Analysing Clickbank products
Another useful website that I recently discovered is the Clickbank Analytics website. Its business model doesn’t rely on membership fees but on Google AdSense, so all the content is free for the grabs. And content they have! Loads of graphs depicting everything (well almost) you’d like to know about current or new products on the Clickbank Marketplace. On the bottom of the right column of the homepage is an interesting list of top-gravity-gainers. If you are just starting as a (Clickbank) affiliate it may be a good idea to focus on new products (less competition!) which pick up gravity fast, meaning they probably are very interesting to promote.

One method to promote Clickbank products
The following method was developed (or published) by Chris McNeeney, author of some of the best selling Clickbank ebooks about affilaite marketing methods, among them Affiliate Project X, the famous DayJobKiller and lastly Google Assassin. The following article can be found on Allan Gardynes great website Associate Programs. I will quote it here:

The hottest products to promote are invariably the new ones - that is true for physical products (PlayStation 3 anyone?), but it is also true for ebooks, which brings me to the biggest affiliate network for digital products, ClickBank.com.

ClickBank lists its latest products in a separate category, titled “New products”. Here is a simple technique that fits in the above guidelines - each week, 50 to 100 new products are added to the ClickBank marketplace.

In our experience, do you know what factor precedes a product about to blow? The number of brand searches for that product. If five people search for [affiliate project x] today and 50 tomorrow, it’s about to blow, BUT you wouldn’t be able to see this by glancing at the ClickBank marketplace until it’s too late…

So, that’s the background; here’s how we are going to do market research on new products AND only promote on super targeted keywords. First, each time a new product is launched on ClickBank, set up a single AdWords ad for that product targeted the [product name] keyword. Chances are, at this early stage there will be no other affiliates there (and often not even the merchant).

We simply throw up a direct affiliate link (going straight through our hoplink). Ideally, cloak the link and upload it to your website (so you get around Google’s “double serving” rule). We insert a bid price of $0.50 - and let it run. For 90% of the products there, you will get very few searches (but quite a few clicks). However, every so often, the product will suddenly start go gather steam - which is the opportune time to go to the next step and write a full pre-sell for the product, or start promoting it on broader keywords (as now it has been proven to convert). You can see which products are getting popular by looking at the impressions for each product - if any product suddenly starts to get lots of impressions, you should take a closer look.

This method allows you to use AdWords impressions to track market research, and also to pay cents for super targeted clicks that no one else is bidding on. It’s a time consuming technique, but it works.

So, what works for Chris will work for you too? Give it a try and let me know if you succeed.

How to pay less for Clickbank products
If you have found a promosing looking Clickbank infoproduct you may ask the seller for a review copy. But if you’re a newbie affiliateer chances are that you do not get one. Then you may want to buy the product to assess if it really IS interesting. So here is a not so widely known ‘trick’ with you for buying Clickbank products and paying the lowest price. Do this at your own risk, and after having read this post about how you may even get it for zero dollars. Here is how it works:
Often a seller develops several versions of a product or several pricing strategies over time. Sometimes these differently priced products are available even if they are not currently promoted on the sellers’ website. To find out, just click on the ‘order’ button or link. It will take you to a Clickbank page with payment information. Now look at the url and search for the following string in this url: ‘&item=x’ . Now try out another number (the number being in the place of ‘x’) and see what happens …

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