If you are an affiliate marketer, you are probably familiar with Clickbank. Clickbank is a large online marketplace and publisher of downloadable information products. You can buy ebooks and software at the site, but most people use the site to either publish information products or to find products to promote as an affiliate. Clickbank offers tools that make it easy for both publishers and affiliates to easily make sales of the products offered there.
Affiliates often search through the Clickbank Marketplace to find suitable products to promote and Clickbank provides a number of statistical measures that show how successful a product may be in the marketplace. Many affiliates, especially those who are new to online marketing, automatically choose the products that have the highest popularity or “gravity” without realizing that doing so may actually make it more difficult to make sales.
Gravity is a score that shows how popular a particular product is among other marketers and how well the product is selling. The formula for determining gravity is proprietary, but the higher the number, the more popular the product. Many new marketers make the mistake of choosing high gravity products when they would be better off choosing a product with a more modest score.
Although there is nothing inherently wrong with choosing a popular product to promote, there are a couple of potential pitfalls of using high gravity as your selection criterion:
Products with high gravity tend to be new and have typically been on the market only for a few weeks. Because of that, it can be hard to determine if the product is actually of high quality. Often it takes a few weeks for customers who are dissatisfied with a product to return it for a refund. Everyone may be buying a product this week, but the same buyers may be returning the product for a refund next week.
You will face a lot of competition if you elect to promote a popular product. The score itself indicates that the product is being heavily promoted, so that means you will find yourself competing with a lot of marketers, both established and new, in trying to earn your commissions.
Today’s hot product is tomorrow’s forgotten product. A lot of “hot” Clickbank products have sharp sales spikes when they are new, only to see sales drop to nothing in a few weeks’ time when something better comes along.
The Clickbank marketplace has tens of thousands of products for sale. Some of them are new, but a lot of them have been around for a long time and have an established track record of good sales over a prolonged period of time. If you are new to marketing, you might be best served by taking some time to find high-quality quality products that have been around for a while. You likely won’t face the stiff competition that you would encounter with more popular products and you will also be promoting a product that you know will be a steady seller for you over time.
While there are many useful and potentially profitable products for sale at Clickbank, it sometimes pays to promote a product that is not among the most popular, as less competition means greater profit. Sometimes less is more.