Found 3 products in clickbank but not sure if profitable

09 Dec 09 7:08 am

a big thing is that direct linking seldom works. most of the people I have met who have succeeded with it admit that they resorted to black hat and unethical methods to do so.

You need to build a site on the niche where you can lead people into buying something.

my concern is that with the economy a hoby site like that may not do well right now. not much of a crisis niche, unless they let me near the power tools :)

I am a cabinet maker ,and I looked into that type of site myself. the few people I met who where running one said they were doing it for fun and rarely ever made money with it.
I was considering a low fee membership site where we design a new plan every two weeks for the members to download, and do some custom designs for a fee.
after looking into the market, I decided there was not enough money in it right now. perhaps once the economy turns around and people can afford those extras I will try it.

09 Dec 09 11:52 pm

the black hat methods are on how they get traffic to their articles. There are rules on what you can and cannot do to drive traffic to articles on the directories. Some people ignore those rules. then they cry when their accounts get banned.

the OP stated that they were direct linking already and not making money at it.

@jcdean
my statements about the profitablity comes from research I did a couple of months ago. I actually got in contact with a few people I know who have sites in the niche, and they are not making much. A few sales here and there but no consistent income.
They stay in the niche because of their passion for it, the money is just a bonus to them.

15 Dec 09 4:54 am

Larry,

Besides just checking the gravity of those products, have you checked Amazon.com for similar products to see if there are very many reviews?

Have you entered those product names directly into Google to see if there are other people selling them and, if so, how many of those advertisers are there? You could also use SpyFu.com to see how long people have been advertising on those keyword phrases. If they've been there more than a couple weeks you can be pretty certain that they're making money.

Have you used the Google keyword tool to see how many people per month are searching for this type of information?

Personally, if you already wrote several articles on the topic, but didn't get any conversions, that would send up a red flag to me. However, I don't know what product you were offering, what the salesletter was like, how much traffic was actually sent to the page, if the traffic was extremely targeted or just "browsers" and "freebie seekers", etc.

I'd definitely do some more in-depth research on it before I went to the trouble of building a site. There may be something else out there that would be a better use of your time and effort.

Just because you happen to be good at something or have a lot of experience doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing to promote.

By the way, I've done a lot of direct linking before but it really makes more sense to send people to an opt-in form and try to build a list. You can always hit them up with a one time offer after they sign up.

Offer them a training course or short report as incentive for signing up. You can modify some PLR articles and make a good report for cheap or have it written for you at Elance.com.

When you send people directly to the offer you build someone elses business. When you get them on your list you build up YOUR business. Make sense?

Good luck.

Joe

17 Dec 09 9:34 am

@marymeagan I understand the concept of direct linking, but if you build your sites according to what Affilorama teaches here, You will not have any problems with converting. I speak from my own experiences with direct linking, and after several hundred articles with good traffic and clickthroughs I had 3 sales.

not a good investment of my time.
Since I started following the teachings here on how to build my own sites, I am promoting the same products and making 3-5 sales/week in that niche. And that site is not built up to get a lot of rankings on the internal pages yet. The main source of traffic I have right now is all the links I had built up when I was direct linking off of the main URL.