Your First ClickBank Sale - Ebook Review
Steven Aitchison runs a nice blog about personal development which is just one of his online ventures. Another is making money from ClickBank as an affiliate marketer. Steven emailed me recently and asked me to review his ebook Your First ClickBank Sale.
As he sent me a free review copy, this was a no-brainer :)
The Core Concept of the Book
There are a great many ebooks and other products about making money, especially with affiliate marketing but many of these products make such big promises that they can be off putting for a newcomer who has yet to make any money at all. This book is aimed at somebody who wants to get started with affiliate marketing but hasn’t quite managed to get going yet.
Steven’s philosophy is to work on only one project at a time, work on it for a week and then move onto another one either keeping or dumping the previous one. Once the first sale has been made, it becomes a lot easier to make the next and the next…
The Packaging
This is a 76 page ebook which is also accompanied by 10 short videos. It sells for $27. It also comes with a few unannounced bonuses - there are two ebooks about Copyrighting and an ebook about using Google Adwords.
One negative thing that struck me straight away was the terrible formatting used in the book. I have no idea what tools Steven used to create this but it looks bloody awful! There is hardly any margin on the pages, the table of contents is extremely difficult to read, there are only two bookmarks (so few writers put bookmarks into their PDF’s!), and its just a bit garish when you first open it up.
However all that is cosmetic and not really important. One touch I really liked were the videos - these really enhanced the content and made it seem much better value for money than an ebook on its own. I really should have done that for my WordPress ebook.
Click Here to Buy Your First ClickBank Sale
Delving Under the Covers
After some introductory material there are four main chapters:
- The Psychology of Wealth
- Getting Organised
- Tools for your First Campaign
- Your First Sale
The Psychology of Wealth
This is actually something I want to discuss in an up-coming blog post. Some people believe that in order to make money you must first believe that you can - that your mindset matters just as much as the technicalities of the actions you take. I am one of those people.
This chapter talks about how to change your mindset to open yourself up to the possibility of earning much more than you currently are and yet this is an ebook about making your first sale. I felt this chapter was out of place in this ebook. It would make a great mini report on its own but it just didn’t seem to fit here.
Getting Organised
This chapter felt like fluff to be honest. I can sum it up pretty briefly - focus your efforts on one project at a time and stop checking your email every five minutes! This is useful information but it is isn’t directly going to help you get a sale from ClickBank.
Tools For Your First Campaign
Okay now we’re talking. For me, this was the most useful chapter. The process that Steven teaches is to choose a product to promote, create a landing page for it and then drive traffic to that landing page via Pay Per Click and then repeat.
This chapter gives you a downloadable template for a landing page and has some videos on just how to edit it. A ClickBank campaign such as this is not in my list of things to do right now but the information about landing pages in this chapter would be useful for anybody who is building a landing page for something - including my email course!
This chapter also goes into some detail about finding keywords to use for your PPC campaign and this is also backed up with some videos. One area that I thought was lacking was that of niche selection. He gives a few resources for spotting trends but there is no information here about how to determine if a particular niche will be profitable.
Your First Sale
This chapter goes into more technicalities about building and customising your landing page. If you are put off affiliate marketing because of your lack of technical knowledge then these last two chapters will prove very useful.
Steven finishes with a 24 hour action plan and gives some additional resources at the end.
Would I Recommend This Book?
It depends… When I released my ebook about building niche sites with WordPress, many people were surprised at the lack of information about the money making aspect. I designed it as more of a technical book. This ebook about ClickBank feels rather like that. I felt as though not enough attention was given to the money making aspect of it but it serves as an excellent technical guide to setting up a landing page and conducting a PPC campaign.
My efforts with affiliate marketing so far have all been contained within this blog. This very post is example - if you buy Steven’s ebook with my link I get a commission. For me, that is a comfortable way of doing affiliate marketing. I don’t have to build any websites, or spend money on PPC traffic. The idea of doing that stuff scares me a little and yet that is how many of the big affiliate marketers make their money.
If you are like me and are feeling apprehensive about the idea of just launching a website just to sell an affiliate product then this ebook will be useful to you. If you have already been doing that and are looking for ways to increase your revenue then I don’t think you’ll find anything of use in this ebook.
Click Here to Buy Your First ClickBank Sale
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Mark Mason
March 27, 2008
Thanks for this review. I am always tempted to experiment with these various PPC affilliate schemes.
However…
As a part-time internet entrepreneur, I am very much NOT in favor of anything that involves Adwords. My brief experience with PPC ia that it takes lots of time and attention, and it is really easy to screw up. Like you, I prefer to get “organic” affiliate sales.
Having said that, I think you can make lots of money quickly in the PPC game. Might be interesting to try for a couple of days over a vacation or something.
Mark Mason’s last blog post..The Magic of Email Lists