If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re probably familiar with Clickbank. Clickbank is a large online marketplace and publisher of downloadable information products. You can buy e-books and software on the site, but most people use the site to post 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 the Clickbank marketplace to find suitable products to promote, and Clickbank provides a number of statistical measures that show how successful a product can be in the marketplace. Many affiliates, especially those new to online marketing, automatically choose the products that have the most popularity or “gravity” without realizing that doing so can hinder sales.
Gravity is a score that shows how popular a particular product is with other sellers 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 it would be better to choose a product with a more modest score.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing a popular product to promote, there are a couple of potential pitfalls with using high severity as a selection criteria:
Products with high gravity tend to be new and have typically only been on the market for a few weeks. Because of this, it can be difficult to determine if the product is really of high quality. It often 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 shoppers can return the product for a refund next week.
You will face a lot of competition if you choose to promote a popular product. The score itself indicates that the product is being heavily promoted, which means you will find yourself competing with many sellers, both established and new, to try and earn their commissions.
Today’s hot product is tomorrow’s forgotten product. A lot of “hot” Clickbank products have strong sales spikes when they’re new, only to see sales drop to zero within a few weeks when something better comes along.
The Clickbank marketplace has tens of thousands of products for sale. Some of them are new, but many of them have been around for a long time and have an established track record of good sales over a long period of time. If you’re new to marketing, you’re better off taking some time to find high-quality products that have been around for a while. You likely won’t face the stiff competition you would with more popular products, and you’ll also be promoting a product that you know will consistently sell over time.
While there are many useful and potentially profitable products for sale on Clickbank, sometimes it’s worth promoting a product that isn’t among the most popular, since less competition means more profit. Sometimes, less is more.