Ecommerce is vastly different to any other business model, but as an affiliate marketer, and specifically anyone who's following the Consumer Wealth System process, needs to be aware of it.

It's my opinion, that for a few people, Ecommerce is going to hold the key to not just making a full time living online, but to building wealth, something that will make you in excess of $100,000 a month, something that you can sell for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in 3-5 years.

Why do you need to be aware of it if you're an affiliate marketer?

Because if you're promoting physical products as an affiliate marketer, through a review style website (like the Consumer Wealth System teaches), it's very easy to take that site, and convert it into an Ecommerce store, and dramatically boost what you are making.

But let's take a step back for a minute, and look at the Ecommerce model.

Well, in the second quarter of 2011, Ecommerce (in the US) accounted for $47.5 Billion, a 3% increase over the previous quarter (reference - census.gov)

And it isn't slowing down, since 2002, it's gone from around 1.3% to the now, 4.6% of total money spent in retail.

Those numbers may seem small, but remember, that 4.6% means $47,500,000,000 transacted in 3 months.

"Them thar are a lot of zeros!!!"

You're damn right it is, and taking a slice of the pie, is actually easier than you think.

It used to be that getting an Ecommerce store that was WELL BUILT (notice the emphasis on well built) was costly.

If you had contacts, and knew what you were doing, you could get away with it being built for $3,000-$5,000, if you didn't, and you wanted something custom built, you could pay as much as, if not more than $2,000,000.  Yes, $2 Million (I know this because a friend of mine who does a lot on Ecommerce, paid slightly over this to have his system built).

But even with those high costs, if you could get traffic, it was worth it.

Why?

Because of the value of the visitor for Ecommerce stores.

A few weeks back I posted on the topic of Affiliate Marketing Metrics.

In this, I went through an example scenario of an affiliate site that was doing 10,000 uniques per month, that was making $660 in sales.

Not bad (but not great) for an affiliate site.

So here's the thing, with an Ecommerce store, that is doing 10,000 uniques a month, let me show you what the numbers look like.

Now, these numbers are close (actually a little lower) to one of our ecommerce stores that we have running.

The effort to setup the site is slightly more difficult, don't get me wrong, but for the same traffic, here is a site that is making almost 8 TIMES the amount of money.

But here's the thing, Ecommerce isn't for everyone.

Going from a successful affiliate marketer, to a success ecommerce store owner, is a big shift in mindset.

You see, affiliate sites can be run, nearly on autopilot.

You get traffic, you recommend products, you make sales, job done right?

Well with Ecommerce, while you can have most of it run on autopilot, it requires a far higher degree of responsibility.

They purchase something through you, you better be well prepared to take care of them, they are your customer, and they will very quickly tell you if you have let them down.

It's part of the game.

But if you can handle that, if you can bear that responsibility with pride, then Ecommerce will likely be a viable avenue for you to make, not just a full time income online, but a serious business that will create wealth for you and your family.

Sincerely,

Daniel Turner

I've been living in the wonderful world of physical products, lead generation and ecommerce for quite some time now, and actively promoting niche digital products through Clickbank has just not been much of a focus for quite some time.

You see, there was a time when I did promote clickbank, and focused quite heavily on it, but that was in the wild wild west days where buying digital ebooks was a novelty and traffic was super easy to come by... or was it?

Back then Clickbank was relatively unknown, with niche products reaching a gravity score (more on this later) of 20 was like, a super duper amazing feat or something.

But when I see products like Woodworking Plans with a gravity of 139, and Wedding Speeches of 94, it makes me think, hmm... theres a lot of people making a lot of money here!

How did I have my eyes opened?

I did a webinar with a gentleman named Adam Short from Niche Profit Classroom which you can access for free here:

http://www.nicheprofitclassroom.com/webinars/mlw/replay.html

Adams basic process is pretty simple, and in fact plays perfectly with my preferred style of physical product promotions.

Step 1 - Research the Marketplace

Step 2 - Setup the Site

Step 3 - Get Traffic

The only difference is that instead of promoting physical products, you're promoting a digital product that is relevant to the marketplace (or setting up your own product and selling that).

If you don't want to spend the time to watch the webinar, let me give you the exact steps you need to go through to start making money with Clickbank as a Clickbank Affiliate (I've added a few more to Adams list just to break it down a little bit).

Step 1 - Go to http://www.clickbank.com and make sure you have signed up for an account there

Step 2 - Go to the marketplace in Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm and search the categories for something you're interested in

Step 3 - Find a product in that market place that has a Gravity of 8 or more (I picked one that was about 90) - While I don't have an exact defined algorithm of how Gravity is made, the essence is this, the number represents the amount of affiliates that have made AT LEAST ONE affiliate sale within

the last 1-2 weeks.

NOTE: For this test purpose, I chose Shed Plans.

Step 4 - Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and make sure that there are a large number of searches for the phrase and market you have selected, in my example, Shed Plans gets 22,000 exact searches a month

Step 5 - Go to http://www.google.com and make sure there isn't a huge level of competition (Adam recommends doing this via Page Rank - for me personally I look at the number of links in the top 10 results - you can do both using http://www.seoquake.com)

Step 6 - Register your domain (not giving this to you yet :D) - I mostly use http://www.namecheap.com

Step 7 - Setup your domain on your hosting account, these sites for us are usually through Hostgator - http://www.hostgator.com

Step 8 - Start posting content consistently to the site

Step 9 - Build links to get rankings and traffic

Step 10 - Check Clickbank account for money :D

So those are my expanded 10 steps to making money with Clickbank, the webinar is an hour long and has a tonne of content, Adam goes into pretty heavily what he does, he shows you an example site, and how much its making and really lays things bare.

http://www.nicheprofitclassroom.com/webinars/mlw/replay.html

I look forward to posting results over the coming months!

Sincerely,

Daniel Turner

Have you ever wondered why some sites do really well, and others do very poorly?

Maybe you've dabbled in affiliate marketing, setup a site or two that seemed to get traffic, but never really generated any sales.

It comes down to one thing.

Understanding metrics.

Metrics are the key indicators for understanding if something is successful or not.

For example, if you were wanting to track the metrics for losing weight, you'd want to track body fat percentage lost and muscle mass gained, two realistic, measurable things that are identifiable.

To illustrate this point, let's walk through a scenario that I know I've personally been down before, and maybe you've experienced something similar.

You find a market/product to promote, you setup a site, you get some content on that sucker, and pretty soon you've got some traffic flowing in.

You're thinking to yourself, "hey, I'm pretty good at this stuff!", but still you're not making any sales, there's no real cash in the door!

This continues, you get the traffic... and... nothing...

What you're suffering from is not a failed site, not a failed product (necessarily) but a failed merchant.

Now if you didn't know this, you'd probably just look at the site, throw up your hands and go "BAH! Stupid internet marketing hogwash doesn't work!"

What are the metrics that go into actually making money from affiliate marketing?

That means when you're saying to yourself, "Damn I wish I was making more affiliate sales", it's not something you can even remotely impact, all you can do is work on the METRICS, the things that make up the formulas.

Traffic (Metric):

Is simple, the amount of total visitors you have going to your site (you are looking for the highest qualified/targeted traffic possible)

Click Through Rate (Metric):

How many people out of every 100 visitors see the link/banner/ad, and actually click on it.  E.g. if you had 100 visitors, and 5 clicked on your links, you have a 5% Click Through Rate.

Merchant Traffic (Result):

The result of the amount of Traffic you have, multiplied by your Click Through Rate E.g. using the same formula/numbers above, if you had 100 visitors, and a 5% Click Through Rate, you'd get 5 for the Merchant Traffic value.

Merchant Conversion Rate (Metric):

This is the conversion rate of the merchant you are promoting, how many out of every 100 visitors do they convert.  This number is in my opinion the single biggest factor in the success or failure of an aspiring affiliate marketer, it is the one thing you have no DIRECT control over.

Number of Affiliate Sales (Result):

This is the result of the Merchant Traffic multiplied by the Merchant Conversion Rate, E.g. if the merchant converted at 5% and you sent 100 visitors (Merchant Traffic) you'd make 5 sales (100*5%).

Sale Price (Metric):

The cost of the product you are promoting - simple really...

Affiliate Commission (Metric):

The percentage you get paid for each sale you make (this figure can vary from 3% to 100% or more depending on the market).

Total Affiliate Sales (Result):

How much money you actually make at the end of the day...

So how does it look?

Let's use a site example (with nice rounded easy numbers) for a monthly period

Site A (following the formula above):

A pretty average performing site considering it's getting 10000 unique visitors a month!

So let me illustrate the power of how understanding these metrics work and show you what happens when you improve each one.

Traffic - 11000 (10% increase - you targeted some more keywords, added some extra content)

Click Through Rate - 10% ( 33% increase - going from 7.5-10 isn't hard, change the banner you're using to promote the product, add some extra links in, make it easier for them to click it)

Merchant Traffic - 1100 (rounded down because you don't get half a visitor :D)

Merchant Conversion Rate - 4% (33% increase, you looked around and found a better converting merchant for the product you were promoting)

Number of Affiliate Sales - 44 (again rounded down because you can't make half a sale)

Sale Price - $300 (same product, same price)

Commission Amount - 12% (20% increase - as you make more sales, you can usually negotiate higher rates)

Total Affiliate Sales - $1584

That's how you take a site, with nearly exactly the SAME TRAFFIC, and increase its earnings by 240%

In later articles/guides I'll target and explain how to improve each of these metrics, and things you should be looking at, but I can guarantee, that just by measuring these numbers your business will start to improve.