Online Marketing Essentials – How to Select Your Product

This is the third in a series of five articles taking you through the basic steps you need to complete to successfully market anything on the internet. This article looks at where to find products and how to make sure the ones you pick will sell. We check out a killer tool to give us the final edge.

If your just starting out in online marketing then it is absolutely imperative that you start with a simple marketing model. You should have a single chain plan so that you can easily modify any part of that chain and review the results. We must be in a position to relate any changes in your results (good or bad), to the changes made in your marketing model. It is this cycle of change, test and review that is the core to successful marketing. To be able to do this you should start with one product.

First thing to discus is product type. For a start-up marketer the best option is to select a digital product. Fortunately there are a number of affiliate networks who you can join and will allow you access to a large number of vendors who run affiliate programs. The bad new is that most of these are very restrictive, especially with new-comers to online marketing. Many product vendors run there own affiliate programs but to start with I suggest you stick with a network.

One particular network, is however, very amenable to new marketers and is completely free to join. So to select your first product you should first join ClickBank. You can go to the ClickBank web site and follow the exercise below.

Go to the ClickBank site and at the top of the page you will see a hyper link entitled 'marketplace'. Click on this and you will then be presented with a search box.

For this example I am going to be someone interested in languages, summer holidays and similar so I have selected the category 'Society and Culture' with the sub-category 'Languages'. I have left the keywords box blank, hit GO and a number of results results are displayed.

In this case the top few items are Rocket Spanish, Rocket French and Rocket German.

Read the product description, but remember this is written by the vendor. The other thing you need to do is 'view the pitch page' This is the selling page of the vendor. Click on the link under the description and see if it appeals to you – would you be tempted to buy this product? Do you think other would?

Now look at the green text under the item. For Rocket Spanish it reads:

$/sale: $86.04 Future $: - Total $/sale: $86.04 %/sale: 75.0% %refd: 73.0% grav: 83.36

What this tells you is that for each sale you make you will get $86 (or its equivalent in pounds), that will equate to 75% of the sale price. It shows that 73% of their total sales comes from affiliates. The final number (Gravity) is calculated by ClickBank based on the last 8 weeks sales. Its a rather complex calculation that adds more weight to more recent sales but gives a measure of the current sales performance of the product. Basically you don't want too high a gravity as you will be competing heavily with other affiliates but you want it high enough to expect a reasonable sales volume. Remember, for now keep it simple.

You can make an assessment on this product in the following way.

1.You will be getting a good amount of cash per sale ($86) that is a fair percentage of the sale price (75%).

2.The product itself looks to be a quality product as 27% of the sales are organic or non-affiliate sales (sold by the vendors themselves).

3.It has an average level of gravity that is ideal for a first venture.

If we wanted to consider Rocket Spanish as our product then still we need to do some further checking and we do this with a fantastic little free tool that will really improve your chances of success.

The tool is called PPC WebSpy and it integrates with your web browser. It only works with Firefox, so if you only use Internet Explorer you will need to download and install Firefox. This is also absolutely free. Many believe this is actually a superior product to Internet Explorer (IE) and certainly less prone to problems. I suggest that during your installation of Firefox you deselect the check box that says 'use Firefox as your default browser'. This will then leave your IE exactly as it is but you will be able to launch Firefox to use PPC WebSpy. If you get to like it you can always make it your default browser later. My guess is you will!

Firstly you need to view the PPC WebSpy video explains and demonstrates how it works. The next steps are simple, you just Google 'Rocket Spanish' and you will see the paid search results. Look at the keywords used and the costs per click, that PPC WebSpy show you, and you will easily be able to calculate what it would cost you to get on the first search page of Google. In this example I was able to discover that I could get the top search page position with the keywords 'learn Spanish free online' for only $0.38 per click. This means you need to get a sale once in every 226 clicks ($86/$0.38) to break even. That should be easy for targeted traffic. What works for paid traffic also works for unpaid traffic so all the signs are that this is a viable product that should make you money.

Use this basic technique to select your own product and you will maximise your chance of success.