If you are an affiliate marketer, you are probably familiar with Clickbank. Clickbank is a large online marketplace and publisher of downloadable information products. You can buy e-books and software from the site, but most people use the site to post information products or to search for products to promote as an affiliate. Clickbank offers tools that make it easy for publishers and affiliates to sell the products offered there.
Affiliates often search the Clickbank Marketplace to find suitable products to promote, and Clickbank provides a series of statistical measures that show how successful a product can be in the marketplace. Many affiliates, especially those who are new to online marketing, automatically choose the products that have the most popularity or “gravity” without realizing that doing so can hinder sales.
Severity is a score that shows how popular a particular product is with other marketers and how well the product is selling. The formula for determining severity is proprietary, but the higher the number, the more popular the product will be. 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 is nothing inherently wrong with choosing a popular product to promote, there are a couple of potential pitfalls to using high gravity as a selection criteria:
High-density products tend to be new and generally only have been on the market for a few weeks. Therefore, it can be difficult to determine if the product is really of high quality. It often takes a few weeks for customers who are not satisfied with a product to return it for a refund. Everyone may be buying a product this week, but the same buyers may be returning 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 promoted a lot, which means that you will find yourself competing with many marketers, both established and new, to try to earn your commissions.
Today’s hot commodity is tomorrow’s forgotten commodity. A lot of “hot” Clickbank products have sharp spikes in sales when new, only to see sales drop to zero in 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 for an extended period of time. If you’re new to marketing, you’d better take the time to find high-quality products that have been around for a while. You will likely not face stiff competition that you would face with more popular products, and you will also promote a product that you know will be a consistent seller for you over time.
While there are many useful and potentially profitable products for sale on Clickbank, sometimes a product that is not among the most popular is worth promoting as less competition means higher profits. Sometimes, less is more.