This question comes up all the time from new affiliate marketers. “How can I tell if a product sells?” They’re looking for some inside stat that might give them a clue as to whether or not the product they want to promote is going to actually sell. Well, this article is going to answer that question. And here’s the answer, though you’re not going to like it.

Promote it and find out.

I told you, you weren’t going to like it. Okay, before you proceed to rip my head off, you might want to read the rest of this article to understand why this is the ONLY way to tell if a product is going to sell for you.

Many affiliates believe that they can look at the ClickBank marketplace stats and tell, from those stats, if a product is a greater seller or not. The stat they look at most is gravity. They see some super high gravity like 400 or 500 or whatever and think, “Wow, look how many affiliates are raking it in with this product.” Well, there’s something you need to know about this very deceptive stat.

For starters, it can be seriously manipulated. One way to do this is with an email to a very large and very responsive list. What the product creator will do is inform his list that this new product is available, give them the link to promote it as an affiliate, telling them to simply replace certain letters with their ClickBank ID and we’re off to the races. Problem is, and the product creator knows this, many of these people will buy the product themselves using their OWN ID. So what happens is this. For every sale made in this manner, the gravity goes up.

Ultimately, what happens is that you have a product with a super high gravity ONLY because a bunch of people bought it with their own link. Then, when other affiliates now see it high at the marketplace, they think the product is a great seller and start promoting it themselves, not realizing that this product may very well have never made ONE sale through a true affiliate promotion. And this is just one way to artificially inflate the gravity of a product. There are others…and they are all used.

Point is, you can’t tell from looking at any one stat if a product is going to sell for you or not. The only way to tell is to promote it and find out. What you may want to do, in order to save yourself a lot of time is the following:

First, check the sales page of the product to see if it’s well written and looks good. If it doesn’t, there is little chance that it is going to sell well at all.

Next, you want to run a small AdWords campaign just to get an idea of the conversion rate of the sales page. If you see it’s converting in the 1% to 2% range, minimum, you might then want to run a full promotional campaign and throw some big money at it PROVIDED the CPC does not exceed your income.

For example, if you’re paying 10 cents per click and after 100 clicks you’ve made 1 sale of a $10 commission product and have spent $10 in AdWords costs, all you’ve done is broken even. Unless you can increase your conversion rate or decrease your CPC, there is no point in promoting the product.

How I wish I had a crystal ball to look at a product and tell if it was going to sell. Sadly, one does not exist. So for now, the above methods will have to suffice.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.