Top Tips from an affiliate marketer

Hi Benitez. I happened over to this web-site almost by accident whilst doing (of all things) some keyword research. I generally make most of my money as an affiliate marketer and your question was interesting enough to make me want to join the forum and reply. So here's my two pennneth worth in no particular order of importance-

1. A lot of affiliate marketers at clickbank (CB) are "newbies" who have been sold on the dream of becoming overnight millionaires simply by promoting a few (mostly crappy) products on CB. They have often bought the dream through some over-hyped and over priced course which tells them to pick products based on what CB calls "Gravity". This is perhaps THE most misunderstood subject in the whole of CB affiliate marketing. In essence,Gravity is an indication of how much competition there is. It measures the number of affiliates who have each made one or more sales over the previous 8 weeks. I would need a whole book to explain properly, but suffice to say that most of the affiliates on CB will have been taught to only promote products with a high Gravity. This in fact turns out to be entirely wrong. But it's worth bearing in mind that if your offering has a low Gravity rating on CB, this in itself will be enough to put most (98%) of affiliates off.
2. There are super affiliates out there. These guys can (and will, if the deal is right for them) bring you massive traffic. And I mean massive. To attract the big affiliates, it's actually simpler than you think - concentrate on 1. having a mass market appeal product (and I mean mass market - free competitions, net detectives, earn money doing surveys, win a house for £1 etc), and 2. Having good salescopy that CONVERTS and that you can prove converts. If an affiliate is going to bother to send you streams of traffic, you will need to prove to him that you have GOOD SALES COPY THAT CONVERTS.
3. $40 a pop recurring is good money. However, if I can only sell 2 of those a month vs 100 doowaps @ $10 a month, guess which one I would put my effort into? Again - all down to conversion rates. How well does your sales page convert? In general, recurring pay checks are always more preferable than one off payments. IMO, you are wrong to be thinking of changing from recurring to (albeit higher) one off payments
4. I personally would not promote a product that doesn't allow me to capture email addresses before sending them on to the vendor. Simple thinking here is that if you have an autoresponder series that captures email addresses and then spends 6 weeks selling the customer on your membership site, I will lose my commission - you will make the sale long after my cookie has disappeared from their home drive.
5. The best affiliates actually don't need or want "affiliate packs" or banners or even much advice from you on how to sell your product. Show them a good product that you can prove CONVERTS WELL and that's all they will need. Bear in mind that they may be using PPC to get you that traffic - they might spend $2 per click through, but if your offer converts well and makes profit for them, they will do it.
6. Final thought - if you are confident in this product, you can always pay for traffic yourself either through PPC or Google's paid content network or even through paid banner advertising on appropriate sites which you can locate through various free means. Paying for traffic in this way is like a tap - you can turn traffic up, down or even off completely, depending on (yes you guessed it) HOW WELL YOUR OFFER IS CONVERTING!

Hope this helps. Please do contact me if you think I can be of any further use! I'd be happy to give your site the once over if you think it might help.