How To Do DD on a Clickbank product site?

[Melissa]

I'm in discussion with someone to buy his site selling a Clickbank product. It's been around for a couple of years and about 75% of his sales comes from affiliates.

I'm not completely raw to investigating the traffic and revenue, but I've never bought a site where the revenue came exclusively from a Clickbank product. I'm new to terms like gravity and the like, new to Clickbank.

The product seems a good quality one and I'm satisfied it's an original work.

Please help with suggestions on what checks you would do and where you see the risks.

[Bryan]

The most important thing you need to do is some analysis on the affiliates who are bringing in sales. You want to look out for one (or very few) affiliates bringing the majority of sales, as this would mean that a large junk of revenue depends on the performance of a few affiliates, meaning that if you lose these affiliates, the product will tank. Or it can also mean that the seller themselves are using an affiliate account to promote their own product (a standard practice).

If there are such affiliates and you're willing to take the risk then it's essential to google their Clickbank IDs in order to try and find out whether they're promoting any other products or just this one, and hopefully find their site(s). If they're only promoting this one product then it's very likely that it's indeed the owner themselves promoting their own product through an affiliate account or two.

Another important thing to consider is whether there's any personal interaction with the top-affiliates. As you probably know, Clickbank itself is a "contact-less" platform, meaning that there is no way to get in touch with your affiliates. In fact, you can't even see their names or where they're from - the only bit of information CB give you is the affiliate's username/ID. That said, many CB vendors do require their affiliates to opt-in first, and by doing that they establish a direct connection with them. Obviously, not all affiliates do opt in as you don't need to be "registered" or "approved" to promote a product, but many do and this adds quite a bit of value to the product.

Apart from the above there's nothing in particular to look out for (apart from the typical DD checks that would apply to any other web property).

[Melissa]

Thanks, bryanon.

Any suggestion on what I can research within Clickbank - gravity, product performance, affiliate performance, stats etc? Can the seller create a guest ID for me?

[Bryan]

Don't worry about any of the public metrics. Gravity, avg $ per sale etc. etc. are for affiliates to choose which products to promote, and the fact that the product has affiliates means that they find it attractive.

There's no such thing as a guest account on CB but I would definitely organise a (long) screen sharing session with the seller and have them go through all statistics. As I mentioned above, you need to have a clear overview on how many affiliates there are, whether there are some "super-affiliates" or not etc. to get a proper overview.