Gossip and rumor about the future of Clickbank has been flying around forums, blogs and private channels for months now.

Some say it’s gone to the dogs — all the push-button bullshit eroding any credibility it may have had left.

Others say it’s shot itself in the foot by clearing out all the push-button bullshit that was in-fact making people a ton of (unethical?) money.

Me?  I say it’s entering an exhilarating period of rebirth.

Having just seen a webinar and talked with Beau Blackwell on Skype, I’m excited about the future.

For 2 reasons mainly…

1) The Joint Venture contract feature.  I’ve been trying this out for 3 or 4 months now and, from a copywriter’s persepctive, it makes product launches and evergreen projects way more exciting.

In the past, its been so hard to collect commissions owed from clients.  No matter how many contracts they may sign or how much you trust them… it’s far too easy for the client to cut and run with your cash.

The JV contract feature on Clickbank means your owed percentage is automatically depositied directly into your CB account when a sale is made.

Pretty cool.

And this means my preferred was of working… partnering with my clients… just stepped up a level.

2) The B2B markerplace.  The smart-cookies at ClickBank have realized there’s an entire ecosystem built up around CB products.

Copywriters, designers, JV managers, programmers and product creators all contribute.

And in early 2012 there will be a marketplace specifically to showcase their talents.

Plus there’s the up-coming digital product protection… the ability to sell big-ticket items… and — best of all — you’ll soon be able to sell physical products through CB.

Making money on the internet has always been a “people business”.  With these new features ClickBank just blazed a trail.  One I’m more than happy to follow.

(In case you’ve been on Mars, ClickBank is the no.1 affiliate network for digital goods.  And a great place to spot what’s working NOW in the marketplace.)

And what I saw was pretty… ugly.

Ok, not all bad.  In fact, there are some powerful tactics at play if you look closer than the screaming hype. We’ll get to those in the next blog post.

But right now, there’s a huge chasm between good quality products and trash software with excessively loud sales pages.

Why?  Well a client of mine put it best this week…

“You can’t sell candy when everyone else is selling crack.”

This is a guy with years of experience and millions of dollars in the bank who can’t get his product noticed because the top 10 in CB is filled up with (what I like to call) ‘push button bullsh*t’.

But just last week CB appeared to have woken up from their cash-induced slumber and declared war on over-the-top sales letters.

First a product claiming it had the secret to free Facebook ads was chopped.

And then, one of my favorite sales pages of the year (if you don’t take it seriously), Stripped Down Profits was also axed.

Side Note — anybody buying the latter in the hope that a stripper would give them financial aid deserved everything they got.

So what does this all mean?

Have ClickBank suddenly decided they better start actually keeping an eye on what’s happening in their network?

Or are they merely making an example of a couple of folks to keep the heat from the FTC at bay?

Time will tell.

And in a moment I’ll give you a real world example of how a business is about to be transformed by implementing this tactic.

You see, online, everybody focuses on getting more visitors to their site.

Traffic = money, right?

Not necessarily. You can easily increase your profits with a little shake-up of your current sales process.

This is something that seems to be a major oversight by a lot of my clients and partners.

Truth is — ignoring your business’s “back-end” is like throwing money away.

Think about it.  You’ve already got your sales letter up and selling.  A steady stream of traffic hits the site each day and you make sales and profit.

But you want more.  So you go chasing after more traffic, more joint ventures and funnel more money into PPC campaigns.

But you don’t have to worry about any of that.

You can make more money right now simply by building a back-end to your product.

The hardest part of any business is getting new customers. So why not treat the ones you already have like royalty and… offer them more products.

The folks who have already bought from you are the easiest ones to see to (assuming your product met their needs) so why not upgrade them, offer them add-ons or follow-ups to their first purchase.  Send special offers their way, exclusive to previous customers.  There are tons of ways to do this.

You’ve probably come across One Time Offers.  Those pesky little sales pages that pop-up after you’ve made a purchase.

Those things are maddeningly effective.

Your buyer is already in the buying mood, so they often can’t resist a juicy little extra.

No.1 On Clickbank But Still Leaving Money On The Table

My current client recently had the number 1 selling product on Clickbank (I don’t mean in its category, I mean across the whole of Clickbank.)

He’s making thousands of dollars per day on a $27 eBook.

But he’s leaving thousands more and — until I wafted the smelling salts under his nose — didn’t even realize it.

We’re putting together a one time offer of advanced videos for his product.  In the next few weeks I fully expect him to start bathing in Clickbank checks.

And that’s from one carefully positioned One Time Offer.  The amount of products he can pitch to his eye-wateringly huge list of buyers is frightening.  But all he was concentrating on was getting new prospects to his front-end product.

Don’t make the same mistake.

Consider your entire sales machine. The money is there for the taking.

It’s probably… along with, say, weight loss and dating… the most profitable niche in the world.

At least, there’s a ton of money floating around and folks happily snap up new releases even if they already have a bulging hard drive or overflowing bookshelves of unread courses.

(We’ll get into the “how” and “why” of that in another post. I’m not in the mood for grim insights into human nature today…)

But because I work in this field and because it’s so damn competitive…

Every single sales letter has to be polished to perfection, tweaked to within an inch of its cash-pulling life and… crucially… stand out from all the rest.

So I work extra hard to make sure my work feels fresh and new while still contained within proven, time-tested copywriting techniques.

But you know, sometimes you just have to come out with a “Who Else…” style headline or an “If… then” lead-in. (Trust me these are copy cliches of the highest order).

Because, although I believe writing copy is a mixture of art and science, sometimes you have to dispense with the fancy-pants artistic self-indulgence and stick with what’s proven.

Gary Halbert said it best…

I think it was his last ever seminar where he’s creating a letter live in front of the audience.

His pre-head is something like “Who else wants to slash strokes from their golf game in 24 hours flat…?”

So he asks the audience (and I’m paraphrasing here)… “anyone know why I used ‘who else’ in my pre-head?”

A few shout out… “because it gives the impression others have tried it…”

And… “it makes it more inclusive” there’s a lot of discussion and all the comments are correct.

But Gary replies…

“I used it because it’s been proven to work in 40 years of copywriting.”

He goes on to point out if those two words are proven and time-tested why come up with something new and risky?

Like the man says…

“Business is tricky enough as it is…”

“Can you write me a sales letter just like that one?”

Of course, I know what they really mean…

“Can you write me a sales page that makes me as much money as that one?”

I mean… sure I can give you a sales page that LOOKS like the latest Clickbank No.1. Though I would never steal or copy another sales page as one unethical “marketer” recently asked me to do.

I can even give you a sales page that becomes a Clickbank No.1 and brings you a boatload of moolah but… you need certain other elements in place for that to happen.

Point is… “great copy alone does not a Clickbank No.1 make”

(Didn’t you know that’s an ancient proverb?)

Being a copywriter, I’ll be the first to tell you how vitally important great copy is.

In fact — it’s crucial to a successful launch.

But it’s still just a single cog in your all-conquering sales machine.

Show me a Clickbank No.1 product and I’ll show you a web page that is pummeled with hordes of traffic day and night.

Because to get the BIG money, you need copy that converts but you also need a lot of traffic. A truckload of eyeballs have to see the webpage before you can make a gazillion sales.

Obvious really.

And of course there are other factors too.

It helps (really helps) if you have a great offer. I mean… if you’re selling dross, it makes my job a lot harder and, frankly, you’re heading for refund city.

A great concept can help, the right price, a message to market match… the list goes on.

Copy is vitally important but it’s not a magic bullet.

Of course, with an online sales letter or a direct mail piece, there’s no way to know exactly who’ll be reading your sales pitch. So…

It’s vital you conjure an image in your mind of the specific person who would most benefit from your product.

And I don’t mean some vague picture of ‘a guy in his 30′s who hates his job’. More the kind of guy who…

“Slumps into his office chair and stares at the same pile of paperwork he dreads each day.”

Get a vivid image of who you’re writing to and have a conversation with him…  the sales copy will take care of itself.

We’re going to blast out some postcards and get folks to a squeeze page. So right now we’re discussing “what’s hot” in squeeze pages these days.

Because it’s important to remember — especially online — everything’s evolving. Sure, the fundamentals stay the same but it’s all about how you dress up those fundamentals.

In this case we’re dealing with how to get lazer-targeted subscribers signing up for a pre-launch.

Here’s what we’ll be testing…

1) Traditional Squeeze Page (mainly text) promising a revealing/eye-popping/must-see video

This is the regular, some might say old-fashioned, squeeze page but… in this era of whizz-bang video overload… some delicate, not too salesy text goes a long way.

Right now I’m favoring a curiosity-building headline and a screenshot of the video you get on subscribing.

2) Video Squeeze Page – video only, maybe the odd bit of text

So these are all the rage right now. Personally, I hate the ones without a pause button.

(I recently did a launch for a well-known “guru” who ditched the sales letter I gave him for a video instead. The video had no pause button, nor was there any other text on the page. It bombed.)

Rather than just give a salesy “please sign-up to my list” type video we’re going with all-content. The catch is that they only get half the info, the other half is delivered on sign-up. I’m looking forward to testing this one.

3) PDF Giveaway

This one is fairly new to me, I tried it recently and while we had fewer subscribers, they were extremely targeted.

Here’s how you do it…

Give away a quality report on the squeeze page. No sign-up, no nuthin’

But inside the pdf give a link to another squeeze page. So… if they love your pdf, if they’re interested in the info… they’ll want to sign-up, right?

This makes your prospects very warm to any offers you might have further down the line.

Anyhoo, I’ll be testing all of these pre-launch sign-up ideas and I’ll let you know which worked the best.