Clickbank Ready Websites

If you’ve followed the Sitepoint Marketplace for any length of time (now Flippa.com), you’ve probably seen sites offered that have under the auction heading ‘Clickbank Ready Websites’. But what are these sites? How are they different from the Wordpress blogs that I’m, for example, mostly designing and offering up for sale?

Well, Clickbank Ready Websites are really regular static html 1 page (max 3 pages) sites, which are offering an internet deliverable product (usually an eBook) that solves a problem, helps with something, teaches something. This ebook is usually written based on the relatively strict Clickbank guidelines (Clickbank.com is the strongest and mostly used affiliate program network) and once the site is setup, it can be as used as a sales page for selling that particular ebook.

First of all, the sales letter needs to be quite strong, to captivate the audience and make them buy the product. Then the actual ebook needs to be written, and finally the custom graphics need to be also setup and if there’s to be an affiliate program for that product, well, you need to offer  A LOT of material for your new affiliates, to have plenty of tools to market your site. This includes, various sizes of the ebook cover, a couple of static and some flashing banners of various sizes.

So how is all this done?

Well, setting such a site, is very costly, particularly if the ebook is to be written from scratch, the same with the sales page. Btw, did you know that a professional sales page requires the work of a copywriter, which can cost anything from $500 and upwards. Serious copywriters work for $2000 and up. But, of course, for relatively average sales pages, which can be later on tweaked, etc, you can find copywriters that write your sales pages for $100-200.

So what most people do is outsourcing. At elance, or Digital Pointforums, they outsource various tasks, those that they cannot do by themselves. I mean being a good copywriter, a good ebook writer and a good graphics designer - those are really qualities that you won’t find all in one single person. Or if yes, it’s quite seldom.

Another alternative is buying an existing PLR product (which contains already an ebook and a sales page) and modifying that until it becomes your product. It’s perfectly legal, and it is used quite a lot. This saves not only your costs, but it also allows you to offer your sites cheaper to the buyers, which might not always go for startus sites costing $1500 and up.

This is what I have done with www.solutiontoacne.com

I have purchased a very high quality PLR product from Kate Anderson (and again, if you’ve followed the Sitepoint Marketplace, you know who SHE is!), product that is sold in a very limited quantity so  it keeps the product relatively unknown and un-saturated in the market, and have spent a few weeks in my spare time on rewriting the book - now it’s really unique. Also I have rewritten the sales page, keeping the mains ideas but changing it enough to make it, again, unique. And I have spent quite a lot of time designing new header for the site, a new ebook cover and various graphics for the affiliates page.

I have to say that I am quite proud of my first clickbank ready product. It was quite an enlightening experience. This opened for me new doors that I never tried to step through before. I’ve learned bunches about copywriting (what an exciting subject!). Learned more thant I could ever believe I would know on creating various graphics (ebook covers, headers, static and even animated banners!) in Photoshop. And learned about acne more than I ever wanted to know, while researching and re-writing the book.

The site has sold for a higher amount than I usually sell the Wordpress blogs for, and although the site contains exactly 3 pages, and the end user (buyer) wil have hardly any work to do on the site (while the wordpress blog needs constantly updating to keep it fresh with news, etc), I truly understand now why these sites sell for so much. There is a tremendous amount of work involved in doing such a project. I have now a totally different respect for Kate Anderson as well, seeing how she is cranking out these clickbank sites so often, I’m amazed!