Can Clickbank Gravity Tell You Anything About a Product’s Conversion?

There are 3 major ways to make money online. You can create a blog with tons of visitors and make money using ad revenue, develop your own products and sell them, or simply promote someone else’s product (affiliate marketing). If you chose the last method, I’m sure you’ve heard of Clickbank. It’s the most famous affiliate network in internet marketing circle, promoted and hyped by many gurus, because of how easy it is to become an affiliate in the network (compared to many others with an approval process). Although, if any of my Clickbank earnings is any proof, the money’s not bad too.

Digging Clickbank Gravity

First of all, let me explain what Clickbank gravity is. Clickbank gravity represents the number of affiliates who are making sales for the last 8 weeks. So, if 100 affiliate marketers make one sale each in the last 8 weeks, the gravity will be 100. And if 50 affiliates each making 4 sales and another 50 affiliates each making 1 sale in the last 8 weeks, the gravity will still be 100. At least that’s the basic idea.

But, as a matter of fact, Clickbank gravity calculation is not as simple as I’ve mentioned above. Clickbank algorithm actually weighted the number of affiliates who made a sale based on how long ago the sale is made. The idea is, the more recent an affiliate made a sale, the higher he contributes to the gravity score. So, an affiliate who made a sale 7 weeks ago will only contribute half or less to the gravity score than the recent ones. That’s why Clickbank gravity number is rarely rounded.

The Gravity Trap

Many newbie affiliate marketers are trapped into believing that Clickbank gravity represents how much money they can make promoting a product. Although that’s not the case at all. It’s very possible for a lower gravity products to make more sales than a higher gravity ones. Because gravity is nothing more than the number of affiliates who are making a sale, not the number of sales made.

As many newbies think it’s better to be an affiliate for high-gravity products, “boosting” the gravity figure becomes a pretty good way to attract affiliates. And many product owners actually faked their Clickbank gravity. This practice is common in internet marketing niche in which the product owner will create ten or more Clickbank accounts, each with different Clickbank affiliate IDs, to promote his product. They can even ask their JV partners to do the same. As a result, the Clickbank gravity of the product will appear high. Although, no affiliate is really making money at all. Just because the sales letter is not that good or the product’s a scam.

Make Gravity Works For You

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking you to ignore Clickbank gravity totally. I just want you to treat the gravity number as a very rough indications of product sales or conversions. Test the product yourself to check the real conversions numbers. If the conversions is bad, don’t blame yourself. It’s most probably the sales page or the product’s fault. Just take a deep breath and move on to next products.

The easiest and fastest way to test a product is using PPC (Pay Per Click). It do cost money though. So, if you don’t feel like spending anything, you can test it with free traffic methods, like article marketing, forum posting, etc (Learn more: Cheap Web Site Traffic). Just take note that these free traffic methods are slower to pick up. So, you’ll probably need a longer time to make a conclusion about the products’ conversions.

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