The nature of my work requires that I spend a great deal of time away from home. Time alone in hotel rooms provides fertile ground for unusual questions to surface. One evening I got to wondering how a hotel concierge learns about the places they recommend. So I asked. I was amazed to discover that, for the most part, they are expected to learn about shops, restaurants, and local attractions on their own time with their own dollars. That got me thinking about how organizations learn about their competition.

(If this apparent leap in subject is uncomfortable for you, get used to it. Not because it is a fault of mine, but because it is a common occurrence when you get serious about asking questions all the time. One interesting question seems to fire brain activity that may appear to be random but with close scrutiny is connected. My experience has been that the effort to find the connection brings little insight, so I’ve learned to ignore the leap and focus on the seemingly new topic. I suggest you do the same.)

I can remember only one time in my corporate career when my employer asked what I knew about our competition. As it happened, I knew quite a lot about a new product that was being introduced by one of our hottest competitors because one of my customers had just gotten a bid from them and had given me a copy. I had read and filed the information. I’m ashamed to admit that it had never occurred to me that this might be important information for the whole organization, and if I hadn’t been asked, it would have remained buried in my file.

Employees are consumers before they are employees, and many of them choose to do business with the organizations that vie for the attention and the dollars of your customers. Or they know people who regularly interact with your competition. How are you mining the information they have?

Even more interesting, there is the possibility that your employees may have some insight that you don’t into who the competition really is. I remember attending an American Booksellers Association BookExpo in 1995 without hearing one bookstore owner mention Amazon.com. I have to believe that many of them had heard about the new company, but most seemed to dismiss it as a fad for the few. They were focusing on the growth of the large bookstore chains, a serious threat to be sure, but nothing compared to the impact of Internet book buying.

I’m pretty confident that out there somewhere is an Amazon.com like competitor for at least part of your business. Asking this question might just give you the heads-up you need.

There are a few top engine searches by name. A few of these are “Traffic Secrets” and “Google Profits”. The latter, “Google Profits” is a product of ClickBank. Like I said, information selling or we would like to call it intangible products sold are the most profitable in affiliate networks.

We take the example of “Google Profits” in ClickBank. Currently, “Google Profits” is offering 67% of the commissions on profit as an affiliate. Just imagine, let say you offer 40% of the total of 67% that is offered to affiliates, do you think that people will buy from you? This is called an affiliate rebate.

CASE STUDY

The program’s worth : $100
What you earn : $67 (67%)
You offer to consumer : $26.80
You are left with : $30.40

Now, if this method will gain you an extra 40-50 consumers per month, do you think it is far more than worth it to adopt this technique? Tell the consumer that the rebate will be paid to them in 60 days and ask for a receipt after the 60th day. In this way, you are secured as you can check you ClickBank account if they have got a refund of the product or not. (Hint : Always make sure that your interest is protected). If they have not obtained a refund, you can pay them through other payment processors for example, PayPal. While all other affiliates are promoting how great the “Google Profits” is and yada yada, you are uniquely offering the consumers “Rebate $26.80 by joining Google Profits today!”

One thing to remember, not every consumer will remember to send you a receipt after 60 days. What you can imply in your rules is that you will forfeit the rebate if they do not claim from the 60th to the 70th day. Often, consumers will get more excited in the product that they purchased than the measely $26.80 that they are entitled to. This way, you could save up your 40% that you are supposed to rebate to the consumer and push the rebate to the next consumer. There will be a point in time that you could hang a banner stating “FREE CLICKBANK PRODUCT FOR THE FIRST 10 CUSTOMER”. This will drive a crazy amount of traffic to your site. You will get serious attention when you advertise in this way. Of course, state some conditions with it, for example, backlinking or bundled purchase. You can tweak it all you like, be creative.

You will not sustain a very great profit if everybody remembers to obtain the rebate from you. However, through experience, only 15-20% of the consumers remember the rebate and 80-85% of them just simply forget after the 60 days.

You would think that most of the consumers would just opt to buy from ClickBank and get a 25-75% discount on their own. You would wonder why would anybody be so foolish to obtain it from your link. Believe me, there are. The fact is that most of the people out there are out to find ways to make money from the internet and not webmasters and tech savvy users like you and me. Further to that, if you have followed the instructions as above, by offering a 100% rebate or anything more than 75%, you would have beaten their own offer from their own links.