If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re probably familiar with Clickbank.  Clickbank is a large Internet market and publisher of downloadable information products. You can buy ebooks and software at the web site, but most people use the site to either publish information products or to find products to promote as an affiliate. Clickbank offers tools that make it easy for both publishers and affiliates to easily make sales of the products offered there.

Affiliates frequently search through the Clickbank Marketplace to find suitable products to advertise and Clickbank provides numerous statistical measures that show how successful a product may be in the market. Many affiliates, particularly individuals who are new to on the internet marketing, automatically choose the products that have the highest popularity or “gravity” without realizing that doing so may actually make it  hard to create sales.

Gravity is a score that shows how popular a particular product is in addition to other entrepreneurs and how well the product is selling. The formula for determining Clickbank gravity is proprietary, but the higher the number, the more popular the product. Numerous new marketers make the mistake of choosing high gravity products when they could be more favorable off choosing a product with a more modest score.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with choosing a trendy product to promote, there are a couple of potential pitfalls of making use of high gravity as your criterion:

Products with high gravity tend to be new and have typically been available for just a number of weeks. Because of that, it can be difficult to determine if the product is literally of high quality. Generally it takes several weeks for customers who are dissatisfied with a product to return it for a refund. Everyone may be buying a product this week, but the same buyers may be returning the product for a refund next week.

You’ll face a variety of competition if you elect to market a trendy product. The score itself indicates that the product is being heavily advertised, so that means you’ll find yourself competing with a number of entrepreneurs, both established and new, in trying to earn your commissions.

Today’s hot product is tomorrow’s forgotten product. A number of “hot” Clickbank products have sharp sales spikes when they are new, simply to see sales drop to nothing in a handful of weeks’ time when a situation more favorable comes along.

The Clickbank marketplace has tens of thousands of products for sale. Some of them are new, but a number of them have been around for ages and have an established track unprecedented of good sales over a prolonged period of time of time. If you’re new to marketing, you might be best served by taking several time to find high-quality quality products that have been around for a while. You likely won’t face the stiff competition that you might encounter with more popular products and you will in addition be promoting a product that you know will be a regular seller for you over time.

While there are a lot of helpful and potentially lucrative products for sale at Clickbank, it occasionally pays to market a product that is not among the most trendy, as less competitors means greater profit. Sometimes less is more.