Did you ever find yourself in the situation where you just had to press that “Buy now” button but hesitated, because you didn’t want to spend $47, $97 or even more just to find out that you chose the wrong product again? Let me tell you that I have been in that situation many times and that I finally found a 5 step guide to overcome it.

Step 1: Find your product

Let’s say you search a book for “dog training”. The first step would therefore be to go to the Clickbank Marketplace (http://marketplace.clickbank.net) and to take advantage of the recently introduced search feature. The results you get are ordered by popularity by default, which means that the first match will also be the top-selling product on Clickbank. Just browse around a few websites to get an impression which product could be your favorite.

Step 2: Product reviews

What do you do first when you want to buy a new car? You sure don’t go to the dealer and hand over your hard earned money right away. What you usually do is find a possible model and then look out for some tests or reviews in magazines or on the internet. And that’s exactly what you should do next.

Assuming that the product you have an eye on is the ebook “Sit, stay, fetch”, you would then go to your favorite search engine and type in the product title in quotes plus the magic word “review”. The results you’ll get may not all be appropriate, but you will eventually find some reviews on “Sit, stay, fetch”.

Hint: It is always recommended to read more than one review on a product as some people will promise you heaven on earth just to make a sale.

Step 3: Customer testimonials

It is quite common for most of the Clickbank products that customers send testimonials to the creator whether they liked the product or not (but would a good businessman really publish bad testimonials on the product website?!). Assuming that the product creator is an honest person those testimonials will be real and you can get quite a good impression how the customers are satisfied with the product they bought.

Hint: Most published testimonials also include the author’s email address or website. If you are skeptical about a certain testimonial then drop the writer an email and see if you are able to get a response.

Step 4: Bonus material

Of course you will primarily be interested in the product you buy, but it is always nice to have some bonuses that come with it. A list of bonuses, if any are offered, can most of the time be found at the bottom of the sales page. Just navigate to the website of the product and have a look at which additional goodies you will get when you buy.

Step 5: Refund policy

In October 2005 Clickbank announced an official refund guarantee for any product which enables you to get a full refund within 8 weeks after the purchase was made. After that 8 weeks the purchase is final and you cannot get your money back. To guarantee customer satisfaction, a lot of merchants offer a refund policy past that 8 weeks limit, some up to a full year. Others are even willing to give you a refund of 200% because they believe so much in their product.

Step 6: Other alternatives

While there are many really outstanding and excellent products available at Clickbank, there are also some that just cannot beat a hardcopy of a book, a retail software, etc. To be honest, why would you want to pay almost a hundred bucks for some ebook that is only 40 pages long and doesn’t contain half as much information as a product available at Amazon or retail stores that costs like 30 bucks?

Hint: The internet is the biggest information source available today and if you just spend some time searching you might find out that a valuable information you need could also be available for free on a website or message board.