Choosing an affiliate network belongs to the first decisions an innovative affiliate must make. Ideally you need a network with a good range of products, decent commissions, an easy to make use of system and good support.
Clickbank is mostly a network we talked a great deal about, but we thought it was about time we did a Clickbank review post to weigh up the pros and cons of the popular network.
A small amount of background:
Clickbank was founded in 1998 and has now grown into a web-based retail service provider with over 12,000 digital product vendors and over 100,000 active affiliates. Processing over 26,000 dealings daily, and averaging over 700,000 unique visits a month, Clickbank has grown into a major player within a affiliate network market.
Getting Started:
When you first head over to the Clickbank sign up form, you will notice that everything is pretty straight forward requiring only basic address and contact information. A distinct advantage for affiliates is Clickbank's lack of requirements when you first sign up. Rather than requiring preapproval like many networks, Clickbank allows virtually anyone to sign up and start promoting. This is great for newbies who can't really point to existing websites and programs they have promoted. Clickbank also allows affiliates from over 150 countries to sign up - which is most. Unfortunately if your country isn't listed in the drop-down menu on the sign up page, there isn't much you can do.
Strolling the market-place:
Once you've signed up, one of the first thing's you'll want to do is have a look through the Clickbank Marketplace. Clickbank has thousands of products that you can choose from. However it is important to take your time in promoting. While there are some really high quality products on Clickbank, there are also a lot of sub-par products that should be avoided.
The best thing to do is check the "gravity" score of a product. The gravity is essentially a calculation that takes into account how many different affiliates have made a sale in this product in the past 8 weeks; the higher the number the better. Our in-house affiliate expert Mark Ling recommends that you always aim for a gravity of at least 30. In addition to the gravity, there are a number of other statistics for each product - these are;
$/sale: This is the average amount that an affiliate earns for each sale of this product, including refunds, chargebacks, and tax.
Future $: The average amount an affiliate will make from recurring billing of a single sale after the initial purchase (recurring billing only).
Total $/sale: For one-time purchases, this number is the same as $/sale. For recurring billing products, it equals the average total of the initial sale plus all rebills, divided by the number of initial sales.
%/sale: Commission rate
%refd: This is the percentage of sales that were referred by affiliates.
All this information gives you a snapshot picture of the products - how much you are likely make and how competitive it is.
The Technical Bits
Clickbank has a very straight-forward tracking system - basically there are a couple of types of affiliate links you obtain; either encrypted or standard. The typical Clickbank affiliate link or "HopLink" is during the format http://pem2001.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net. Clickbank also has encrypted HopLinks that hide the seller ID and affiliate ID. While I can understand people wanting to hide their affiliate ID, I believe a redirect is a far cleaner approach to take action as the encrypted links aren't exactly pretty (e.g. pem2001.hop.clickbank.net). Also it is vital to don't forget - if someone buys through your link, you affiliate ID will be visible at the payment page.
Some merchants developed more sophisticated set-ups for their affiliate programs through Clickbank. For instance we allow people to link to any page in our site by simply adding "?aff=affiliateID" to the top of the url. However this is not standard for every product. This does mean that usually the only real affiliate link you can receive is usually to the principle sales page.
Personally I like to recommend setting up affiliate links in the first un-cloaked format. That's just personal preference, nevertheless it is much easier to troubleshoot any problems if you'll be able to see what the code actually is!
Getting paid
Clickbank pays out commissions every two weeks. On the list of great advantages of Clickbank is that you're able to choose the payment threshold that may be set to just $10 - which implies no waiting around for weeks because you were $1 below the threshold.
Payment is either by posted check or direct deposit is accessible to 17 countries including the United States. However in order to qualify for direct deposit you now receive three paper paychecks within any 12 week period - that may be a bit frustrating at first, but when you finally qualify you're set.
Commissions on Clickbank are generally quite high - many over 50%. Therefore you are really rewarded to your efforts.
Because Clickbank is also a payment network - i.e. they process the payment of sales, Clickbank is kind of good at preventing fraud. Merchants aren't able to try to trick you out of sales (unfortunately this does happen) because Clickbank gives you your cut straight from the payment.
Becoming a Merchant
A extremely big good thing about Clickbank is how easy it's always to be a merchant. They provide a ton of support material also it's really cheap to start (just $49.95 to activate an item). While this may appear from reach for beginners, you would be surprised how easy it is to generate a product and start selling it.
Need Help?
Clickbank has an enormous Help Center, with a great deal of frequently asked questions and informative articles that cover nearly all of the information you should have to know. There exists also a video library of useful video tutorials and then a frequently updated blog that has up to date information, news and advice. In addition they do contain a contact form for direct requests.
One slight downside with Clickbank is that there's no direct option to contact the merchant unless the merchant goes out health of their way to deliver contact details. However most merchants have affiliate pages on their site - usually located at www.merchantsitename.com/affiliates, so I always recommend rummaging through their site and seeing if there's any affiliate resources.
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