Choosing an affiliate network is without doubt one of the first decisions a new affiliate has to make. Ideally you desire a network with a good range of products, decent commissions, an easy to use system and good support.
Clickbank is known as a network we talked significantly about, but we thought it had been 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 an internet retail service provider with over 12,000 digital product vendors and over 100,000 active affiliates. Processing over 26,000 transactions daily, and averaging over 700,000 unique visits a month, Clickbank has grown into a significant 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 2 different affiliate links you can receive; either encrypted or standard. Typical Clickbank affiliate link or "HopLink" is during the format http://pem2001.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net. Clickbank 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 strategy to take action because encrypted links usually are not exactly pretty (e.g. pem2001.hop.clickbank.net). Also it's important to keep in mind that if someone buys through your link, you affiliate ID shall be visible to the payment page.
Some merchants create more sophisticated set-ups for his or her affiliate programs through Clickbank. As an example we allow people to link to any page in our site by simply adding "?aff=affiliateID" to the top on the url. However this isn't standard for each product. This does mean that often the only real affiliate link you obtain is usually to the key sales page.
Personally I like to recommend organising affiliate links in the first un-cloaked format. This can be just personal preference, but it really is far easier to troubleshoot any problems if it is possible to see what the code actually is!
Getting paid
Clickbank pays out commissions every two weeks. One of several great inherent in Clickbank is that you get to choose the payment threshold which sometimes be set to just $10 - which suggests 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 so that you can qualify for direct deposit it's important to receive three paper paychecks within any 12 week period - that may be a bit frustrating to start with, but as soon as you qualify you're set.
Commissions on Clickbank are generally quite high - many over 50%. This implies that you're really rewarded for the efforts.
Because Clickbank can be a payment network - i.e. they process the payment of sales, Clickbank is quite good at preventing fraud. Merchants aren't able to try to trick you out of sales (unfortunately this does happen) because Clickbank creates your cut straight from the payment.
Becoming a Merchant
A very big good thing about Clickbank is how easy it really is to be a merchant. They provide a large amount of support material but it's really cheap to get started (just $49.95 to activate a product). While this might sound from reach for beginners, you would be surprised how easy it can be to make an item and begin selling it.
Need Help?
Clickbank has a large Help Center, with plenty of commonly asked questions and informative articles that cover many of the data you will want to know. There is also a video library of useful video tutorials along with a frequently updated blog that gives updated information, news and advice. On top of that they do have a very contact form for direct requests.
One slight downside with Clickbank is that there's no direct method to contact the merchant unless the merchant goes out and 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.
In summary, Clickbank is a superb network, with a simple and easy to use system, easy enroll and good support. While there are a few things that could be improved, overall Clickbank is a very accessible network that should be perfect for people first getting started in affiliate marketing.
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