The Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Review

The Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Review

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and Clickbank, then The Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Review is for you.

It’s about how Clickbank and affiliate marketing work; the good and the bad. It gives you solutions so that you can quickly start making money.

Briefly, Clickbank is an affiliate management company and deals only in digital download products. Clickbank is a go- between product vendors, affiliate marketers, and consumers.

It provides a turnkey solution to vendors and affiliates. Clickbank lists the products that affiliates promote. When a sale is made Clickbank processes the transaction and every two weeks pays both vendor and affiliate minus a fee.

You may ask: “What are the benefits to me of getting involved with Clickbank and affiliate marketing of digital products?”

Let’s start by putting things in perspective. As you know, internet marketing covers a very broad and competitive market. Starting out, you need to find smaller targeted markets or niches with high demand and lower competition.

Selling digital products has many advantages over selling physical ones. Some of the most important advantages are:

• High demand for digital information products
  
• Low cost to enter the market
• Lower production cost, in fact, a one time initial cost
• No ongoing manufacturing costs
  
• No warehousing costs
  
• No need for a physical store and its high costs to buy, rent, or lease
  
• You can work from your home
  
• No or much lower employee costs
  
• Lower advertising and promotion costs
• Growing global market

Pretty impressive list, you would agree.

Next, there are three main types or ways to marketing digital products. They are:

• Sell Your Own Product- the best way. You can remake resell rights products into your own.
• Resell Rights- use resell products to make your own.
• Affiliate Marketing- getting paid to sell others’ products.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the easiest and least expensive way to enter internet marketing.

You join a merchant’s affiliate program, promote his service or product, and earn a commission when someone referred by you through your affiliate link completes an action or purchases the product.

At a minimum, to start doing affiliate marketing you should:

• Do market search, develop a unique selling proposition, and choose a product(s) to sell
• Prepare product or service information report(s) to give out for free
  
• Register a keyword rich domain name
  
• Get paid webhosting account (free hosting or free domain name are not recommended)
  
• Use a Wordpress blog vs. traditional website
  
• Build product and marketing content on your blog
  
• Get an autoresponder account and load messages
  
• Drive traffic to your affiliate blog website
• Presell (soft sell) product, make free offer to get visitor’s email, and
  
• Send visitor to vendor’s website to close the sale.

Who/What is ClickBank?

ClickBank is an affiliate management company. It is the best known and largest company of its kind.

ClickBank is so dominant in its niche, that when someone mentions affiliate marketing they are probably talking about ClickBank.

ClickBank was founded in 1998. It provides digital content – e-books, software, memberships and subscriptions – to consumers in over 200 countries.

ClickBank has more than 100,000 affiliates (many inactive) and over 12,000 vendors of 35,000 unique digital products.

It’s a privately held company with offices in Broomfield, Colo., and Boise, Idaho.

ClickBank’s Business Model

ClickBank’s success is the result of bringing three key groups together:

• Affiliate marketers
  
• Product vendors
  
• Consumers

Affiliates marketers

ClickBank affiliates are Internet marketers who earn commissions by promoting ClickBank vendor products. Key benefits for affiliates include:

• No need to set up a merchant account or have to take credit card payments
  
• No banking or Paypal account is needed to become a Clickbank member
  
• Large variety of products to promote
  
• Average commission rates of 50% to 70%
  
• Tracking, analytics and reporting (through your account)
  
• Single commission check for all sales from ClickBank
  
• No requirement to have individual contracts with each vendor
  
• Comprehensive fraud management

Product Vendors

The main benefit for product vendors is a turnkey service that includes:

• Easy access to a motivated army of affiliates
  
• ClickBank handles all payments to you and affiliates (minus a fee, of course)
  
• Sell products to people in over 200 countries and in three languages
  
• No need to establish a merchant account or other banking relationship
  
• Comprehensive fraud management

Consumers

Consumers utilize the ClickBank network in order to purchase specialized, niche products and services that are typically unavailable in brick-and-mortar retail locations.

Key benefits for consumers include:

• Easy access to a wide variety of products and services 
  
• Safe and secure purchasing process
  
• Fast and friendly customer service
  
• Consumer friendly policies

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing Internet businesses today because of these powerful and growing trends:

• The continued rise of Internet commerce.
  
• The widespread use of high-speed broadband, making digital downloads of large files fast and easy.
  
• 100% effective marketing (vendors pay only when a sale is made).
  
• The accepted change of distribution methods from physical to electronic for a wide variety of products.

The Internet continues to grow and evolve as a central, global economic marketplace, as evidenced by the fact that online sales are expected to top $1 trillion annually by 2010.

ClickBank is a good choice both for affiliates and vendors, but it does have certain problem areas. We’ll point out these problems, but will not recommend a specific paid product to solve a problem.

Getting Started

Click on “Sign Up” to open your ClickBank account. You can use this same account if you want to also become a vendor.

How to use the ClickBank Marketplace

The ClickBank Marketplace is where to go to search for products to promote.

There are 9 main categories that affiliates can pick material from:

• business-to-business
  
• home & family  computing & Internet
  
• health & fitness,
  
• money & employment
  
• fun & entertainment
  
• marketing & ads
  
• society & culture
  
• sports & recreation.
  

Any item within the Marketplace can be searched by title, as well as category, subcategory, popularity, and of course, a keyword.

Users can also look them up by product type, which in this case will be either standard billing (where customers are charged a one time price), or recurring billing (where customers are billed weekly or monthly based on a subscription).

Affiliates can view what is called a “pitch page” (the vendor’s sales page) so they can see how the products they choose will be presented to the customer.

All items in the Marketplace are ranked by a productivity score. The formula as to how ClickBank comes to this score is not made public, but there are several factors involved.

$Earned/Sale, Future $factor, %Earned/Sale, %Referred, Gravity factor

As an affiliate, it’s important to know the search capablities of the Marketplace are rather limited.

To improve on the search for the best possible products in the Marketplace you have three options:ClickBank will provide you the raw data.

• You can import it into Excel and reorder it to your criteria. 
  
• Subscribe to a search membership service with monthly payments
  
• Buy a third party software database tool for a one-time payment

I recommend the last option.

How To Find The Best Products To Promote

Look at the ClickBank factors that make up a product popularity score in more detail.

How about diversifying your product selection by price and type. You may choose some products that :

• Sell in the $10-$20 range but have high conversion rates
  
• Others in the $20-$40 range
  
• Some that sell for over $40
  
• Look for products with recurring monthly payments
  
• You generally want this to be in the 50% – 75% commission range.
  
• Aim for a 70% or less referral percentage. It means less affiliatesthat competing for sales.
  
• Go for a gravity roughly between 25 and 100. Anything below 25 would mean that the product is not too popular and could have a low conversion rate and anything higher than 100 could mean that the market for that product is already saturated.

Now that you can tell which programs are worth checking into, there’s other very important things you should look for in each affiliate product from the vendor’s sales page. You can find a long list of things to check for in the sales page in the full copy of The Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Review.

Once you’ve chosen your products:

• do a Google search and look for reviews.
  
• Search blog and forum posts about the product.
  
• It’s best to review products personally before promoting them, so you could always ask the product owner for a review copy… or worst case scenario, buy through your own ClickBank affiliate link.

These tips and specifics on what to look for should help you narrow down the field considerably.

You Have Selected Your Products, Now What?

It’s time to get your hoplink. The hoplink is your affiliate link for the Vendor’s product. Get it from the Marketplace product search results page as below.

The hoplink format is:

<a href=http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net target=_top>CLICK HERE</a>

Replace AFFILIATE with the affiliate nickname

Replace VENDOR with the vendor nickname.

Replace CLICK HERE with any promotional text or image you prefer.

An optional promotion tracking code is available to allow affiliates to add a tracking code to the hoplink. Some of the key features are:

• Allows affiliates to add a code to the hoplink process for promotion tracking
  
• Captures promotion tracking code during the order process
  
• Displays the promotion tracking code in the transaction report(s)

Here is what a hoplink looks like with an associated tracking code:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=zzzzz

In order to be paid your affiliate commissions, you must use the hoplink feature. This is how ClickBank tracks its thousands of referrals in the system.

The rule is that the last affiliate gets the commission.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links

Cloaking means to disguise or hide your affiliate links to protect your commissions. If you don’t, anyone can simply substitute his own nickname and steal the commission for the purchase.

On April 27, 2009, Clickbank offered the Hoplink Shield to cloak your Clickbank affiliate link or hoplink as they call it. Use it at your own risk. General opinion on the internet is that it’s not secure and is easily defeated.

Never Link Directly To The Affiliate Site!

There are better techniques and tools which can encrypt (or cloak) your hoplinks to prevent link theft.

Remember you always want to maintain control over your affiliate links on your computer. Do not use any offsite link shortening service.

You can do a “redirect”. There many ways to do redirects.

The best way is to upload a “Recommends” page to your own website which then leads (redirects) to the affiliate program.

Check Your Link

You should test your affiliate link to make sure you have set it up correctly – or even that the affiliate program and site is still working.

Click the link and it will take you to the vendor’s website. Find the order link (there may be several) and click through to the ClickBank order form.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you should see [affiliate = xxxxxx] where xxxxxx is your nickname.

Promotion

Now that you have an idea of what ClickBank is and how it works, you need to promote so you can start making money. Except for Review Sites, a full discussion on traffic generation and list building is beyond the scope of this report, but here is a short list:

• Pay Per Click (PPC)
  
• Organic search engine traffic
  
• Social bookmarking
  
• Article marketing
  
• Forum marketing
  
• Classified ads
  
• Ebay and Craigslist
  
• Joint ventures

Review Site

A review type of website is a very effective way to promote ClickBank affiliate products. The purpose of the review to presell, build your list by capturing the visitor’s email address, and then sending the visitor to the Vendor’s sales page.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this long post. It’s a summary of The Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Review I offer in the Free Stuff section of my blog. For complete solutions to the problems presented here, you can download the complete Review here.

As always, if you have any suggestion or question please contact me through the blog Contact form here.

To your success,

Nick

Tagged with: clickbank affiliate • clickbank affiliate marketing • how clickbank works

Filed under: CB Reviews

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