Making Clickbank Affiliates Your Own

One thing many merchants love about putting product out on the Clickbank market is they really don’t have to recruit affiliates to sell the product. Clickbank has some 150,000 affiliates scanning the product listings every day and picking up new digital products to sell. Among this army are some of the top names in internet marketing who could be looking at your product and picking it up to sell to their very large customer base.

You would think that with this huge number of affiliates that you would be guaranteed some good sales if you put virtually any product out there. But believe it or not, it's still possible to list your digital product in the Clickbank marketplace and for it to just "sit there". For one thing, your product is competing for attention with some 10,000 other products. And the products that already have strong sales and good affiliate association are the ones that are in high demand. If your product enters at a dead stop, it’s a hard to path to get it into the "fast lane" so the good affiliates take notice of it.

Moreover, among those 150,000 eager sales people, there is a fair share of bad ones. And if your product gets picked up by rookie affiliates or those in the market but who are not skilled at what they do, your product can just "lay there" making you wonder what went wrong. So anything can do to draw affiliates to your product and to even recruit your own affiliates is entirely justified to get your sales moving in Clickbank.

Many merchants remain satisfied to just allow the nature of Clickbank to bring affiliates their way. But to get aggressive and actually get out there and draw affiliates to you gives you some ownership of the process. Not only do you accelerate the process of becoming successful within the Clickbank environment, you develop relationships with affiliates and work more in partnership with recruited affiliates than you would if you simply relied entirely on "random" affiliates picking up your product and beginning to make the sales you need.

Identifying new affiliates and making them part of your affiliate network takes some creative thinking but in many ways you already have all the resources you need at your disposal. Your primary objective is to build lines of communications which would not exist if you simply left the Clickbank affiliate arrangement operate as it is. The assumption of the Clickbank culture is that merchants and affiliates do better if they do not have to communicate because you can focus on creating more product and affiliates can focus on sales and not having to be accountable to dozens of merchants if they are promoting a lot of product.

Of course, this formula does work in a lot of cases, particularly if your product becomes part of a catalog of hundreds of thousands of products for some very large affiliates who move a lot of digital products under the Clickbank system. But that doesn’t mean there is not plenty of room within the Clickbank system for a partnership relationship between affiliate and merchant. You already may be in such relationships outside of Clickbank with affiliates you work with through your web site. That body of sales people is a natural place to go to recruit affiliates to sell for you in Clickbank. By approaching them to consider becoming part of Clickbank and selling your product there, you can sweeten the deal by offering a higher commission and the lure of such a large catalog of products there that they can become more prosperous selling in the Clickbank marketplace.

The ideal situation is to cultivate a large body of affiliates, some of whom do sell your products "anonymously" and others with whom you are in relationship. You can recruit affiliates for future product announcements and by simply thanking affiliates who made your last product offering a success and offering to keep them in the loop when you put more products into the marketplace. By building a mailing list of successful Clickbank affiliates who like your work and want to know when you have something new to offer in Clickbank, you will slowly build a "team" of sales people with a good focus on your marketing approach and how they can join in your success as a merchant by seeking you out when you have something new to offer.

Safe Selling on Clickbank

In the non-internet world, retailers are always fighting a war with shoplifters and people who would take your product without paying for it. You would think that this kind of thing would not be a problem in an online world. But in Clickbank which is the largest internet marketplace in the world, one of the biggest problems is stopping people from downloading a digital product and then not following through with payment.

Like any other retail setting there are security weaknesses in Clickbank as there are with any software environment. But with some proper caution on the part of the vendor at the individual level, you can find ways to plug those security holes and keep your product secure so every time it gets downloaded, you get paid.

In reality we sometimes are our own worst enemies when we become Clickbank merchants because we do some things that undermine the security Clickbank already has in place. The first thing to recognize when you market on Clickbank is that it is off limits to put links to your product files on Clickbank on one of your other website pages. Don’t try to extend the marketing by driving traffic to your Clickbank pages in this way. For proper security, the only way your customers should be able to download your product is after going through the normal Clickbank payment pages which enforce that payment is made before delivery. This is one very simple precaution to keep someone from getting to your content and bypassing the payment procedure.

Another good reason not to put links to your product on your web site is that it will cause this back door to your products to appear on the search engines as links others can use. Google will find the links and index them and they could appear fairly high in search engine rankings and that is very dangerous for the security of your product.

Some risks that your product page could get leaked are outside of your control. There are internet thieves who would collect your thank you page and product URL where and post them on newsgroups and forums devoted to underground theft of online products. The actual amount of thefts you might have from that happening is fairly small. The real problem is if those postings get picked up and listed on a search engine. Then you could have a serious security risk.

There is one step that will eliminate the search engine problem which is the bigger risk of your thank you or product pages for Clickbank getting "out there". That is to contact your web hosting provider. They have a way at the server level to build a customized security file that is checked by the search engines to exclude certain files form becoming indexed. By adding the URL for your products page on Clickbank as well as your thank you page, even if those links get listed, you stop the bleeding in its place so the amount of losses will be quite minimal.

However this approach must be used with extreme caution. The file that many web hosting servers used is called the robots.txt file. The problem is that hackers are very aware of that file as much as search engines are. And if a hacker can find that file, and they can, that opens the door for the locations of your product files to be stolen and then posted on another web site which opens the whole can of worms all over again.

The best thing is not to reference those locations at all so if there is going to be any leakage of their location, it will be through hackers whose influence is minimal at best. That way at least you are living a clean life and doing what you can. And by watching the Clickbank FAQ and updates notices so you are always up to date on any new security updates they are putting in place.

Taking Clickbank to the Next Level

The thing that is so great for you when you sign on to be an affiliate in Clickbank is also the thing that can be so frustrating about the marketplace and that is how big it is. With over 10,000 products available for you to promote, just the task of discovering them all and then selecting and organizing them, can be a real challenge. And if you have wrestled with how to get as much Clickbank product in front of your customers and still keep an orderly system you can work with and your customers can use, a little help goes a long way.

As with a lot of marketing needs though, Clickbank has a way to help you kick your management of the huge Clickbank catalog to another level. The resource they give you is the Clickbank Mall which is a tool you can have for free that is a great way to organize product. It can also be a huge boost to your sales and profitability as well. There are extra profits to be made using the Clickbank Mall and promoting the Clickbank products using the mall concept. So this one tool can create various streams of income for you just doing what you already do well, marketing products on Clickbank.

Because you can use the Clickbank Mall concept to organize the better products on Clickbank into understandable categories, you make it a lot easier for your customers to find the things they want to buy through you. The potential for commissions becomes quite lucrative as many Clickbank affiliates have reported up to 75% commissions and the ability to market thousands of Clickbank products because of the organizational power of the Clickbank Mall.

One way that the Clickbank Mall is so profitable is that it can serve as a way to centralize the use of some powerful internet marketing tools that Clickbank makes available. When you set up a Clickbank marketplace, you can provide webmasters with a free Clickbank search box that will bring customers right to your mall to make purchases. Then whenever a customer uses that search box, you get a commission on top of your existing Clickbank commission as a direct Clickbank affiliate. It is yet another layer of profitability for you.

On top of these benefits, Clickbank has an advertising mechanism that works much like the Google Adsense approach but it far more profitable because it is targeted at the Clickbank affiliate team and enhancing your profitability, which of course makes them and the merchants on Clickbank more profitable as well. You can use the Clickbank Ads free and they even better than Adsense because you earn a commission by the sale rather than just by the click so your take per sale is far greater than the tiny amounts pay per click can generate.

The beauty of the Clickbank mall is that once you step through the process of creating your own free mall, it really will become your marketing presence that you can use as your total front end for your affiliate business. In laymen's terms that means that if you have been looking for a way to make a lot of money through internet marketing using affiliate sales but you don’t want the overhead and fuss of your own web site with all the cost and technical effort that takes, the Clickbank Mall is the perfect solution. You can of course use your existing web property and expand the marketing value with the search bar and links that will make the Clickbank Mall work virtually as another page of your web site.

But if you have been looking to get into internet marketing in a big way without the burden of a web site, this is the perfect solution for you also. The Clickbank Mall will generate a fully functional marketplace web site that can provide the front end for your sales and generate large volumes of Clickbank sales but still be presented to your customers as your web site and your marketplace.

When you begin to get moving using this powerful feature of Clickbank, the money making functions that are still to discover will continue to convince you that this is a great way to go. And the more you exploit this resource, the more money you make for yourself and your partners. That's why this is such a great tool that Clickbank provides to its affiliates.

The Data Entry Clickbank Product Category

When you get started on Clickbank, any guide to success in this marketplace will tell you to quickly get product out there. The good thing about the process of introducing product to Clickbank is that they make it easy. There are tens of thousands of digital products on Clickbank so to be able to get your product noticed, the categorization system they have in place is important and you will be glad its there.

Of course, you probably don’t pick a category and just like that have product ready to put out there. Unless you are brokering other people's product, there is a niche which is your skill and the product you will offer to the world through Clickbank. Because Clickbank deals with all forms of digital products, you would expect every legal category to be represented. But if your product falls under the umbrella of an "data entry product", you will find no category to fit it. That is because Clickbank eliminated it which makes this the largest internet marketplace in the world, not a good place for you to market your product.

While we don’t have a publicized reason why Clickbank doesn’t support the data entry category anymore but we know that the product line historically had a very high rate of people asking for refunds. This means one of two things. Either a lot of people were putting scam products or shoddy merchandise out on the Clickbank market and it was getting returned by unhappy customers or this category was one most prone to Clickbank "shoplifting" which is easy to pull off when downloading a digital product from a service that offers an iron clan return policy as Clickbank does.

It seems that part of the problem is not so much that data entry products themselves are scams but that they offer a false expectation. When a program is advertised as a way to "get rich" just doing data entry and the software will give you the tools to do that, this can lead to an expectation by the customer that its just that easy. But then when the real road to prosperity is far more than just data entry but includes an ability to do affiliate level marketing on the internet to get those riches, that is discouraging to people so they want, and get, a refund from Chickbank.

By definition data entry is just that. It is typing known data into a form to build content. A typical data entry job offered freelance on the internet involves something like visiting 1000 web sites and filling out a form about the web site owners or working with an online data entry format to help the owner's bulk up a database. Data entry is actually a fairly old job in the world of data processing but it is not as prevalent now that data can be captured digitally and the need for human data entry is less common.

Marketing a data entry product on Clickbank or anywhere might involve creating a product name and marketing text that gives the wrong impression. Your program might be a very good program to help the buyer get his or her feet down in the field of affiliate marketing but there will be some need to go through a learning curve and the path to revenue flow will be filled with a lot of trial and error. But this is not to say that the data entry programs you have to offer are not solid products of real value to the customer.

The fault lies with those who have gone before you on Clickbank and advertised deceptively causing such a high refund rate. Now Clickbank is "snake bit" and has closed the product category entirely. And that is a real shame.

Heaven For Small Business

Starting a small business has to be one of the most courageous things a person can do. There are a lot of unknowns that can strike fear into the heart of any small business owner. Issues of labor, supply and demand and the market always are a concern. And even if you do all of your market studies and prepare intensively, launching that business is sometimes an act of faith.

The modern era has opened up a new frontier for small business owners and that is the internet. But even there, risks exist and if anything the unknowns are even more exotic. Because the online marketplace is vastly distributed, estimating the market need as well as the potential demand for a product can seem like a cryptic exercise. In the early days of the internet, the costs of handling money and the resources to help small business succeed were few and far between and hard to use at best. That is why by comparison the modern internet marketing world is a relative heaven for small business due in no small part to online marketplaces and resources such as Clickbank.

One of the ways Clickbank and other online merchant accounts smooth the road out a small business to get started is by making it possible to accept payments online even when you are just getting started out. Most online purchases are done with credit card. But, especially at first, to do business directly with credit card companies to accept payments online was a nightmare. They required a lot of capital and proof of the health of the business both of which are in short supply when you are just starting out.

Clickbank puts all of that at your disposal for an amazingly low investment. You can join Clickbank for a simple one time fee of $50 and a small commission on each sale. For that they operate virtually as your online banker accepting payments, managing the credit card transactions and the relationship with the credit card companies and faithfully handling the money to be passed to you on a routine basis. If you are selling products through Clickbank, you might have hundreds or thousands of transactions per day from just as many customers. But all of that financial management and customer interaction is handled by Clickbank so you just offer your product and then sit back and collect the returns on your sales.

The marketplace dynamic on the internet is as different from the traditional business model as night and day. Small business people must already be light on their feet and able to adapt to change and new things quickly in any market. This requirement of an online entrepreneur is even more crucial. The business model for running a business with Clickbank at the heart of what you are doing does require a massive paradigm shift in how you do business. But most of the ways you change your approach to small business mean giving up some of the aspects of small business that you probably won't mind giving up.

For one thing, while you can always be actively involved in sales, it is entirely possible to run a healthy and very active and prosperous small business selling digital products to a huge customer base and completely give up the sales side of the business model entirely. That is because on Clickbank, as a merchant, your primary responsibility is to put product on the market. Once your product or products is "out there", there is an army of sales people called affiliates who are ready to pick up your product and promote it to their large existing customer base. By army we mean that a staggering 150,000 internet marketers are on Clickbank and every one of them can sell your product if they wish. There is no risk to you and Clickbank manages the relationships with this marketing army and the collection and distribution of their commissions.

To take advantage of this army, you will have to grant a slice of profit in the form of a commission to the affiliate as his reward for doing your sales for you. You can consider it a business expense and even record it to deduct it as such. But because that commission will draw this huge and highly specialized mob of internet marketing gurus to your product, that is a pretty good use of a commission.

The Highs and Lows of Clickbank

There has been a lot said and written about Clickbank and most of it is glowing about what a great organization it is and a great marketplace. But there is no company or even internet service that is perfect. So as you study getting involved with the Clickbank "movement", it is good to know the great things that this, the largest internet marketplace ahs to offer. But it is also to know the weaknesses of Clickbank as well. That way you don’t have any surprises and nothing comes up to surprise you once you are an active member of the community.

Clickbank definitely puts their best foot forward in taking good care of their merchants and their affiliates. And that is as it should be because these two large communities are the very reason why the service is such a smashing success. So without question the ease at which you can sign onto Clickbank, set up an account as a merchant or as an affiliate and be right into the middle of the marketplace makes this one of Clickbank's greatest advantages.

The only negative about not only the ease of getting started on Clickbank but of the hundreds or thousands of glowing reviews and articles about the service is that it is easy for a "newbie" to come to Clickbank thinking that with 20 minutes of signup, they will be making big money in the Clickbank marketplace. Of course, seasoned Clickbank veterans know that the laws of economics have not been suspended in the world of Clickbank and the law that says "you only get back what you put into something" still is in full force even here on the internet. So there is work to be done to become really prosperous on Clickbank. But because the potential return on the investment is so huge, that effort is likely to pay you back handsomely.

The customer service side of the ClickBank corporate culture is both their strongest hand to play and their Achilles Heal in many respects. Clickbank has done a superior job of setting up policies and an approach to customer service that is clear to the customer and easy to take advantage of. The language of their help pages is well done and Clickbank maintains a live help desk so there is never a time when a customer cannot get help to move to the next phase. So this is one business area that Clickbank truly shines at.

The Achilles Heal which also comes form their zeal to offer world class customer service is the Clickbank refund policy which while certainly a great policy for the customer, it is one that causes endless problems for Clickbank, its merchants and affiliates. In context all products sold in Clickbank are digital products. That means a digital copy is delivered after the sale. But this also means that the very idea of a "return" is absurd. And yet Clickbank has an iron clad, no questions asked refund policy.

This policy opens the door for massive problems because there really is no way to check customers who are buying digital products and then filing for a refund. That means that this refund policy is basically open season for shoplifting or theft on Clickbank. Any customer that wishes to can purchase a product, pay for it and download it or acquire the product and any product keys or codes needed to use it. Then it is just as easy to get a refund as there is that "no questions asked" policy. So that customer can virtually continue to get products, pay for them and then cash in on the refund. Since there really is no such thing as a "return", they get to keep the product free of charge.

It’s a virtual authorized and legal method of getting free products from Clickbank. It's a problem that Clickbank is addressing as best they can. One possible solution that will only work on some products is a follow up usage code. You can issue a temporary code to enable the product to work for the timeframe of the refund period. Then you can implement internal timings into the software so the customer must receive a permanent code after the trial or refund period passes. In that way if customers "steal" your digital product, it's only for a few weeks. But obviously this solution won't work for every product.

The Breakdown on What Clickbank Can do for You

There are a lot of reasons that Clickbank has been a successful gateway to internet profitability for so many people. But two big reasons so many find success with the Clickbank system is that it is simple to understand and get started on quickly and everything in the Clickbank system works. It is such a well run internet marketing resource that a lot of people have turned to it as a payment gateway rather than PayPal or one of the other more well known funds processing agencies on the web.

Clickbank does an outstanding job of handling third party credit card transactions. It really is a critical park of why their business works because Clickbank lists well over ten thousand products and is used by over one hundred thousand partner affiliates so that kind of marketplace has to handle money reliably and safely to survive. And because everything about Clickbank is digital including all products and the means of delivery, the accountability for handling payments has to be absolutely rock solid dependable and trustworthy.

The ability for any internet marketer to quickly and easily become a Clickbank affiliate is another reason it is such a stunning success. It's simplistic to select a product from the Clickbank marketplace once you have a free account on the service which you can easily set up on their web site. And once you have that account, Clickbank generates tracking codes so it can tell when you have selected a digital product and started promoting it online. This means with the simple step of creating an account, the door is open for you to sell ten thousand products on your internet marketing web presence with little more work than that. Suddenly you go from a newcomer to cyberspace to the owner of a Wal-Mart of the web.

Any marketplace in cyberspace or not relies on the meeting of sellers and buyers. And to be a success Clickbank also has to make it easy for creators of digital products to sell their goods through their marketplace too. For a seller, there is a fee to get started on Clickbank but considering that by putting their product into this marketer, it could get picked up by an army of 100,000 sellers, a $50 start up fee and a small percentage commission to Clickbank is entirely reasonable. And since Clickbank is replacing your routine credit card processor and handling all of those transaction fees, their commission is pretty much a wash.

Now you just get your product into the Clickbank library. You might have to hold your breath to get a sale because you need one sale to get noticed by the marketing software in Clickbank. But once you are listed, the odds are somebody is going to pick up your product and begin to sell it. Clickbank tracks and records those sales scrupulously so other affiliates will start to pay attention as your sales pick up and before long you are making tons of sales being promoted by this sales army you never met and have no idea who they are. You don’t have to know. They are making you rich and getting a handsome commission for themselves in the process. It’s a beautiful partnership between strangers where everybody wins.

Clickbank is a full service marketplace for the seller because you don’t have to find affiliates or even promote your product. Just get it out there and once the momentum of sales picks up, it can snowball into a huge seller for you. The profits roll into your Clickbank account and on your regular distribution cycles you established when you set up the account, Clickbank sends the money to your bank account. It's just that simple and just that quick.