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 Clickbank Guide

It’s good to go into this kind of situation with your eyes wide open though and be aware that one thing can put a monkey wrench into the best marketing plan for a product.  And that is the Clickbank refund policy.  Now a good refund policy has to be at the very heart of a marketplace like Clickbank so people can buy with confidence knowing they can get a refund if the time comes.  And since Clickbank is a full fledged merchant account in its own right, they can handle refunds directly.

Clickbank Refund Policy

Unfortunately a refund policy that is iron clad is also an open door for people trying to scam the system.  Even for the best of products with a huge army of happy and satisfied customers, you will be asked for a refund from time to time.  That is to be expected.  But when what is happening is someone is trying to get your product for free milking the refund policy from Clickbank, that’s just wrong.

The Clickbank extensive tracking system tells us that five percent of sales in their marketplace come back as refund requests.  When you give a buyer a refund, you might hear any sort of complaint. Some of them are legitimate and others are bizarre.  And others just won’t offer an explanation for why they want the refund.  For many of these refund requests, the odds are you are dealing with an unethical buyer.

The problem is that all of ClickBank’s products are digital products.  That means your e-book, your software product or your music can be downloaded and paid for and then the buyer can ask for a refund, no questions asked. And because the product is digital, it’s pretty silly to ask for the product back as they have a copy on their computer and perhaps copied to other computers.  You can paint it like you want, its just plain theft no mater how you cut it.

This is a tough problem to solve.  Even if the entire Clickbank community banned together to fight the problem, about the only possible solution is pretty weak.  A reference system could be created that recorded users who were habitual customers of the refund policy.  Then if that reference system actually worked, you could conceivably refuse service to a refund policy abuser who had been “busted”.    But this is a system fraught with holes at best.  A refund abuser is intestinally stealing product so they are going to be one step ahead of your tracking list.  It simply is not that hard to come back into Clickbank as a customer with a new ID and new credit and your tracking system is out the window.

It would be nice to come to the end of our discussion with an announcement that the problem has been solved.   But that is not the case yet.  Clickbank is aware of the problem and is putting time and effort against it.  But for now we will have to wait until Clickbank comes up with a solution.  But its still worth supporting a strong refund policy because that is what makes Clickbank a solid marketplace.  And if you do have to entire a 5% refund but keep 95% of the sales Clickbank delivers to you, that still is not too shabby.

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.

Free Clickbank Mall

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.

Just going through that vast catalog can become your second life all by itself.  And if you did try to sort, catalog and understand every product, your brain would be so muddled it would not be able to figure out which products are the winners for you to promote and get big money from.  But at the same time, anyone who has been successful with the Clickbank system has done it by being a smart marketer and learning first how to pick the product that is choice for the market right now and then how to promote it to land big sales from the system.

The first order of business is to set yourself up as an affiliate on the Clickbank web site.  This is just getting your foot in the door but it’s an essential step.  It’s easy to do and free at the Clickbank web site so take the few minutes you need to get yourself set up in the system and step through the easy sign up form and become an affiliate citizen of Clickbank.

The first thing that will jump out at you when you start looking for a product to promote is that there is a small elite group of products that are clearly the most popular sellers in the catalog.  You might be drawn to those on the idea that if they are popular now, why not cash in on the wave and get some of the revenue from all those sales.  But keep in mind that a popular product also is one that is probably being merchandised by hundreds or thousands of other Clickbank affiliates.   So the internet customer base is being bombarded with sales pitches for that product.  Why join the flood when it may be already dwindling down to a trickle?

This doesn’t mean you pick a product that is not selling well just because it isn’t on a lot of other affiliate web sites.  The skill is to pick a product that there is a good market out there in cyberspace for that product but it is a market that has not been heavily “tapped” yet.  Its tricky business and give yourself permission to experiment.  You may not hit pay dirt with the first product you select.  But you will make some money and you can experiment and learn how to select the right product over time.  There is an “intuition” to any kind of market and getting a gut feel for what the internet market is going to want can happen but it’s a gut feel that is developed, it doesn’t just come naturally to you.

There are some other factors of how a product is positioned and how it is already performing that can help with your decision.  Look at the sales copy for the product to see if it is the kind of marketing tool that is likely to work.  Read through it and see if it creates a desire in your to buy the product.  If they can’t convince you, it’s probably a poorly crafted sales page and you would be wise to steer clear of the product.

But another variable about the products you pick other than popularity or movement numbers is far more important to your profitability.  You should pick products that pay outstanding commissions.  A commission on the sale of a product on Clickbank can run from 1% to 75%.  That’s a pretty huge variation in profitability.  A good guideline is never promote a product that pays less than 50% commission.  That way even if your sales are not through the roof, you still make a decent return on your investment for promoting the product and the product owner makes money too.  That’s what this partnership is all about.

Making Money With Clickbank

Just as in the music industry where music distributing has been completely overhauled by the internet, publishing has gone through a similar revolution.  It’s a people’s revolution too because no longer is it the large publishing houses that tell the public what they can or cannot read.  Now good authors can get their works out there simply by producing an ebook.  And merchandising services like Clickbank have completed the cycle by making merchandising, marketing and distribution a breeze as well.

There was a time that the term “self publishing” created the image of some pitiful quack with an axe to grind paying one of those do it yourself companies to put his book into prepaid print to be sold out of the back seat of his car.  But there is a new respectability to self publishing because so many ebooks have reached the public that were of just as high a quality anything the big publishers could have put out.  And for the aspiring author, moving to an internet based business model when it comes to publishing your book makes a lot of sense.

It is the ability of even writers just starting out to be a big success with online publishing that has made this revolution possible.  And there is no doubt that the reason for that ability becoming so easy for writers to access is due in a large part to Clickbank.  Clickbank being an internet marketplace devoted 100% to digital product sales and distribution is an ideal place for an ebook writer to find success.  And by simply going through the well known steps for merchandising their works, an author doesn’t have to become an “expert” internet marketer at all, just be good at following directions.

Step one is simply to write your book.  You, the author know how to do this and the merchandiser doesn’t need to teach you your craft.  A word processor any sort is a fine tool for the composition and you can put the finished product together as a PDF file or as a compiled ebook using a commercially available ebook compiler.

Now to give Clickbank what they need to merchandise your ebook, you will need a very simple web site.  This doesn’t have to have dancing babies on it, just basically two pages of html that can respond to internet traffic flow when Clickbank sends it your way.  After setting up the web site, just follow ClickBank’s instructions to set up the ecommerce software on the site which will also make possible the payment for the book.  That’s all you need and you have the means to make a lot of money selling your ebook on Clickbank.

Now you are free to play with that web site and make it as elaborate as you wish.  But the beauty of the simplicity of the basic Clickbank system is it can work at the barebones level just fine and let you go back to do what you are good at doing and what you love to do which is to write.  As you compose your next masterpiece, things will be happening in the marketing of your existing book on the market that you don’t have to do a thing to help along.

The 150,000 affiliates on Clickbank will get wind of this new exciting ebook product and they can quickly link it into their sales mechanism without even telling you it happened.  That means that a virtual internet marketing army will be able to sell your book with complete liberty taking their small commission and bulging out your bank account while you never know who they are and you never will know.  All you know is the market value of your book will be fully realized on Clickbank which means financial stability for you.  And for a creative soul, that is a highly prized commodity.

Clickbank eBook

But Clickbank isn’t a marketplace that requires that you have tremendous technical knowledge to use.  The designers of Clickbank have made most of the functions you need to operate either as a merchant or as an affiliate in the system fairly easy to use.  That is one of the keys to why Clickbank is so successful.  So to smooth your entrance into using Clickbank, it pays to look at the inner workings of the gears of Clickbank to get a feel for what you should expect when you sign up and want to get going fast making money there.

Like a lot of successful online markets, Clickbank doesn’t make anything and it doesn’t sell anything.  The value Clickbank adds to the world of internet commerce is that it provides a “place” for vendors of digital products can place their goods for sale and for people skilled in marketing to take those products and sell them to a large internet community.  Clickbank has cashed in on two basic principles which are (1) people who make things don’t like to do marketing and (2) people who love to do marketing don’t like to make things.   By getting these two groups together, merchants, affiliates and Clickbank all take away a nice profit because each makes the other successful.

Clickbank then at its core is a clearing house that works as a meeting gourd for merchants, affiliates and customers who can order the product, pay for it and download it or receive it by some other digital delivery system.  It is very important to understand that Clickbank ONLY DEALS IN DIGITAL PRODUCTS.  So you cannot sell clock radios, salt shakers or children’s clothing through Clickbank.  If you were looking at Clickbank for any other than a digital product, look elsewhere for market such as eBay.  The kinds of products Clickbank will allow to be sold include ebooks, computer courses, digital music and software programs and games.

Clickbank also offers real value to both merchants and affiliates because they handle all of the financial details and take a lot of the administrative work off of its members.  Clickbank operates a fully functional merchant account so there is no need to use PayPal, 2co or any other funds management system.  The handling of money is secure so when a sale is made, the money goes to Clickbank who then pays the affiliate his or her commission, keeps what is deserves by way of commission for the sale and delivers the balance to the merchant efficiently and without fail.

The “gears” of selling on Clickbank are simple and straightforward.  To get set up, you step through the registration procedure as you would with any membership service online.  For a merchant, there is a one time set up fee of $50 which should be easy to make back because Clickbank can get your product into the hands of over 150,000 affiliates which represent a customer base that numbers in the millions.

Once you have you account, you begin listing your digital products in the marketplace.  You don’t need many accounts for more than one product as Clickbank can be used to sell up to 50 products under one account identity.  Once you have completed setting up the product on the service, you then take a link that is given to you which can be used to direct customers to your Clickbank product listing and you put it on your web site.  When affiliates pass customers to Clickbank to sell them the product, Clickbank will take them to your web site to use that link to complete the ordering process.  It is a truly collaborate process and yet entirely seamless because Clickbank has taken care of the details.

You have a little more information to give to Clickbank such as the commission you will give to affiliates who sell your products and the URL for the “Thank You” web page that you will use to assist the customer in downloading what they bought.  And with those simple steps, you are a Clickbank merchant.  It’s as easy as that.

clickbank storefront

Your Clickbank ID is a central code you must have to put into your link.  That is the one step that must happen for money to come your way.  But you can be a bit savvy how you create that ID in the first place.  One clever way to keep your ID from broadcasting that you are a Clickbank citizen is to use a more critic ID code.  Something like research4u2 or profits2008 and excellent choices.  These have the feel of an internet business and less of one person out on Clickbank trolling for profits.

Having a website is a great step to maximize your Clickbank listings.  By adding links to Clickbank so your website visitors can go there and use the marketplace to buy your products, Clickbank can virtually replace your catalog pages and your shopping cart with a much smoother operation that is easy to keep up to date and that puts your products into a broader affiliate market with no work from you as well.  Keep in mind your niche markets addressed by your site.  You might have a wide variety of products out on Clickbank but not all of them fit with the theme of your web site.  So if your web site is devoted to musical instruments, focus the way you add links and don’t include links to products that don’t fit there.  If you have products that have no home to be promoted on any of your websites, it’s easy enough to set up a new one.

If you are thinking about selecting a product as an affiliate on Clickbank and you want to promote it, you want to know that product is doing well in its home setting so you can capture some of that momentum.  So do a little research on the websites that support the products you are thinking about.  It’s easy enough to run some keyword searches and to find the page rank of those web sites.  That will give you an idea if the website owner who is behind this product is putting time and money into SEO on the site which would help it generate bigger profits.

Never stop learning how to make your product listings on Clickbank more successful or how to become a successful affiliate.  Make it a private study to learn how to spot products that are on the verge of a boom of success.  This will take some intuition and some watching the market so you learn where different products, product groups or categories are going.  Like a stock market at any time some products will be surging in sales potential while others are tapering off.

It will take some dedication, creativity and even some courage to make bold moves to keep on top of your accounts and keep them profitable week to week.  But if you treat your Clickbank management as part of your larger job of becoming successful on the internet, these efforts will pay off.

Affiliate Marketing Tips – ClickBank

Venturing into the world of the Clickbank marketplace requires that we start from a fresh slate and not go in with any presumptions.  The two presumptions that seem to slow people up the most is that Clickbank is for internet guru types who know every trick of the trade of internet technology and marketing to be successful.

But Clickbank isn’t a marketplace that requires that you have tremendous technical knowledge to use.  The designers of Clickbank have made most of the functions you need to operate either as a merchant or as an affiliate in the system fairly easy to use.  That is one of the keys to why Clickbank is so successful.  So to smooth your entrance into using Clickbank, it pays to look at the inner workings of the gears of Clickbank to get a feel for what you should expect when you sign up and want to get going fast making money there.

Like a lot of successful online markets, Clickbank doesn’t make anything and it doesn’t sell anything.  The value Clickbank adds to the world of internet commerce is that it provides a “place” for vendors of digital products can place their goods for sale and for people skilled in marketing to take those products and sell them to a large internet community.  Clickbank has cashed in on two basic principles which are (1) people who make things don’t like to do marketing and (2) people who love to do marketing don’t like to make things.   By getting these two groups together, merchants, affiliates and Clickbank all take away a nice profit because each makes the other successful.

Clickbank then at its core is a clearing house that works as a meeting gourd for merchants, affiliates and customers who can order the product, pay for it and download it or receive it by some other digital delivery system.  It is very important to understand that Clickbank ONLY DEALS IN DIGITAL PRODUCTS.  So you cannot sell clock radios, salt shakers or children’s clothing through Clickbank.  If you were looking at Clickbank for any other than a digital product, look elsewhere for market such as eBay.  The kinds of products Clickbank will allow to be sold include ebooks, computer courses, digital music and software programs and games.

Clickbank also offers real value to both merchants and affiliates because they handle all of the financial details and take a lot of the administrative work off of its members.  Clickbank operates a fully functional merchant account so there is no need to use PayPal, 2co or any other funds management system.  The handling of money is secure so when a sale is made, the money goes to Clickbank who then pays the affiliate his or her commission, keeps what is deserves by way of commission for the sale and delivers the balance to the merchant efficiently and without fail.

The “gears” of selling on Clickbank are simple and straightforward.  To get set up, you step through the registration procedure as you would with any membership service online.  For a merchant, there is a one time set up fee of $50 which should be easy to make back because Clickbank can get your product into the hands of over 150,000 affiliates which represent a customer base that numbers in the millions.

Once you have you account, you begin listing your digital products in the marketplace.  You don’t need many accounts for more than one product as Clickbank can be used to sell up to 50 products under one account identity.  Once you have completed setting up the product on the service, you then take a link that is given to you which can be used to direct customers to your Clickbank product listing and you put it on your web site.  When affiliates pass customers to Clickbank to sell them the product, Clickbank will take them to your web site to use that link to complete the ordering process.  It is a truly collaborate process and yet entirely seamless because Clickbank has taken care of the details.

You have a little more information to give to Clickbank such as the commission you will give to affiliates who sell your products and the URL for the “Thank You” web page that you will use to assist the customer in downloading what they bought.  And with those simple steps, you are a Clickbank merchant.  It’s as easy as that.

Clickbank Marketplace Quick And Easy Cheap As Kewwords

Clickbank is clearly one of the real hot online resources to make big profits from affiliate sales but you still have to know your tools and know your stuff to make it work.  Anyone who takes advantage of Clickbank wants to become one of the great affiliates using the system.  So like that smart mechanism, dentist or stone mason, using the tools that Clickbank gives you to become a success will make or break you in this virtual world of sales and marketing.

The ClickBank calculator is a powerful tool because knowing how to use it makes enables you to compute your commission on each product without having to have a degree in math.  You can access the calculator at http://www.clickbankguide.com/calculator.htm/  Along with the calculator itself, this is where Clickbank lays out a table of most used prices so you can understand how the tool functions.  With these starter tools, you can create your own price tables that will be your roadmap to success.

At “template” is a common format that you can use over and over again in any setting to save you from constantly coming up with a layout for a letter, a survey or some other form of communications.  Often webmasters use one template for all the web pages on a site they are creating.  It’s a great tool for standardizing what works and sticking with it.  The tool set that ClickBank provides is a great source of such templates for you to supply to your affiliates or for you to use for your own internet marketing and merchandising.

Mass mailing through email is the backbone of any successful internet marketing campaign.  While in this day and age, avoiding becoming a spammer is a science in itself, that doesn’t eliminate the need for a good mass mailing tool to add to your arsenal of tools you will use to reduce the work of running your online business.  But because ClickBank knows that a tool to send out large amounts of emails to customers or prospective customers, they are there to give you a group email tool.

One problem that can become a nightmare to keep straight is what affiliates are to be considered future partners and which ones are future competition or “the enemy”.  So a tool to organize your affiliate contact list can be gold when you get a large affiliate list which will happen when you become successful.  In addition to keeping tabs who are already onboard with you as an affiliate ClickBank’s tools helps you track potential partners so you can contact them before they become “the enemy”.  Better to join up with successful internet marketers and everyone work together to get rich than work against each other and lose.

Keyword optimization may be one of the hottest internet marketing tricks of the trade to really drive traffic to your website.  Keywords are what Google and search engines use to rank web sites so if you have your keywords “optimized” that means your web site will perform well on Google or Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.  ClickBank can help with finding the right keywords to optimize so as you build up your online content and article base, you are naturally driving traffic online to generate revenue from your site marketing tools.  Using this tool well is just smart merchandising online.

This is just a sampling of the types of tools that ClickBank provides to make you a success.  When you are a success, they are a success so take the time to learn to use these tools well and to discover the vast array of other tools out there from ClickBank so you can use convert this knowledge into online gold for your internet business.

Wealthy Affiliate Clickbank

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.

Wealthy Affiliate Clickbank