How to succeed with ClickBank
Selecting a suitable product
To succeed with ClickBank, start by searching for a product at the ClickBank Marketplace where several thousand publishers (vendors) display their products in an organized directory.
a) Look at the product price and commission rates
You should aim for products with a reasonable rate of commission, say 50%, to make your efforts worthwhile.
Be aware that ClickBank deducts transaction fees from a sale.
b) Is it an in-demand item?
The Marketplace listings are ranked by popularity, so you can see which are the in-demand items. Popularity is determined by a number of factors, the main being the amount of sales and the number of affiliates making sales over the last 8 weeks.
Note: a product at the low end may still turn out to be popular especially if it is new.
c) How effective is the sales page?
Visit the sales page of the product to confirm that the sales copy does a good job of selling the product. (There’s another important factor – sales page leaks – which we cover in the next section)
The next step to take to succeed with ClickBank:
Check out the affiliate support
The publisher should provide you with much more than just a link to join the affiliate program. Check for any useful promotional material (e.g. sample ads, articles, solo mailings, endorsement/reviews, signatures). Ideally there will be an affiliate mailing list so that the publisher can convey useful news. You want someone reliable who won’t disband a program or make rule changes without telling you.
Warning – look for sales page “leaks”
As an affiliate you want the visitor to read through the sales page and hit that order button with you getting credit for the sale. There are a number of reasons why this does not happen:
1. There is an overt link to an affiliate sign up page. Your potential customer could simply become an affiliate and purchase the product himself.
2. The publisher offers multiple payment options so if ClickBank is not chosen you do not get the commission.
3. Your product is just one of many unrelated products on a page – a put-off for the potential customer. (The reason for this usually is that all the products belong to one ClickBank account which is restricted to only one affiliate landing page ).
4. There are many external links which distract the visitor from reaching the order page.
5. The publisher captures your commission. There are offers to join a mailing list or claim a free report: you should get credited for any sale ensuing from these leads but an unscrupulous publisher may follow up and make the sale via his own link.
Similarly the publisher may use a pop up upon exiting a site to convert a leaving visitor into a sale for which you do not get the credit.
Promoting the product
Once you are happy that the affiliate program is worth promoting and does not suffer from potential ‘leaks’ you can collect your affiliate link, known as a hoplink. It has the format http://xxxxxxxx.publisher-id.hop.clickbank.net where you substitute xxxxxxxx with your nickname. You should check the validity by clicking on it and following through to the ClickBank order page where you should see [affiliate=yournickname] at the bottom. If not then you may have incorrectly formatted your hoplink or it’s possible that the affiliate program has been discontinued.
Link cloaking
The basic hoplink is not ‘protected’. A customer can simply substitute his own nickname and get commission for the purchase. There are techniques and tools which can encrypt (or cloak) your hoplink to prevent link theft.
More Information
Affiliate MarketingClickbank, clickbank affiliate marketing, dominating clickbankJanuary 25, 2011
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