Clickbank.com is a fairly new enterprise for people looking to make a few extra bucks, or if they’re dedicated enough, make a career out of the affiliate marketing opportunities that the website presents. Founded in the year 1998, Clickbank began taking advantage of the online affiliate marketing world at that time, when online affiliate marketing was still in it’s infancy.
The founders of Clickbank recognized a trend in online marketing. Back then, they saw that companies were not very satisfied with just marketing their products or services on their home pages.
Consumers only had one page on the the entire internet where they could find the particular product that they were looking for. Rather than be content with that, companies branched out across the internet and started advertising everywhere they could. Then, affiliate marketing websites such as Clickbank started springing up, allowing companies the chance to pay individuals a commission for selling their products to consumers.
Clickbank allows a person to sign up, which is completely free of charge, and pitch their website’s product or products to individuals who are looking to make money by advertising those products to eager consumers. With more than 10,000 products in their inventory, there is plenty of opportunity for anyone to make money with Clickbank.
Most of these products are information products, usually eBooks, videos, or audio files that teach or inform people about a particular subject or ‘niche’. Millions of people have made money with Clickbank affiliate marketing, but of course, the very first thing that needs to be done is to sign up for Clickbank’s services, and then one can begin to make money with Clickbank’s affiliate products.
By signing up as an affiliate, a Clickbank member is given the option of choosing from numerous different products. They can do this either by directly searching for a specific product, maybe one they have a passion for, or they can browse the marketplace for anything that might be popular with consumers today. After finding a good product they wish to become an affiliate for, the Clickbank member simply sets up what is called a hoplnk somewhere on the internet.
These hoplinks direct buyers to the Clickbank product and will earn a commission for the affiliate if the consumer decides to buy. This may sound very easy or simple to implement, as though anyone could do it, but the truth is is that an affiliate must have a solid website or article to pull in a sale. After all, consumers are very crafty and not easily parted with their hard-earned money.
A good Clickbank affiliate marketing site will draw a consumer immediately, rather than direct them elsewhere. The site should be a realistic advertisement for the product, going over all of the features and aspects of the product, and what the consumer would gain from purchasing it. If the affiliate owns and uses the product, all the better. The affiliate can use that to improve their marketing and draw in a potential consumer, as reviews for affiliate products are very popular these days and are a great way to get more prospects.
A well-constructed affiliate website will be a dead end with only the product sale as the heart of it – there has to be some valuable content that a visitor can absorb before making a sale can be possible. With that said, putting other advertisements on the site such as Adsense might drive people off, as external links may pull the consumer out of the site and lose the sale in the long run.
With just a simple registration, there is really no reason that anyone could not make some extra money (or a career, if they’re dedicated enough) using affiliate marketing through Clickbank. Armed with a little knowledge about the product and a desire to sell it, it is fairly simple for someone to set up an affiliate marketing page for any of Clickbank’s variety of products. If the site is well-made and properly advertises to it’s specific niche audience, it may draw in numerous different sales and earn plenty of commission for the affiliate. Like all businesses, affiliate marketing does take some time and experience to turn into something really profitable.
However, Clickbank affiliate marketing is one of the most prolific methods for online retailers to advertise their products, and now anyone can take home a piece of the earnings. As it currently stands, choosing Clickbank products to sale as an affiliate is one of the best ways to make money on the internet – cheaply and effectively.
If you are considering starting Affiliate Marketing you need to do your homework, especially if you will be using Google AdWords for your leads. One resource here you can check out that has valuable free information about how you can start making money with clickbankand becoming a successful Affiliate marketer is http://www.squidoo.com/make-money-choosing-clickbank-products
Author: Helene M Malmsio
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Sponsored by: Internet Marketing Tools
When was the last time you made $500 a day using ClickBank? Was it within the past 1 or 2 months? Didn’t think so. How much did you spend for Adwords/Yahoo? Was it so low that you that you just skipped a day’s coffee? Didn’t think so. What was your ROI (Return in Investment) after all the time spent, hassles taken, e-books from “Experts” bought and promised dreams of “Financial Freedom”? Was it high enough to quit your job? Didn’t think so. Did you “Fire YOUR Boss” after joining ClickBank? Didn’t think so.
Is ClickBank really what it is claimed to be? Is it really the best way to make money selling digital products in the Business-to-Business or more specifically the ever-so-popular “Internet Marketing” category? Let’s clear our doubts first, ClickBank was definitely the best way to make money by have a Squeeze Page or a redirect, or cloaking your Affiliate ID, having a Review Site and having a killer Adwords Campaign. Back then, even I, getting $500 a day from selling affiliate products was a joke but, that was in the “Google Cash” method days which took the internet by storm about 2 years ago.
ClickBank is still good for a lot of niches but again you have to understand that the fact is, the “Gravity” measure is below 20 for almost all other niche’s except a very select few which shows that there is not much interest in them. Now, there are some fantastic products being sold on ClickBank and let me name a few of them, one being the Keyword Analyzer tool and many others. But, how many “Take Paid Surveys” or “Get Rich Quick” or “Make $500 a day” type “products” do we see DAILY on ClickBank?
ClickBank’s BIGGEST flaw is the fact that you can buy using your OWN affiliate ID to get a discount. This is great if you are interested in buying the product but just imagine if more than 80% of the people were to do that (which is common these days) how much do you think a normal newbie affiliate or for that matter an average affiliate would make? You guessed it, very less after the exorbitant Adwords fees. Even if you cloaked your link and masked the website with precision, a person who signed up to be a ClickBank affiliate is 99% of the time smart enough to know what he is up to when he goes to the Checkout or Order page and when he looks below to see the text “[affiliate=someone]” they will right away change it to THEIR affiliate ID, literally STEALING your commission. Is there a way to counter this? Yes, some gurus suggest there is when you increase the perceived value of the product by giving a quality review, or building a very personally bonded list, but seriously, how many more would you get with this method then normal? 4? 10? Maybe 20? (Being generous here.)
Now Imagine the number of Paid Survey sites or Data Entry Job products on CB, if you look at their Earned/Sale (which is basically how much ON AVERAGE a person makes per sale after fees etc.) is so less, that most of the time if you are entitled to get $45 per sale, the average is usually around $33! This is $12! Less on average! Which means that there are many HARD EARNED commissions which are losing out because of ClickBank’s liberal Refund Policy. Just imagine if you just put in $50 for an Adwords Campaign and got two sales totaling $73 or so in commissions and you just got a refund (to which you have no control over) you just made a loss. Now you may say a loss of just about $5-10 but if you total the amount of time, energy, testing, trial and error that took place from you part, it would be A HUGE LOSS.
Now, if you aren’t making any money off of ClickBank, then WHO IS?
Let me rephrase the question, if most of the buyers are abusing the liberal “Refund Policy” of ClickBank and most of the users are trying to use their own Affiliate Hop link then who is making the money? That Link Cloaking software you purchased for quite some cash didn’t tell you about Refunds or this fact. Well, you guessed it, THE MERCHANT. It is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation for him/her. Let me elaborate, even if he/she does not get a sale, he/she will get a future prospect or Lead which will either
a) Opt-in to his/her list
b) Get his/her name known to the world in case he/she does not have a prior portfolio
c) CASH CASH CASH. Either it is from your affiliate ID or someone else’s affiliate ID, it doesn’t matter, they rake in the cash no matter what and the more the merrier.
D) He/she now gets to use those earnings from ClickBank he received because of people like YOU to hype up his next sales letter and his next “Proof of Earnings” Section.
Now you being a disgruntled affiliate will end up bidding on Keywords for Adwords and after all the effort would still not see the results you are promised or made to “dream” on the plentiful E-books which are collecting dust on your hard drive by now. Why? Because the people who will buy from the Adwords Ads will be the people who are NOT a part of ClickBank affiliates at all, these are most probably total Newbie’s who just happened to search and you know what? There aren’t many of those any more, in fact, it doesn’t even matter, the odds of them converting are pretty rare.
So getting back to the original point. There is a trick where you make your Domain URL similar to the Official URL which works but again, only to the “Non-ClickBank viewers.”
So why are the people showing all those huge checks and $$$ out of no where? Well, because these are part of the Merchant’s “inner circle” that get hold of the buzz of the product’s launch and are 1 week ahead of everyone. What these people do is, literally squash all the little affiliates who are not part of the “inner circle” by aggressively marketing on Adwords and sending a killer sales pitch to all their Lists and giving away bonuses and what not. These amount for more than 30% of the sales that the merchants get, often times these people are less that 10! The next kind as I said earlier are the people who buy using their own affiliate ID to get their discount to see “what this buzz is all about” and they amount to over 55-60% of the people. The remaining 10-15% is for average affiliates.
Now, is it worth the effort to be part of this very little percentage and add to the fact the refund policy, merchant’s bad service rapport leading to even bigger problems of the people who bought from your “review website” to ever find it credible again. Now not all of the people struggle but indefinitely, the people who do are the new guys on the game, these are the guys who have been “catching up on the gold rush” so to speak what did they end up getting? Yet, these are the guys the “Gurus” aggressively market, when I mean aggressively, these are the “target market” for them because they will spend anything to fill the gaps, to “crack the code” to “get the secret” to “beat their competition.” But for how long?
These are some of the quotes that some affiliate friends I know say “This is the last e-book I will pretty much ever buy. I’ve had enough of this; seriously, I bought pretty much 30 e-books by now.”
“The information was nothing new, not saying that it wasn’t good but again, I honestly believe that gone are the days where you could use CB for affiliate products because everyone will use their affiliate ID and buy the e-book to get the discount.”
Gurus claim as if being an affiliate will bring HUGE sales of their product and therefore hype up their e-book. All they would do is get sales off of newbie affiliates who haven’t made a killing using ClickBank. Let me give you an example, would be able to sell a “Get rich quick” E-book to Bill Gates? Why Not? Because he is rich, he is NOT the target market. But, if you pitched the same thing to a guy who is working as a store clerk who thinks his life sucks and what are the chances of him buying? You know the answer.
The Quality of products in ClickBank is decreasing and because of high refund rates, the merchants are over-pricing their products, what would have been worth no more than $29 last year is worth more than $97 now, so that they can recuperate from the high refund rates.
Because of this, the “new” buzz is to create physical products to sell at exorbitant prices and decrease the refund rates. ClickBank means well and their refund policy is an example of that, however, the quality and honesty of their merchants is up for questioning as it’s not the merchant or his/her Super Affiliates (i.e. friends from inner circle) but YOU as a common average Joe who is getting affected because, YOU are spending your energy every single day, YOU are spending your hard-earned money on advertising and YOU face the consequences if it doesn’t work out. You got no one to blame at the end if you burn your money on a Scam Artist selling via ClickBank at the end of the day.
I’m not going to lie to you however, I do make enough money using other alternatives and some niche products on ClickBank but the fact is, it isn’t easy, nor will it make you enough to make fun of your boss. So, it is important for you to stand up on your feet and be down to earth on your successes and accept your failures before it is too late. I however, found my success on eBay by using techniques and softwares that are virtually unknown by 99% of the people who venture the affiliate marketing and more specifically Internet Marketing arena. Visit my website for more information.
To Your Success,
Mr. Anonymous
PS: You may use this article and publish in your website provided all the links and data is intact.
Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experiences being a prominent affiliate marketer of many ClickBank Products for many years. It does not condemn ClickBank in any way shape or form. It is just no longer a means of making huge amounts of income online for me.
Mr. Anonymous is the founder of ScamsReviewer. He can be reached for more information at his website here: http://www.scamsreviewer.com Mr. Anonymous has been a contributing author for this website and is an acknowledged expert in the field of making money online.
Author: Richard Lexionagtona
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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