ClickBank for Beginners
If you’ve been reading about affiliate marketing or making money from your blog, you’ve no doubt come across ClickBank. According to them, “ClickBank is the online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product publishers and their 100,000 active affiliates. We’ve been paying our customers on time, every time, for 10 years. Over $1 billion to date.” moment. Now with weekly payments!” . If you haven’t found it yet, you’ll want to navigate to their website and sign up as an affiliate, as commissions typically range from 50% to 75%.
You will be prompted to choose a nickname and you should choose carefully because this name will appear on every link you create to promote your products. ClickBank is also helpful if you have digital products to sell on your blog site. Let’s say you’re writing a health and fitness blog and want to create and sell an e-book on the best way to stay fit and lose weight. You could use ClickBank to take care of the monetary part of the transaction and, at the same time, have the affiliates sell it for you. You don’t need a shopping cart or an SSL certificate. Simply link your order button to ClickBank and provide a way for customers to download your book on a thank you page. His instructions are quite simple.
Another thing you’ll want to do early on if you’re promoting ClickBank products is to use Tracking IDs, especially if you use multiple means of promotion (ie your blog, Google AdWords). That way you will know where your clicks or “jumps” are coming from. You can use any ID you like, as long as it’s alphanumeric and 8 characters or less. The format is zzz.PUBID.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=xxxxxxxxx where zzz is your ClickBank nickname, PUBID is the nickname the publisher of the product chose, and xxxxxxx is the tracking ID they chose. ClickBank does not need to know or approve your Tracking IDs, but if you get the format wrong, you will lose credit for sales.
Once you start charging commissions, you should be aware of their Customer Distribution Policy which states: “ClickBank accounts may not be used for the sole purpose of collecting rebates or extending credit to yourself or others. In accordance with Under US law, ClickBank will withhold payment on any account balance until the following criteria are met: Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard or PayPal) different credit card numbers.” This means that you will need several sales before you get paid the money you have earned.
If you’ve just started using ClickBank to find products, you may find its search facility a bit frustrating. I suggest you use a ClickBank tool like CBEngine.com or CBTrends.com. Both are free, but if you subscribe to the full version of CBEngine, you get a lot more features and can bookmark multiple products in different file folders. However, I find the charts on CBTrends to be a bit better, so I use both: CBEngine to find new products and CBTrends to chart products that interest me.