What is Clickbank?
Clickbank is actually quite difficult to define. It is a marketplace and payment processor for the sale of Digital Products on the web. These products can be Software, ebooks, site/club membership or anything that can be downloaded.
There are a number of competitors such as paydotcom and Plimus but none are on the same level as Clickbank in terms of products, affiliates and revenue. They claim to process a sale every 3 seconds and have processed over $1.2billion of sales since they started in 1998.
Clickbank doesn’t actually sell anything, they act on behalf of the Vendor and take a percentage of each sale. They don’t even promote products on their site, each Vendor has their own Sales Page which directs the Customer to a Clickbank hosted payment page.
If you are a publisher of a digital product or membership site you can sign up for an account here
Affiliates
An affiliate makes commission by promoting Vendor products. In the case of Clickbank, these products are digital, not physical and this makes a huge difference when it comes to the potential % share offered to affiliates when compared to a CPA Network or a physical product affiliate program such as Amazon.
If you are a Vendor selling digital products your cost per unit sold actually decreases the more you sell as your main costs are upfront, in terms of developing the product, a sales page and marketing to create awareness. As you are not selling a product that has a physical cost per unit, you can afford to offer a much higher percentage share to the affiliate who will be doing all the hard work in promoting your product.
Because of this, the % commission offered for most of the top selling products on Clickbank is between 50% and 75%. The typical % offered for physical products is more like 5-20%.
Types of Product
A quick look at the NicheJunky Top 10 shows a wide variety of types of product across a number of topics, including:
FAT LOSS FOR IDIOTS – One of the all time best selling Clickbank products, this unique sales page leads the ever consistent flow of people looking for the ultimate diet to their answer. This is in the form of an electronic book (ebook).
FAP Turbo – Sounds like a car part, but is in fact the best ever selling Forex Expert Advisor (also known as Forex Robots). This is software.
Maverick Money Makers – Is a money making club where anyone who wants to make money online can learn from the best. This is a membership site with a recurring monthly fee.
Earth 4 Energy – is a guide to building your very own wind turbine and solar panels for very low cost in your own shed or garage. This is an ebook with video guides.
The Clickbank Code – is a typical “Make Money Online” or MMO product which is based on a “secret” formula to make significant money from affiliate marketing, in this case Clickbank products. This is an ebook.
The Vaguely Technical Bit
Don’t get me wrong, making money with Clickbank is not difficult. I don’t have any experience yet as a Vendor, so this is going to be from the Affiliate side.
The key to Clickbank for Affiliates is “hoplinks”. A hoplink is a URL which is based on your very own Clickbank ID, sometimes known as your CBID. It looks like this:
http://yourCBID.vendorCBID.hop.clickbank.net
You can choose your CBID, which can be up to 10 characters.
If a customer clicks on your hoplink it will take them to the Vendor’s Sales Page. Your customer will now have a “tracking cookie” on their computer which lasts up to 60 days. Assuming they do not pick up another cookie from another affiliate, if they buy the Vendor’s product during the 60 day period you will be credited with the commission.
Tracking IDs
One of the keys to success with affiliate marketing is statistics and analytics, which I wrote about some time ago, The Importance of Analytics. Clickbank has an OK analytics section, which they are apparently in the process of improving, and one of the key elements is the TID or Tracking ID. This can be added to the end of a hoplink to show you where the link was from. This is particularly important if you have a number of sites/blogs/forums where you use a hoplink for the same product. The TID should include an indicator of the product and the location, i.e. “blogfap” for my blog and the product FAP Turbo.
The hoplink would look like this with the TID “blogfap”
http://yourCBID.vendorCBID.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=blogfap
The TID can be 24 characters long, containing alpha and numeric characters only. Any value longer than 24 characters will be truncated.
Hoplink Cloaking
To avoid the ugly hoplink URL and replace with a much nicer, http://website.com/product URL you can “cloak” the hoplink. I have covered this in detail in the post, Hop Link Cloaking Options.
Getting Paid
So you have sent a customer to the Vendor’s Sales Page, and the customer bought the product via the Clickbank Payment Page and because of the tracking cookie left by the hoplink, your account has been credited with the commission. So, how do you get paid? This is the bit that confuses and frustrates most newbies and experienced Clickbankers alike!
Clickbank offers a no questions asked 60 day money back guarantee for all products which has an impact on how much and when you get paid. The first obstacle is the CDR:
Customer Distribution Requirement
ClickBank accounts cannot be used for the sole purpose of collecting rebates or otherwise extending credit to yourself or others. In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until the following criteria is met:
- Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and
- Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal). Note: PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum 5 different credit card numbers.
Once you have met this criteria you will be eligible for payment if you have met your payment threshold, you can set this in your account settings.
Clickbank assume that on average 10% of your sales will be refunded, so they hold back 10% Return Allowance which is released after 12 weeks.
Return Allowance
ClickBank withholds a fraction from each payment that is credited back to your account after 12 weeks (about 84 days). These funds are used to manage quality issues that may arise with Products you publish or promote, including delayed refunds or revoked sales. The standard return allowance is 10%. ClickBank may adjust your return allowance at any time.
The payment will initially be via paper check in US Dollars and will be sent via regular post.
In some countries you can receive a direct deposit payment into your bank account, but you must have first received three paper paychecks within any 12 week period before it is eligible to enroll.
That pretty much covers the basics of Clickbank and Affiliate Marketing.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave below and I will endeavour to answer them or point you in the right direction.
And finally…..
I learnt most of what I know about Affiliate Marketing through a small number of great communities, the best of these is Nichechoppers, originally started by a Clickbank Vendor/Publisher as an affiliate resource center it has grown into a fantastic community of likeminded moneymakers, from newbies to well established millionaires. Do not go out and buy loads of ebooks about the latest Clickbank Secrets, join me at the Nichechoppers and learn from those actually making a regular income.
Find out more about Nichechoppers >>>
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