Why Clickbank is excellent for newbie affiliates

Choosing an affiliate network is likely one of the first decisions a fresh affiliate has to make. Ideally you wish a network using a good range of products, decent commissions, an easy to make use of system and good support.

Clickbank is mostly a network we talked a good deal about, but we thought it had been about time we did a Clickbank review post to weigh up the pros and cons of the popular network.

A small amount of background:

Clickbank was founded in 1998 and has now grown into an internet retail service provider with over 12,000 digital product vendors and over 100,000 active affiliates. Processing over 26,000 dealings daily, and averaging over 700,000 unique visits a month, Clickbank has grown into a major player inside the affiliate network market.

Getting Started:

When you first head over to the Clickbank sign up form, you will notice that everything is pretty straight forward requiring only basic address and contact information. A distinct advantage for affiliates is Clickbank's lack of requirements when you first sign up. Rather than requiring preapproval like many networks, Clickbank allows virtually anyone to sign up and start promoting. This is great for newbies who can't really point to existing websites and programs they have promoted. Clickbank also allows affiliates from over 150 countries to sign up - which is most. Unfortunately if your country isn't listed in the drop-down menu on the sign up page, there isn't much you can do.

Strolling the market-place:

Once you've signed up, one of the first thing's you'll want to do is have a look through the Clickbank Marketplace. Clickbank has thousands of products that you can choose from. However it is important to take your time in promoting. While there are some really high quality products on Clickbank, there are also a lot of sub-par products that should be avoided.

The best thing to do is check the "gravity" score of a product. The gravity is essentially a calculation that takes into account how many different affiliates have made a sale in this product in the past 8 weeks; the higher the number the better. Our in-house affiliate expert Mark Ling recommends that you always aim for a gravity of at least 30. In addition to the gravity, there are a number of other statistics for each product - these are;

$/sale: This is the average amount that an affiliate earns for each sale of this product, including refunds, chargebacks, and tax.
Future $: The average amount an affiliate will make from recurring billing of a single sale after the initial purchase (recurring billing only).
Total $/sale: For one-time purchases, this number is the same as $/sale. For recurring billing products, it equals the average total of the initial sale plus all rebills, divided by the number of initial sales.
%/sale: Commission rate
%refd: This is the percentage of sales that were referred by affiliates.
All this information gives you a snapshot picture of the products - how much you are likely make and how competitive it is.

The Technical Bits

Clickbank has a very straight-forward tracking system - basically there are 2 kinds of affiliate links you obtain; either encrypted or standard. The conventional Clickbank affiliate link or "HopLink" is in the format http://pem2001.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net. Clickbank also has encrypted HopLinks that hide the vendor ID and affiliate ID. While I can understand people wanting to hide their affiliate ID, I believe a redirect is a far cleaner approach to take action as the encrypted links aren't exactly pretty (e.g. pem2001.hop.clickbank.net). Also it is vital to understand that if someone buys through your link, you affiliate ID are visible at the payment page.

Some merchants set up more sophisticated set-ups for their affiliate marketing program through Clickbank. For example we allow people to link to any page in our site by simply adding "?aff=affiliateID" to the end of the url. However this isn't standard for every product. This does mean that always a common affiliate link you can get would be to the primary sales page.

Personally I like to recommend planning affiliate links in the initial un-cloaked format. That's just personal preference, but it is far easier to troubleshoot any problems if you'll see what the code actually is!

Getting paid

Clickbank pays out commissions every two weeks. Said to be the great inherent in Clickbank is that you get to choose the payment threshold which sometimes be set to just $10 - which means no waiting around for weeks because you were $1 below the threshold.

Payment is either by posted check or direct deposit is obtainable to 17 countries including the United States. However so that you can qualify for direct deposit you should receive three paper paychecks within any 12 week period - that might be a bit frustrating to start with, but when you qualify you're set.

Commissions on Clickbank are generally quite high - many over 50%. Meaning you are usually really rewarded to your efforts.

Because Clickbank is also a payment network - i.e. they process the payment of sales, Clickbank is sort of good at preventing fraud. Merchants aren't able to try and trick you from sales (unfortunately this does happen) because Clickbank provides you with your cut straight out of the payment.

Becoming a Merchant

A very big benefit of Clickbank is how easy it is to be a merchant. They provide a large amount of support material also it's really cheap to start (just $49.95 to activate a product). While this may appear out of reach for beginners, you would be surprised how easy it will be to make a product and start selling it.

Need Help?

Clickbank has a large Help Center, with a lot of commonly asked questions and informative articles that cover the majority of the information you'll need to know. There's also a video library of useful video tutorials including a frequently updated blog that has up to date information, news and advice. Additionally they do have a very contact form for direct requests.

One slight downside with Clickbank is that there is no direct method to contact the merchant unless the merchant goes out of these way to produce contact details. However most merchants have affiliate pages on their site - usually located at www.merchantsitename.com/affiliates, so I always recommend rummaging through their site and seeing if there's any affiliate resources.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Gerald Aumaugher www.perpetual-reviews.com/

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