Experience with Clickbank?
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 12/11/2006 - 19:47.
Hi folks,
I signed up with Clickbank back in July of this year, and simply haven't used them yet. I'm putting together a niche site or two and I'm considering using one or two of their merchants/publishers. They're a little different than what I'm used to dealing with as far as affiliate marketing? Payouts certainly look pretty good! Just trying to get some feedback from anyone that may be promoting their merchants. Not trying to reveal anyones secrets but are there folks on the forum that have had a lot of success with them?
Thanks for any insight!
Regards,
Chris
Experience with Clickbank?
I make substantial amounts with them (well, for my personal scale - it's nothing like the six+ figures/month that you can do with the big networks). It's a somewhat strange network in that near everyone can easily become a merchant there. Thus the abundance of extremely poor "products" which range until outright scams - in particular most of the "download movies ipod" products, while being very popular, are in essence nothing but scams making people pay for access to a free P2P network. Same goes for most of the "paid surveys" and "work at home" stuff. It is still a mystery to me how they actually still exist after several years and the FTC or whoever else in charge haven't stomped them yet. There are, of course, exceptions - like for instance Jeremy's book - but I'd say about 90-95% of the stuff in those categories isn't worth much. However, if you stay out of the "make money" and "pay to download stuff for free" categories, there are a lot of interesting niche products that have sizable search traffic, little competition, and good payouts. Still, conversion rates are mostly quite poor compared to brand-name stuff on the big networks, and if you happen to pick a product that promises more than it delivers, their unconditional 60-day refund policy may hurt as well.
Payouts are biweekly, and quite reliable - never had to complain yet. Keyword-level conversion tracking was introduced a couple of weeks ago, which certainly made things easier. I'm not too happy with their customer support though.
Experience with Clickbank?
Hi Skaze,
That is just the kind of feedback I was looking for! I noticed that the "make money" programs, (as well as the others you mentioned), seem to have a lot of activity, but I'm not so sure I would feel right promoting most of them?
I'll do a little more research and see what additional products and services they have to offer.
Good luck to you and thank you for the insight!
Chris
Experience with Clickbank?
Good post, Skaze.
A couple of questions?
Did you use Google and/or MSN PPC for this?
If so, if so did you use niche sites, landing pages, or just direct to clickbank?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Experience with Clickbank?
Hi,
I use all 3 major SEs (main share of traffic coming from Google though), and all kinds of LPs. I usually start testing with a cloaked PHP redirect, if the product turns out to be reasonably well-converting, I typically test out several kinds of LPs to see whether I can improve the conversion rate (usually I can).
Regards,
Sergey
Experience with Clickbank?
Personally, I do not care at all for ClickBank. I have received payouts from Commission Junction, LinkShare, Amazon, and a number of private companies who run their own affiliate companies. Of all those, ClickBank has the most bizarre payout rules I have seen.
I agree with all that has been said about the general scam-quality of many (most?) of their offerings. It is so bad that I question the ethics of supporting them on either end. (Does anyone else do electronic offerings?) But it goes beyond that.
Although I have accumulated monies well over the minimum, they will not pay me because I have not met their "Customer Distribution Requirement." This silly agreement requires me to have sales that are made with five different credit cards AND these must include at least one Visa and one MasterCard payment. PayPal and echeck purchases do NOT even count toward the five purchases.
To top that off, if you have a bunch of money in your account--that they won't pay you due to the CDR--they start siphoning it off if your account is dormant. In other words, they take back your commission.
Frankly, it's the most ridiculous setup I've ever seen, one that serves only Clickbank with no common sense or fairness. They accept the full payment from the buyer, keep the commission portion back from the seller, and then never pay it to the affiliate.
I didn't even get the benefit of using my own link to buy this eBook because I didn't know it was a ClickBank offering. Sheesh.
Experience with Clickbank?
I think the main reason for the 5 different credit cards requirement is that a lot of people are tempted to give themselves the affiliate commission on some product which they want to buy, without actually intending to become an affiliate.
At first I found it rather weird too. But, well, you get those 5 purchases with different credit cards rather quickly in practice - took like a day or two for me.
Some alternatives are paydotcom.com and RegNow...dont know much about RegNow but paydotcom is, well, not that great in my opinion.
This is more of a starting-out problem IMO. Once you have a cashflow beyond a certain level, there arent really any major problems with their payout system from my experience. And it's pretty fast - biweekly - while other networks sometimes take 45-60 days.
RE: Experience with Clickbank?
As of June 2007 I was totally new to affiliate marketing and using Clickbank and never heard of those things before that time. It has now been almost a year and my Clickbank account is getting close to 5 different credit card purchases, but is not there yet because there are mostly pay pal payments which don't count as a credit card purchase. According to Clickbank rules there needs to be at least one Visa purchase, and one mastercard purchase in the 5 purchases. This means you can have a thousand visa purchases, and thousands of discovery card purchases, and American express etc, but if you don't get that Master Card purchase you still won't get you money un til you get it.
I have a few visa card purchases, a discovery card purchase, and a few pay pal purchases, but no master card purchase.
My account is nearing $200 which for me is about half my take home pay (after rent is taken out, and food, gas etc.) at my regular job, so I want to get paid soon - it is like having an extra biweekly paycheck for me.
I wrote to Clickbank asking them about the CDR rules and they were kind enough to override the CDR so I will be getting paid during the next pay period.
I hope I don't have to wait for 5 different credit card payments the next time around.
I find it hard to believe that some of you are able to make enough sales in a few days to get the 5 different credit card purchases. It has taken me about a year to make under a dozen sales. Then again maybe some of you are have enough extra cash on hand to invest in google adwords? I tried google but don't have enough money to always pay for clicks since most clicks (if you want to be on page one) seem to be over $1.00 a click, some keywords are as high as $10 a click (especially if you are advertisinf stock). And on weekends when more people online are buying some keywords I was using shot up to $5 a lick or higher. And i am only about to invest about $10 worth of clicks every two weeks which limits me to a few clicks on my ad and my money is gone. I think so far i spent about $70 on google and made $50 back. I put it on hold until i research into it a little more.
Experience with Clickbank?
One important issue to bear in mind with Clickbank is the continuing debate on IM forums re the crediting of CB affiliate sales. For example, many people have found that after installing Spybot - Search and Destroy anti-spyware, they see "[affiliate = none]" on CB's sales page rather than the affiliate's ID. I downloaded and installed Spybot to test this and found it happened on numerous Clickbank affiliate links I clicked on (including my own).Considering that, according to download.com, there have been over 85 million downloads of Spybot alone then this is something to bear in mind.
This means that the affiliate loses commissions on the sale because it isn't credited to them. I don't know how many other anti-spyware/malware software does this but it is an important issue; especially if you are running a PPC campaign.
Peter
PayDotCom Need To Change Their Terms
Agree with you Peter.
They better add affiliate cookies to their exclusion list, otherwise affiliates lose big time.
As for PayDotCom, i was the victim by promoting one of their merchants product and never paid, because they delisted that merchant from their marketplace for his 3000$ of unpaid debt to PayDotCom.
Now many if not all of affiliates haven't been paid for their work.
I made around 700$ and noticed that sales stopped suddenly while i was still receiving hits.
I wrote the e-mail to PayDotCom's CEO Mike Filsaime saying that i will never do business with PayDotCom again. Unfortunately PayDotCom don't have the control over affiliates' payments.