If you have been reading about affiliate marketing or making money with your blog, no doubt you have been introduced to ClickBank. According to them, “ClickBank is the online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product publishers and their 100,000 active affiliates. We’ve paid our clients on time, every time, for 10 years. Over $1 billion thus far. Now with weekly payouts!”.
If you haven”t run across it yet, you will want to browse to their website and sign up as an affiliate as the commissions generally run 50%-75%. You will be asked to pick a nickname and you should choose carefully because this name will appear in every link you create to promote their products. ClickBank is also handy if you have digital products to sell on your blog site. Let”s say you are blogging about health & fitness and want to create and sell an ebook on the best way to stay fit and lose weight, you could use ClickBank to take care of the money part of the transaction and at the same time have affiliates sell it for you. You don”t need a shopping cart or SSL certificate. Simply link your order button to ClickBank and provide a way for customers to download your book on a Thank You page. Their instructions are fairly straightforward.
Another thing you will want to do from the start if you are promoting ClickBank products is to use tracking IDs especially if you use various means of promotion (i.e. your blog, Google AdWords). That way you will know where your clicks or “hops” are coming from. You can use any ID you want as long as it is alphanumeric and 8 characters or less. The format is http://zzz.PUBID.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=xxxxxxxx where zzz is your ClickBank nickname, PUBID is the nickname that the publisher of the product has chosen and xxxxxxx is the tracking ID you have chosen. ClickBank does not need to know or approve your tracking IDs but if you get the format wrong, you will lose credit for the sales.
Once you start collecting commissions, you should be aware of their Customer Distribution Policy which reads, “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.” This means that you will need several sales before the money you have earned will be paid to you.
If you have started using ClickBank to find products, you may find their search utility a bit frustrating. I suggest that you use a ClickBank tool like like CBEngine. It is free but if you subscribe to the full version of CBEngine you get a lot more functionality and are able to bookmark various products into different file folders.
