JL Forums

I went to a site by Harvey Segal, who has quite a number of impressive credentials, one of the being that he was on the Advisory Board of ClickBank's European Client Meetings.

http://www.clickbankguide.com/

He promotes an intensive online guide to Clickbank.  BUT, he does say there are many negatives about getting paid, sales charges from each sale, meeting the $100 balance, along with meeting the ClickBank's accounting policy in their customer distribution requirement that he outlines.  

He also goes as far as to say that over 90% of ClickBank's affiliates are considered an Inactive account (dormant - no sales in at least 3 months)

It is a bit scary.  Of course he is promoting his solution to getting a firm and secure base by getting into a sale with his product with special deals and outcomes.

Are any of you experiencing negative results with clickbank?  I mean those of you really offering good content and an aggressive stratety with a good product?

Joyce Kuras

Hi Joyce,

I am becoming less impressed with Clickbank. I fear its day may have come and gone as Internet users have become increasingly more sophisticated and many vendors offering affiliate programs via Clickbank haven't a clue.

Clickbank makes money by playing the numbers. But for affiliates this is not good enough. One can sink a lot of time and money into promoting a vendor's products only to find it stolen away. And, many otherwise good products, suffer from Clickbank's image of being a warehouse of overpriced, useless products.

I must admit that I do make some money through Clickbank. But it's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. The ideal situation is to develop your own product and promote outside of Clickbank. Affiliate's suffer by the fact that anyone can become an affiliate with a few click of a button! And many vendors splash 'AFFILATE PROGRAM' across their sales page! This is counter productive to your effort as an affiliate. And what it really serves to do is bring in more competition.. for you, the affiliate. Therefore, to survive as an affiliate you must find an 'edge' over this potential competition and this is not easy. In many cases, it is impossible.

With that said I would be careful of following any one 'guru' advice. The desire for personal gain is just too strong in all of us and what a guru may teach you, even those with good intentions, serves their own bottom line. Otherwise, why teach anyone their "special techniques"? It is counter to good business practice.

The solution to all of the above, as I see it, is to limit the number of affiliates that can join any particular program. And by limit, I don't mean to a few thousand!! I mean a REAL limit of a dozen (at most). The vendor would retain the right of imposing performance standards to protect his/her interests. But with such a small number the very best affiliates could actually benefit from the success of a product which is not the case with any Clickbank product today.

This is why in the real world of commerce there are 'franchises' and not mass give away of equal rights to profit.


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PS: There is no $100 limit for the Clickbank affiliate. Any such limit is for the price of a product. My personal threshold as an affiliate for Clickbank is set at $10. Which means that I am sent a check (deposited actually) whenever my account has cleared this amount. Yet another problem with Clickbank.. the 60 refund policy. Just wanted to be sure you understood this point.

Hi thanks for this advice.  I am not the one behind this - I am working for someone else.  I don't have the problem you mention of wanting personal gain.  I trust God for my survival in my everyday life and live by the Scriptures.  Money has never and will never be my first consideration.

The person who has me doing this is very successful with a thriving business.  He is not just looking at Clickbank but we are starting with them now for a learning process and will be signing up with all the major affiliate programs and individual ones as well.  Jon obviously has done very well with clickbank and his affiliate programs and lives totally on the Internet, so there must be positives somewhere.

I caught his motive after reading quite a bit of his material.  He wants to frighten people into buying his product that will guarantee success with Clickbank, so I discarded him, but his credentials were impressive since he served on the higher inner circle in the Clickbank European board meetings and has forums like Jon just for Clickbank.

With the $10 threshold, they take $2.50 for every sale out of that?

I am a newbie at this.  

Thanks again.

You should note that not all of Jon's products are promoted through Clickbank. I'm not sure if he's using them at all these days, he may be, I don't know. As with most things involving IM, Jon is outside the box. I'm not saying this to butter him up.. it is just a fact. He has a successful business model in place that if others really want to know how to do all of this they should follow his lead! But most don't. Why? I don't know.

And, I should also point out one other thing.. Jon is a creator of products. The creator of a product holds the upper hand on Clickbank. Why? you ask.. because he's going to make money no matter who sells his products. There's a lesson in there which I'll let you dig up for yourself.

While "I trust God for my survival in my everyday life and live by the Scriptures. Money has never and will never be my first consideration." may be admirable to some, it's not definitive enough for sound business practices. I believe the question had to do with the effective of Clickbank as a partner in conducting business.. ie, obtaining sales? I may be wrong, perhaps I misunderstood your inquiry and did not pick up on the religious nature of your question. That I can deal with in another forum.

"A $2.50 pay period processing charge is deducted from each payment we issue."
 clickbank.com/accounting.html#A6

One $10 sale would impose a hefty fee, but scattered among many.. with higher commissions.. within a pay period (which in actual practice may easily occure well beyond the threshold) it's just the cost of doing business. Still, sales are easily lost due to the reasoning in my previous statement.

Many people come to IM hoping for a fast, easy way to make money. It isn't. They look at a guy like Jon and say to themselves, 'well he's making a killing', without considering the time, effort and financial investments he's made over many years. IM, like Mail Order, is a conduite for doing business.. it is NOT the "business" in and of itself. Good, sound business practices will always apply.

Personally, I think you done the right thing by ditching this guy's advice. If he were so successful with Clickbank himself he would not be teaching others how to do likewise. I learned this basic business principle years ago in the stock market... for many there is more money in teaching about how to invest, then there is in actually investing. Why? Because successful investing takes hard, grunt work. Most people only want the cream and this is why most people fail in stock investing.

Today we are seeing a rash of 'gurus' anxious to teach us how to make a killing using Clickbank. This reminds me, again, of investing in stocks. Whenever you see a major CEO (Bill Gates for example) splashed all over the newstands and media outlets, IT'S TIME TO SELL. Get out! These gurus are following this path.

But again, please refer to my comments concerning Jon.. he wasn't successful overnight. To me that's encouraging, it says those who are willing to devote themselves to this 'Internet thing' can, with lots of work and solid risk management, come out on top.

Here's a key thought: Look for an edge.

Don't worry about the high number of dormant affiliate accounts. Only worry about YOUR account being ACTIVE.
The truth is that pretty much every affiliate program works on Pareto - 80% revenue from 20% of the clients/accounts.

Most people who try to do affiliate marketing never earn a single penny, the ones who make a living from it are very few in number. It is a business and very competitive.

I'd not worry about being a vendor of CB products, you need to take care about making sure your links are not subject to click hijacking, but in truth this is only an issue in a few niches because the only way a buyer can benefit from taking your affiliate commission is f they are, themselves a qualified affiliate and there are not too many of those.

If you want to protect against click hijacking then you can use one of many cloaking tools out there or just use the one provided by ClickBank that nobody seems to know about. Here it is: https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_encoding.htm

Make sure that the products you promote are good quality and of good value. The marketplace could be full of rubbish but your buyers will not know that, they are interested ONLY in what you show them - just make it good!

Some vendors have bad sales pages and good products, there are techniques that enable you to make your own sales page and then send traffic directly to the order page - for some products this can be a very useful thing to do.

Bottom line: treat this as a business, learn the business and invest in your own business with time, money and self education and you will be one of the 10% who run active CB accounts.