Sen Ze’s Business In Your Pajamas! Blog

Phew! The baby’s arrival was lots of fun, and it’s true:

It’s SOO much easier this time around, now that we know just what to expect and do with him.

I remember being exhausted every single day when we were taking care of our first baby but that hardship’s a distant memory now…

Ok – I was discussing Affiliate Programs for Merchants and Affiliate Program software in my previous posts…

Here’s a recap, to bring you up to speed for the next discussion:

1. Affiliate Program For Merchants <--- Click for full story
In this post I talked about the Merchant’s limited ability to reach out to his target market on his own or even with a team of marketers on his payroll, since they all have only 24 hours in a day. He would be far better off if he has a team of “Affiliates” all over the world working hard marketing his products with him, and pay only for performance. This way, he can have thousands of Affiliates helping him out and he needn’t worry about paying them until his products are sold from their marketing efforts.

Thus an Affiliate Program should be considered by every Merchant with products that have good margins for commissions to be paid out from. This is particularly so in the case of digital products where his profit is over 90% of the selling price, but it can also apply to physical products as long as the profit margin is enough to make commission payouts attractive to the Affiliate.

2. Affiliate Program Software Essentials <--- Click for full story
In this post I talked a bit about the imporance of an Affiliate Program software in tracking the sales of the Merchant’s Affiliate. Some of the most essential features of an Affiliate Program software were discussed.

An Affiliate Program that is available on the Internet for anybody to join needs to have a robust and good Affiliate Program software running it. This post also highlights certain important features of such a piece of software, which can also act as an automatic Affiliate recruiting tool.

3. Software For Your Internet Business <--- Click for full story
This post discusses the 2 different types of software available for the Merchant to use. He can install the software on his own server and run it from there (and pay a one-off fee), or he can be a client of a 3rd party Affiliate Program software provider and run his Affiliate Program off the 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software on the latter’s own server instead (and pay a monthly fee).

The better option for the Merchant is for him to run his Affiliate Program off a 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software since he needn’t worry about upgrading, maintaining or fixing the software (when bugs occur) and just focus on his business. The minimal monthly fee shouldn’t be considered as an expense but more of an investment for the marketing of his product.

4. Clickbank <--- Click for full story
This post then introduces Clickbank, a retailer who will buy your digital product from you and resell it to their Customers using their own credit card merchant account. This arrangement is great if you have difficulty getting your own credit card merchant account from your bank and have it linked to an online payment gateway so that your Customers can key in their credit card details at their computers anywhere in the world.

The other reason is that Clickbank has an Affiliate Program software installed on its own server. Thus if Clickbank accepts you as its Supplier (with some exceptions), you’re in fact riding on Clickbank’s Affiliate Program software – which is what I recommend that you do.

5. Clickbank Issues <--- Click for full story
However, Clickbank comes with its own issues, chief among them is the fact that its Affiliates really aren’t your Affiliates, but Clickbank’s. Thus if you were to promote your product linked up with Clickbank to your list, they’ll become Clickbank’s Affiliates instead of yours.

On top of that, its Affiliates are also not linking to your web site to promote your product, but to Clickbank’s using Clickbank’s Affiliate Link format. This does not help your web site gain better positioning in the Search Engines from the Affiliates’ linking activities, which is a major benefit of having an Affiliate Program.

6. The MOACA <--- Click for full story
This post discusses the “Mother Of All Clickbank Alternatives” (MOACA) where you can get the benefit of your Affiliates linking directly to your domain for Search Engine ranking advantage and have the same Affiliate Program software running off a 3rd party’s server for the benefits of such an arrangement.

You become your own Merchant, and you will pay your own Affiliates. However, you can dispense with payment by paper checks completely using an inexpensive electronic transfer facility that is available online in most countries in the world. You will only spend a few minutes on a particular day each month doing commissions payout – thus just about matching the advantages offered by Clickbank in paying its Affiliates for promoting your product (where you are not a part of this payment process at all since they’re not your Affiliates).

You’re Up To Speed!
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The above brings us up to date with the discussion on Affiliate Programs, their issues and their solutions. Make sure you click on those links to have a deeper understanding of the discussion – because they’re important to your profits.

In my next post, you’ll discover the best Affiliate Program software ever created that will enable you to have the “MOACA Experience“.

Its benefits are so mind-blogging, it’s unreal. But it is real – as you’ll soon see.

Stay tuned!

Sen Ze

The “MOACA” that I mentioned in my last post isn’t any single entity that provides everything under one roof, but a combination of entities and services that will help you solve all the issues you have with using Clickbank.

In fact, you’ll be so far ahead of Clickbank that you wouldn’t miss it!

Here are the different components for MOACA:

1. Use PayPal to accept online payments from your customers
With PayPal, you’re acting as the Merchant, selling directly to your customers, since PayPal isn’t a Retailer and will not be selling your product for you.

PayPal charges only 2.4% – 3.4% plus $0.30 per transaction (depending on your volume).

For your customers to use PayPal to pay you, they must fund PayPal with their bank account or credit card (depending on which country they’re in), or receive payment from another PayPal user and then use that money to pay you. PayPal also accepts credit card payments from those without a PayPal account, so you’ve pretty much covered everybody.

However, PayPal does not come with an Affiliate Program software for you to use, so this brings us to the following….

2. Set up your own Affiliate Program to run off a 3rd party Affiliate Program software
The Affiliate Program software is the core component of MOACA. A great piece of Affiliate Program software will enable you to create opportunities for both you and your Affiliates where none existed before.

Now you don’t want to install the software on your own server because of the issues I raised in this post, but use one hosted on the 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software vendor’s server. This 3rd party will be maintaining this software for you to ensure you have the latest version running, and fix any bugs it may have when they surface – thus saving you the headache of having to do this part on your own.

Setting up with your existing web pages will only take a day or two, and then it’s up to you to upload all your marketing materials to it for your Affiliates to access them for their marketing efforts.

3. Ensure that 3rd party Affiliate Program software allows you to use your domain in your Affiliates’ Affiliate Links
Even though the Affiliate Program software is running on a 3rd party’s server and hence a different domain, it may have a feature where you can use your domain name in your Affiliates’ Affiliate Links.

You will only use this software if it has this feature.

This feature will help you with your web pages’ ranking higher in the Search Engines since now all your Affiliates are linking directly to your domain, instead of to a 3rd party’s before being re-directed to yours (like Clickbank).

4. Ensure that this Affiliate Program software allows you to link to any sales page for any other products you may have
If you have more than 1 product to sell, your Affiliates must be able to link directly to all or any of their sales pages, instead of just to your 1 Home Page.

This helps them focus on the product being sold, and reduces distractions. It also gives your Affiliates great flexibility to link to any web page of yours, if they think that would be a better option.

5. Pay your Affiliates’ commissions yourself, using PayPal’s “Mass Pay” feature
One thing you’ll have to do on your own is to tabulate all your Affiliates’ commissions and send them over. The tabulation is done automatically by the 3rd party Affiliate Program software, so there’s nothing extra for you to do here.

You can then use PayPal’s “Mass Pay” feature to send your Affiliates’ commissions directly to them from your own PayPal account to your Affiliates’ PayPal accounts. All you need to do is to upload a spreadsheet with 3 columns to your PayPal account Mass Pay section stating the e-mail address of the recipient, the amount he’s receiving from you, and the currency you’re paying out in.

The 3rd party Affiliate Program software may be able to help you generate such a spreadsheet automatically – so again, there’s nothing much for you to do except log into your PayPal account, upload the spreadsheet and click on “Pay”.

With PayPal being available in most countries in the world, you’re able to pay your Affiliates easily without ever having to write out a check and posting them. On the rare occasion when your Affiliates prefer to be paid by check, you can simply write out those few and send them over.

By using PayPal to pay your Affiliates, you’ve lessened the impact Clickbank has in doing all the grunt work in paying out commissions to its Affiliates for selling your product. All you need to do is to set aside a few minutes one particular day of the month to do the Mass Payment in PayPal, and you’re done!

Note: You must have a checking account linked to your PayPal account before you can use the Mass Pay feature.

And that’s the “MOACA” in a nutshell…

Neat, yes?

In my next post, we’ll take a look at the best Affiliate Program software ever created for both the Merchant and Affiliate, with some unique and outstanding features for the Merchant to make even more sales with less time and effort, simply by keeping his Affiliates very happy…

Stay tuned…

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/internet-business/mother-of-all-clickbank-alternatives.htm

Technorati Tags: Clickbank, Affiliate Program, Affiliate Program software, PayPal

In my last post I talked about how easy it can be for you to use Clickbank’s setup to quickly get you going with the selling of your own digital product.

You don’t have to apply to your bank for a credit card merchant account and integrate it with an online payment gateway on your own, in order to accept credit card payment from your customers. You simply become Clickbank’s Supplier or “Publisher”.

You can also tap into Clickbank’s existing Affiliate Program and Affiliate Program software to have Affiliates market your product for you without you having to set up your own Affiliate Program software for this purpose.

However, the following are some issues you may want to think about if you want to tap into Clickbank’s setup:

1. Clickbank doesn’t allow its Affiliates to route their Prospects directly to your different products’ sales pages
While Clickbank allows you to supply up to 50 different digital products to it per Clickbank account, it doesn’t provide its Affiliates with more than one URL to use for Clickbank to track the sales of your different products.

Assuming your registered Clickbank nickname is “jeremy” (you’re Clickbank’s Supplier), and one of Clickbank’s registered Affiliates’ nickname is “susan”, then all “susan” needs to do to link to your product sales page (and still be tracked for her referral should a sales occur for the purpose of calculating her commission) is to use the following URL:

http://susan.jeremy.hop.clickbank.net

This URL will then re-direct to your web page selling your product, which is usually “http://www.YourDomain.com” as you would have specified that URL as your “Home Page” in the Clickbank Control Panel.

Because Clickbank doesn’t allow you to specify more than one “Home Page” for each Supplier Clickbank account, if you have 2 different products to sell, this one Home Page must necessarily contain 2 different links to your 2 different products’ respective sales letters at your domain.

When this is the case, Clickbank’s Affiliates can’t really link from their advertisement for Product 1 directly to its sales page, but to your Home Page which contains 2 different links to 2 different products.

This can result in some confusion for the Affiliates’ Prospects who clicked through the ad for Product 1 only to see a choice of 2 different products to look at – the link for Product 1 and another link for Product 2.

If the Prospects aren’t confused, they now have a choice of 2 different products to buy – and may well end up not being able to decide which one to buy.

It gets worse when you have more products to sell, as your Home Page will be filled with up to 50 different links to your many different products.

When your Prospects’ attention is diluted, or they’re confused, they will be less likely to buy from you – and Clickbank’s Affiliates will soon stop marketing your products and instead look at your competitors’ products instead.

One solution is to open another Clickbank account for the 2nd product, but you’ll have to pay for a new Clickbank account every time you do this.

2. Clickbank’s Affiliates don’t link directly to your web site
Clickbank’s Affiliates use the following URL to link to promote your products:

http://susan.jeremy.hop.clickbank.net

This URL then re-directs to your domain.

Note how the above URL isn’t linking to your domain, but to clickbank.net instead?

This is necessary since the Affiliates are really Clickbank’s Affiliates (not yours), and the Affiliate Program software resides at www.Clickbank.net.

When this happens, Clickbank’s Affiliates are not building up any links to your own domain, but to Clickbank.net instead. Search Engines like Google look at the number of links to your sales page to decide whether to rank it higher than your competitor’s web pages on keywords related to it – so your sales page will get no help from Clickbank’s Affiliates here!

3. You’re building up Clickbank’s Affiliate force for free
Clickbank will list your product in its marketplace for its other Affiliates to check out and make the decision to market, but you really do need to market your own product to your own list of Prospects to start off since nobody knows what your product name is or which category it is in when you’re launching – not to mention the hundreds of competitors you have who are already populating Clickbank’s Marketplace even if they do know.

Now your sales page for your product will usually contain a link to your Affiliate Program details since not everybody who sees your sales page will become customers, but some will become Affiliates since it costs nothing them to join your Affiliate Program for them to be able to earn commissions for their referral efforts.

However, what you’re really doing is building up Clickbank’s own Affiliate force, as they’ll have to sign up at Clickbank’s web site as an Affiliate (you’ll have to link to Clickbank’s Affiliate sign up form) and for Clickbank to be able to track their Clickbank Affiliate Links that re-direct to your domain for calculating any sales that result from their efforts.

4. Clickbank isn’t available to Merchants, Affiliates and Customers in some countries
This is due to various considerations, and one of them is the higher risk of credit card fraud in certain locations according to Clickbank’s own “findings”.

Thus if you’re a potential Clickbank Supplier, know that you’ll either be unable to be its Supplier because of where you are, or you’ll be selling a lot fewer of your products than with another retailer like Clickbank without its restrictions.

The MOACA
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While Clickbank can be a great help for you to get up and running in the quickest possible time, and is the retailer of choice for many Suppliers, the above factors may be important to you and make you decide not to go with Clickbank.

But is there a better alternative with practically the same benefits as Clickbank without the disadvantages listed above?

I’ve hunted high and low for a solution and I couldn’t find it.

Until now.

Stay tuned for it because you’re about to discover the Mother of All Clickbank Alternatives (MOACA) – with benefits that far surpass Clickbank’s!

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/clickbank/clickbank-issues.htm

Technorati Tags: Clickbank, Clickbank issues, Affiliate Program, Affiliate Program software, digital product