Sen Ze’s Business In Your Pajamas! Blog

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

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