Understanding The Highs and Lows of Clickbank

There has been a lot said and written about Clickbank and most of it is glowing about what a great organization it is and a great marketplace. But there is no company or even internet service that is perfect. So as you study getting involved with the Clickbank "movement", it is good to know the great things that this, the largest internet marketplace ahs to offer. But it is also to know the weaknesses of Clickbank as well. That way you don’t have any surprises and nothing comes up to surprise you once you are an active member of the community.

Clickbank definitely puts their best foot forward in taking good care of their merchants and their affiliates. And that is as it should be because these two large communities are the very reason why the service is such a smashing success. So without question the ease at which you can sign onto Clickbank, set up an account as a merchant or as an affiliate and be right into the middle of the marketplace makes this one of Clickbank's greatest advantages.

The only negative about not only the ease of getting started on Clickbank but of the hundreds or thousands of glowing reviews and articles about the service is that it is easy for a "newbie" to come to Clickbank thinking that with 20 minutes of signup, they will be making big money in the Clickbank marketplace. Of course, seasoned Clickbank veterans know that the laws of economics have not been suspended in the world of Clickbank and the law that says "you only get back what you put into something" still is in full force even here on the internet. So there is work to be done to become really prosperous on Clickbank. But because the potential return on the investment is so huge, that effort is likely to pay you back handsomely.

The customer service side of the ClickBank corporate culture is both their strongest hand to play and their Achilles Heal in many respects. Clickbank has done a superior job of setting up policies and an approach to customer service that is clear to the customer and easy to take advantage of. The language of their help pages is well done and Clickbank maintains a live help desk so there is never a time when a customer cannot get help to move to the next phase. So this is one business area that Clickbank truly shines at.

The Achilles Heal which also comes form their zeal to offer world class customer service is the Clickbank refund policy which while certainly a great policy for the customer, it is one that causes endless problems for Clickbank, its merchants and affiliates. In context all products sold in Clickbank are digital products. That means a digital copy is delivered after the sale. But this also means that the very idea of a "return" is absurd. And yet Clickbank has an iron clad, no questions asked refund policy.

This policy opens the door for massive problems because there really is no way to check customers who are buying digital products and then filing for a refund. That means that this refund policy is basically open season for shoplifting or theft on Clickbank. Any customer that wishes to can purchase a product, pay for it and download it or acquire the product and any product keys or codes needed to use it. Then it is just as easy to get a refund as there is that "no questions asked" policy. So that customer can virtually continue to get products, pay for them and then cash in on the refund. Since there really is no such thing as a "return", they get to keep the product free of charge.

It’s a virtual authorized and legal method of getting free products from Clickbank. It's a problem that Clickbank is addressing as best they can. One possible solution that will only work on some products is a follow up usage code. You can issue a temporary code to enable the product to work for the timeframe of the refund period. Then you can implement internal timings into the software so the customer must receive a permanent code after the trial or refund period passes. In that way if customers "steal" your digital product, it's only for a few weeks. But obviously this solution won't work for every product.

ClickBank Will Be Heaven For Small Business

Starting a small business has to be one of the most courageous things a person can do. There are a lot of unknowns that can strike fear into the heart of any small business owner. Issues of labor, supply and demand and the market always are a concern. And even if you do all of your market studies and prepare intensively, launching that business is sometimes an act of faith.

The modern era has opened up a new frontier for small business owners and that is the internet. But even there, risks exist and if anything the unknowns are even more exotic. Because the online marketplace is vastly distributed, estimating the market need as well as the potential demand for a product can seem like a cryptic exercise. In the early days of the internet, the costs of handling money and the resources to help small business succeed were few and far between and hard to use at best. That is why by comparison the modern internet marketing world is a relative heaven for small business due in no small part to online marketplaces and resources such as Clickbank.

One of the ways Clickbank and other online merchant accounts smooth the road out a small business to get started is by making it possible to accept payments online even when you are just getting started out. Most online purchases are done with credit card. But, especially at first, to do business directly with credit card companies to accept payments online was a nightmare. They required a lot of capital and proof of the health of the business both of which are in short supply when you are just starting out.

Clickbank puts all of that at your disposal for an amazingly low investment. You can join Clickbank for a simple one time fee of $50 and a small commission on each sale. For that they operate virtually as your online banker accepting payments, managing the credit card transactions and the relationship with the credit card companies and faithfully handling the money to be passed to you on a routine basis. If you are selling products through Clickbank, you might have hundreds or thousands of transactions per day from just as many customers. But all of that financial management and customer interaction is handled by Clickbank so you just offer your product and then sit back and collect the returns on your sales.

The marketplace dynamic on the internet is as different from the traditional business model as night and day. Small business people must already be light on their feet and able to adapt to change and new things quickly in any market. This requirement of an online entrepreneur is even more crucial. The business model for running a business with Clickbank at the heart of what you are doing does require a massive paradigm shift in how you do business. But most of the ways you change your approach to small business mean giving up some of the aspects of small business that you probably won't mind giving up.

For one thing, while you can always be actively involved in sales, it is entirely possible to run a healthy and very active and prosperous small business selling digital products to a huge customer base and completely give up the sales side of the business model entirely. That is because on Clickbank, as a merchant, your primary responsibility is to put product on the market. Once your product or products is "out there", there is an army of sales people called affiliates who are ready to pick up your product and promote it to their large existing customer base. By army we mean that a staggering 150,000 internet marketers are on Clickbank and every one of them can sell your product if they wish. There is no risk to you and Clickbank manages the relationships with this marketing army and the collection and distribution of their commissions.

To take advantage of this army, you will have to grant a slice of profit in the form of a commission to the affiliate as his reward for doing your sales for you. You can consider it a business expense and even record it to deduct it as such. But because that commission will draw this huge and highly specialized mob of internet marketing gurus to your product, that is a pretty good use of a commission.

Be a Wizard With Clickbank

If you are attracted to the huge money making possibilities of Clickbank, you are not alone. The affiliate marketing profit potential on Clickbank are huge and. But like any new market, you have to learn how to work the system to your advantage. The quicker become a wizard of Clickbank, the faster you will make some real money in the digital marketplace.

Clickbank is in every way a real marketplace. As such it is a place where legitimate vendors offer real products that add value to customer's lives and purchases are made. Too many people see the internet as one big scam artist paradise. But you are not a scam artist and you just want to make a good return on your product and make a good living like anyone else. That is what Clickbank is all about.

From a merchant standpoint, you will have achieved "wizard" status when you are selling a wide variety of product consistently. So to get started, shoot for putting five products into the marketplace. Examine the product categories to find niches that fit your product catalog. Don’t be drawn to the categories that promote money making schemes as they are just that - schemes which you don’t want to be associated with by your long term customers on Clickbank.

After you have your start up products to put onto Clickbank, waste no time in finding good keywords that will draw traffic to those items to get sales moving. Keyword selection is a science in its own right but you can use internet tools to find good keywords that have a track record of pulling traffic historically. Don’t be afraid to buy or use such keyword optimizers as any tool that can help you legally make money in your business is worth using.

If you can come up with twenty or thirty solid keywords that you can build your Clickbank marketing plan around, that’s a solid starting place. With the keywords captured, now create articles around those keywords. Now we are not all writers but there are good ghostwriters on services like Rent-a-Coder that can kick out these articles for you at a reasonable rate. The writer may know keyword optimization rules but they are not that hard to get used to. Basically if the keyword is in the article title and then 3-4 times per 500 word article, that’s pretty good optimization.

There are a lot of good article sites you can use to put your articles into internet circulation and that will drive traffic to your products well if your keywords do their job for you. When you first are setting up for Clickbank, establish accounts on these article sites because you will use them a lot. Don’t just rest with a few articles but try to get an initial set of four or five per product out there and then follow up over the next week or two, try to kick out two or three a day around each product using those keywords and get them into circulation.

There are always new ways for you to get awareness of your product raised through various internet methods of promotion and you should explore them all. You can place ads on popular internet services to build traffic to your Clickbank items. RSS feeds and ads on related internet sites are also well proven methods of creating more sales for you.

You can see that the "set up" for these various services has to be a part of your entrance into the Clickbank system. But once you are rolling, you will use them over and over and get plenty of good from your membership fees. And you will have a system you can repeat with new products as well and build your Clickbank catalog and build profits along the way as well.

Tips & Tricks to Selling Everyday on Clickbank

There is a prevailing mythology about the Clickbank marketplace that it is virtually an effort free profit machine. Its easy to get the wrong idea because it is a marketplace where if you get your product out there into the Clickbank marketplace, there are over 150,000 eager affiliates ready to pick up your product and begin to sell it. Those affiliates don’t need to tell you that they are going to sell your product or get your permission. Just by virtue of being in the Clickbank community gives them liberty to sell your product. So in theory you could put a product out there and see its sales soar with no more effort than that.

But even if you get some marginal or good sales from your products using that approach, you don’t want to settle for marginal or good. You want to get the maximum sales potential you can from your listings on Clickbank. And that means you don’t just sell one day and put your product on auto pilot. You sell every day on Clickbank and you reap the rewards in terms of higher sales, higher profits and a better rating because you are being aggressive about your sales. And when your products rise in the sales numbers, they get noticed by more successful affiliates in Clickbank and you get to a larger audience. It's all about establishing momentum and then keeping it.

One way to raise your profits on your product has more to do with production than it does promotion. If you own the product you put out there so you are not selling someone else's product, 100% of what you get from Clickbank after the affiliate cut and Clickbank's fees are yours. You can either have the product made for you and buy the rights to it completely or make it yourself.

A good example of this approach is in the marketing of an ebook. If you write it entirely yourself, you have complete ownership over it and all of the profits are yours. But even if you have a killer idea for an ebook that will sell like hotcakes, not all of us are writers. But there are starving artists out there on the internet job services who for a few hundred dollars will put together an ebook that will read well and deliver a great concept to your customers. And by having the book ghostwritten, you purchase complete ownership of the rights to the book and you can market it and reap all of the rewards all for yourself.

Within Clickbank, there are a wealth of tools that you can use to keep tabs not only on how well your products are moving but on the relationship of advertising to product movement and how your commissions look to be sure they are healthy and not undergoing any form of commission theft that is sometimes possible in Clickbank. So part of selling every day isn't so much just paying attention to sales but to the variables of sales such as the success of specific affiliates and the level your product is reaching as a desirable product to promote.

There is something to be said for simple positioning and learning to help your product move up so more affiliates pick it up. So after you get your product into the system, make it a major ambition to get familiar with all of the Clickbank tracking and reporting systems. These reports can let you stay on top of your product's performance on a daily basis and if you see change happening, you can adjust accordingly.

That is the kind of dynamic product management that will result in stronger sales. If you see your product take a turn in the statistics that is not healthy, you have the chance to intervene and make adjustments or even pull the product if it’s a serious enough situation. On the other hand, if you see a sudden surge in popularity and sales and a greater participation in the product, you can do your part to make sure the affiliates are enabled to jump on the band wagon and make your product successful. And while the subtle changes to how you position your product and manage advertising is not exactly selling every day, it is making sales work better for you every day and the outcome of greater profits is the same.