Clickbank | Make Money Mine

Before the world of the internet, you made money by offering services to customers. And part of what made you a success was a great set of tools. So to be a great car mechanic, you need outstanding wrenches and a good shop. A dentist has his drills and a stone mason his trowel. So we should not be too surprised that to be a success in the world of internet marketing, good tools will make or break you here too.

Clickbank is clearly one of the real hot online resources to make big profits from affiliate sales but you still have to know your tools and know your stuff to make it work. Anyone who takes advantage of Clickbank wants to become one of the great affiliates using the system. So like that smart mechanism, dentist or stone mason, using the tools that Clickbank gives you to become a success will make or break you in this virtual world of sales and marketing.

The ClickBank calculator is a powerful tool because knowing how to use it makes enables you to compute your commission on each product without having to have a degree in math. You can access the calculator at http://www.clickbankguide.com/calculator.htm/ Along with the calculator itself, this is where Clickbank lays out a table of most used prices so you can understand how the tool functions. With these starter tools, you can create your own price tables that will be your roadmap to success.

At “template” is a common format that you can use over and over again in any setting to save you from constantly coming up with a layout for a letter, a survey or some other form of communications. Often webmasters use one template for all the web pages on a site they are creating. It’s a great tool for standardizing what works and sticking with it. The tool set that ClickBank provides is a great source of such templates for you to supply to your affiliates or for you to use for your own internet marketing and merchandising.

Mass mailing through email is the backbone of any successful internet marketing campaign. While in this day and age, avoiding becoming a spammer is a science in itself, that doesn’t eliminate the need for a good mass mailing tool to add to your arsenal of tools you will use to reduce the work of running your online business. But because ClickBank knows that a tool to send out large amounts of emails to customers or prospective customers, they are there to give you a group email tool.

One problem that can become a nightmare to keep straight is what affiliates are to be considered future partners and which ones are future competition or “the enemy”. So a tool to organize your affiliate contact list can be gold when you get a large affiliate list which will happen when you become successful. In addition to keeping tabs who are already onboard with you as an affiliate ClickBank’s tools helps you track potential partners so you can contact them before they become “the enemy”. Better to join up with successful internet marketers and everyone work together to get rich than work against each other and lose.

Keyword optimization may be one of the hottest internet marketing tricks of the trade to really drive traffic to your website. Keywords are what Google and search engines use to rank web sites so if you have your keywords “optimized” that means your web site will perform well on Google or Yahoo or one of the other big search engines. ClickBank can help with finding the right keywords to optimize so as you build up your online content and article base, you are naturally driving traffic online to generate revenue from your site marketing tools. Using this tool well is just smart merchandising online.

This is just a sampling of the types of tools that ClickBank provides to make you a success. When you are a success, they are a success so take the time to learn to use these tools well and to discover the vast array of other tools out there from ClickBank so you can use convert this knowledge into online gold for your internet business.

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.

Getting a new product out on Clickbank is always a moment of supreme optimism. What we envision is getting a product out there on the marketplace that truly takes it by storm and is one of those big sellers people write books about. And there is not reason to believe that any one product on Clickbank might just get there.

It’s good to go into this kind of situation with your eyes wide open though and be aware that one thing can put a monkey wrench into the best marketing plan for a product. And that is the Clickbank refund policy. Now a good refund policy has to be at the very heart of a marketplace like Clickbank so people can buy with confidence knowing they can get a refund if the time comes. And since Clickbank is a full fledged merchant account in its own right, they can handle refunds directly.

Unfortunately a refund policy that is iron clad is also an open door for people trying to scam the system. Even for the best of products with a huge army of happy and satisfied customers, you will be asked for a refund from time to time. That is to be expected. But when what is happening is someone is trying to get your product for free milking the refund policy from Clickbank, that’s just wrong.

The Clickbank extensive tracking system tells us that five percent of sales in their marketplace come back as refund requests. When you give a buyer a refund, you might hear any sort of complaint. Some of them are legitimate and others are bizarre. And others just won’t offer an explanation for why they want the refund. For many of these refund requests, the odds are you are dealing with an unethical buyer.

The problem is that all of ClickBank’s products are digital products. That means your e-book, your software product or your music can be downloaded and paid for and then the buyer can ask for a refund, no questions asked. And because the product is digital, it’s pretty silly to ask for the product back as they have a copy on their computer and perhaps copied to other computers. You can paint it like you want, its just plain theft no mater how you cut it.

This is a tough problem to solve. Even if the entire Clickbank community banned together to fight the problem, about the only possible solution is pretty weak. A reference system could be created that recorded users who were habitual customers of the refund policy. Then if that reference system actually worked, you could conceivably refuse service to a refund policy abuser who had been “busted”. But this is a system fraught with holes at best. A refund abuser is intestinally stealing product so they are going to be one step ahead of your tracking list. It simply is not that hard to come back into Clickbank as a customer with a new ID and new credit and your tracking system is out the window.

It would be nice to come to the end of our discussion with an announcement that the problem has been solved. But that is not the case yet. Clickbank is aware of the problem and is putting time and effort against it. But for now we will have to wait until Clickbank comes up with a solution. But its still worth supporting a strong refund policy because that is what makes Clickbank a solid marketplace. And if you do have to entire a 5% refund but keep 95% of the sales Clickbank delivers to you, that still is not too shabby.

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.

Venturing into the world of the Clickbank marketplace requires that we start from a fresh slate and not go in with any presumptions. The two presumptions that seem to slow people up the most is that Clickbank is for internet guru types who know every trick of the trade of internet technology and marketing to be successful.

But Clickbank isn’t a marketplace that requires that you have tremendous technical knowledge to use. The designers of Clickbank have made most of the functions you need to operate either as a merchant or as an affiliate in the system fairly easy to use. That is one of the keys to why Clickbank is so successful. So to smooth your entrance into using Clickbank, it pays to look at the inner workings of the gears of Clickbank to get a feel for what you should expect when you sign up and want to get going fast making money there.

Like a lot of successful online markets, Clickbank doesn’t make anything and it doesn’t sell anything. The value Clickbank adds to the world of internet commerce is that it provides a “place” for vendors of digital products can place their goods for sale and for people skilled in marketing to take those products and sell them to a large internet community. Clickbank has cashed in on two basic principles which are (1) people who make things don’t like to do marketing and (2) people who love to do marketing don’t like to make things. By getting these two groups together, merchants, affiliates and Clickbank all take away a nice profit because each makes the other successful.

Clickbank then at its core is a clearing house that works as a meeting gourd for merchants, affiliates and customers who can order the product, pay for it and download it or receive it by some other digital delivery system. It is very important to understand that Clickbank ONLY DEALS IN DIGITAL PRODUCTS. So you cannot sell clock radios, salt shakers or children’s clothing through Clickbank. If you were looking at Clickbank for any other than a digital product, look elsewhere for market such as eBay. The kinds of products Clickbank will allow to be sold include ebooks, computer courses, digital music and software programs and games.

Clickbank also offers real value to both merchants and affiliates because they handle all of the financial details and take a lot of the administrative work off of its members. Clickbank operates a fully functional merchant account so there is no need to use PayPal, 2co or any other funds management system. The handling of money is secure so when a sale is made, the money goes to Clickbank who then pays the affiliate his or her commission, keeps what is deserves by way of commission for the sale and delivers the balance to the merchant efficiently and without fail.

The “gears” of selling on Clickbank are simple and straightforward. To get set up, you step through the registration procedure as you would with any membership service online. For a merchant, there is a one time set up fee of $50 which should be easy to make back because Clickbank can get your product into the hands of over 150,000 affiliates which represent a customer base that numbers in the millions.

Once you have you account, you begin listing your digital products in the marketplace. You don’t need many accounts for more than one product as Clickbank can be used to sell up to 50 products under one account identity. Once you have completed setting up the product on the service, you then take a link that is given to you which can be used to direct customers to your Clickbank product listing and you put it on your web site. When affiliates pass customers to Clickbank to sell them the product, Clickbank will take them to your web site to use that link to complete the ordering process. It is a truly collaborate process and yet entirely seamless because Clickbank has taken care of the details.

You have a little more information to give to Clickbank such as the commission you will give to affiliates who sell your products and the URL for the “Thank You” web page that you will use to assist the customer in downloading what they bought. And with those simple steps, you are a Clickbank merchant. It’s as easy as that.