STOP promoting ClickBank until you read this!

You are completely right. But this is not what the OP mentioned. He wants to get the commission even if he clears the cookie or changes the browser which is obviously not possible.

 

Actually, I'm over that guy.

I was trying to answer Al's question about the cookies!

 

the sneaky vendor would write a 'special' mail with his affiliate link, which will overwrite your affiliate link, which will suck, which will make him rich, which overall sucks for the affiliate (again).

WHICH!!!!!!!!!!shift+1111omfg.

 

It makes no difference if browsers carry cookies for 3 days, 30 days or 300 days.

The most recent cookie is the one that earns the affiliate commission.

If you click on an affiliate-link, as a potential customer, and go to the sales page and don't buy (i.e. like most people), but opt in (i.e. like some people) and the vendor sends you email one day later, or 59 days later, and the email contains a different affiliate-link to that same sales-page (as many do, usually cloaked of course), like his own affiliate-link, or his wife's affiliate-link, or his dog's affiliate-link, then when that's clicked on, from that moment onwards the original affiliate whose work, time, effort, energy, money, experience and skills actually produced the customer, can't earn a penny on that customer's purchase.

It's as simple as that.

It's been like that since the day Clickbank started and it's still like that now.

It's even openly explained on Clickbank's web site.

That's why vendors with an opt-in on their sales page have some considerable difficulty getting professional, experienced affiliates. Because any experienced affiliate knows that many vendors send out autoresponder email with a subsequent affiliate-link which overwrites the original one. I've seen many of them myself. It's literally as easy as that for such vendors to steal commissions. All they have to do is send a fresh cloaked link in their emails to their lists.

And this is why these subscription services exist to inform affiliates which products have these "leaky" sales pages and which ones are worth looking at.

This is history, not news.

 

No Alexa, this is "mind blowing" news.

 

Well, I beg its pardon, then, call me cynical and jaded but mine must have been blown a while ago

 

oh so they are cheating us....

 

The stinky and leaky vendor I mentioned earlier said

"We have a right to promote anything we want to our customers (regarding promoting other products with their own affiliate link) and leads. Because it's not the affiliates that own or created this product....It's ours....YOU are NOT the OWNER and if you don't like anything we do...Again promote another 2012 product"

So affiliates stop promoting this vendor, this vendor don't want any affiliates. And just because he is the owner of the product, he wants all the sales.

utter BS

 

I also focus many vender's websites have a floating opt-in windows that can drive your sales out of clickbank. Affiliate need to test throughly with each vender's website.

 

oh did they really told like that, they are very harsh i thimk. anyway stop promoting it...

 

Strictly speaking he's correct. Maybe he doesn't deserve affiliates, but he is correct, and so's his answer: "promote another product instead".

Vendors do own the leads once they've opted in, and Clickbank (perfectly reasonably, to be fair - they have no control over it, nor any choice about it) can't possibly be expected to prevent them from doing all these things. I don't hesitate to criticise Clickbank for a number of other things, but here I don't blame them at all.

For myself, as an affiliate, I'm not willing to lose my potential profits from leads produced by my work, time, effort, energy, skills, etc etc to these vendors, so (like many professional affiliates) I simply choose not to promote products with a vendor's opt-in. Fortunately, there are over 10,000 products to choose from. All you have to do is set up your own opt-in and build your own list so that you own the leads instead (and doing so has a dramatic effect on one's income). Problem solved. End of story.

 

That is the most foolish vendor response I've ever witnessed. His product had better be able to piss rainbows of fruit flavors, because he's not going to have affiliates hang around to promote it for long. If an affiliate brings a customer to my site, I try as hard as possible to get my affiliate a sale. I use the affiliate's 60 day cookie to it's fullest extent and try to hook his customer the entire time.

 

Huh, now I feel really stupid. I see those opt in forms all the time, but never realized that this happens.

 

I didn't either, for months and months and months.

And none of those "guidebooks" tells you this. (Well, one hints at it, but apart from that it's actually not at all a good book, overall, in my opinion, and I only found it later anyway).

And then one day I worked it out and made just two changes in my CB affiliate marketing: I dropped any and every product with a vendor's opt-in, and any and every product with a high gravity. I changed nothing else about what I was doing (luckily, it seems other things I was doing at the time were probably mostly right!). My affiliate-sales income went from earning virtually nothing to bringing in a respectable four-figure monthly income within 2 months, and it's continued to grow from there.

And yes - it does make you feel a bit stupid, I remember this well, too!

 

Hi

Can I just ask you Alexa, for the Clickbank products you promote, do you use direct-linking or landing pages/website for these offers?

I am pretty new to this (about 6 months) and read almost everywhere that this is a numbers game. I have only worked on about 7/8 promotions and have only had really 1 offer which is converting well (over 50%), however, comission is very low.

For my Clickbank strategy, I am doing direct-linking, and if it starts to convert, then I build a website for that offer. Would you say this is a good strategy? Or, build pre-sell pages for every offer (and then scale once a offer converts well)?

Many thanks for your time and any feedback.

 

Landing pages, always.

I'm not quite with you ... sorry: 50% of what is converting to what? (I've managed to miss your point here, sorry ).

(You're clearly not an affiliate for a CB product with a 50% conversion-rate! Was this bit not about Clickbank?).

I would say that it's a fallacy, sorry. It might be the ones that don't ever start to convert that most need a landing page, and the ones that product the odd sale by direct-linking that won't produce much more with a web site. I'm not suggesting this as some kind of pedantic argument: I believe it may actually be true, and there are actually some perfectly logical and reasonable possibilities why it might be true. The point is that you can't know this (and neither can I!).

I think this sounds a far better proposition.

Even here, I suggest you may get the odd surprise and find sometimes that the ones that convert badly (rather than "well") might still be the easiest ones to improve on, though! It depends on the niche, the product, the type of leads you're attracting, the merchant's sales page and lots of other things, and the interplay between all these factors makes it really difficult to predict!

I have absolutely no experience of ever trying to do anything without a landing-page, though, so take my answer in that context! (I must admit, if I were trying "direct linking" I would probably go for products with a vendor's opt-in on the sales page and hope for the best, even knowing that I might never get paid for some of my sales that way, because at least that way someone's following them up! Not many people buy the first time they see the sales page, you know? Though that proportion is obviously higher if they've got there via a pre-selling site/blog. And not so many return to a sales-page unprompted, without receiving some follow-up email or something?).

 

Shocking warning!
We have to test all things before we jump in.

 

Hi again. Thanks very much for your feedback. Very much appreciated.

The 50% conversion rate is not a Clickbank product. In fact they are not on any network. What I mean't was, when visitors get to my landing page, about 65% click on the links to go to the offer, from there- 50% (of this 65% average) sign-up for the offer.

I was on CJ until recently (still are), but I found the commissions were small (I am using PPC) for many offers, and where there was high commissions- PPC was expensive and competiton strong. Also, and most importantly, there are many leak pages (ie. phone numbers on the merchant pages).

So, recently I decided to concentrate on Clickbank because of higher commissions potential (with less competion for some at the same time), and also more offers with 'no leak pages'. Most importantly, I think there are many offers/niches where it is very possible to send very highly targeted traffic.

However, my initial question was to enquire whether direct-linking or pre-sell was the better strategy, which you clearly cleared up. Thanks again.

One final question if you don't mind, apart from the quality of the merchant's sales pages, offer, call-to-action etc etc, is there any 'main elements' you look for when deciding to take an offer up?

For example, do you make sure that it is a 'buying niche' (ie. in demand product/service), or it doesn't really matter as long as you struture your campaign/keywords/landing pages ets correctly?

Any ideas would again be appreciated. Thanks.

Abi

 

Generally, I look for niches where I can get targeted, reasonably priced traffic (usually means limited competition).

There are many areas that have massive amounts of competition and usually its hard to make a decision profit margin on these (if you are using PPC) or significant traffic if you are using articles.

 

Thanks for the tip,

I just tested this with a cb vendor I was just going to promote. When I go to the vendor site with my aff id and subscribe, the path to the order page passes my aff id, but the link I clicked from a free pdf ebook (I downloaded) into the same browser over writes my cb affiliate id. And most visitors would get the ebook!

Some vendors will pass the aff id to the ebook automatically.

Wow! This Vendor is filed under G.