Adwords straight to clickbank product... A waste of time?

I aompletely agree to you Joe about the visitor being captured at the cost of your PPC spend, but no revenue to you. I guess this is very very true in digital products, whereas if you are doing affiliate marketing for other tangible/physical products, this sort of loss is lesser.

 

The way I figured this out is that I linked to a few of the really good CB product sites, and there was the floating "free information" window. I filled it out with one of my email addresses, then monitored the stuff I got from the vendor. The only links are back to their main site, with no hop pages. Plus, when I did get to their order form, even if were on CB for credit card payment, my nickname was nowhere to be found.

As a rule, on my CB product sites, Find and Assign and Loan Officer 101, I do not include any autoresponder app on my CB hop page, so I can not "steal" a customer from an affiliate.

 

Just my 2 cents:

I struggled with this as a vendor with my own product line:

1. I do not pop a window open, nor would I promote a site that does.

2. I do collect info, and CB cookies with the aff link for 60 days (95% have cookies enabled), 60% of my sales are coming from the AR, my affiliates still get paid, and I have saved a sale.

3. While it's true, vendors have the ability to point traffic elsewhere, affiliates should be smart enough to do due diligence on the product and system around it as you did If it smells fishy - don't invest time or money. However there are vendors and products that are reputable and safe from all angles as well. Digital products have pro's and cons as do tangible goods.

4. My affiliates sell most with landing pages and their own domain names pointing to them (some even buy 5 domains, and take up a bunch of top spots...), some mornings I wake up and see 5+ affiliates convert with 0 hops so far today, these are coming from the aWeber responders.

If you ask your vendor, they may be open to creating your own non-optin page or one with YOUR opt-in list, I would After all, smart vendors value their digital sales team and do what they can to keep them happy.

Cheers and enjoy your day.
NC.