Hmm... Sales drop like a rock and now Clickbank.com has a new look. Coincidence? I think not. Its funny too...After I sent my mail to them yesterday magically within minutes I had sales post to my account.
I saw the same thing in another thread -- hadn't had sales for three days (when they averaged $150 a day) -- Then within minutes after the "new look," two sales recorded within minutes of each other. I haven't been so lucky yet. Just hope maybe things will get back to normal. Don't know how this could possibly have anything to do with it. I did have two sales last night, both were international. In fact, the only sales I've had since Wednesday have been international. I looked back and the last time I had a big drop in sales, I had just two or three sales in three days -- all international. Probably just a coincidence, but really strange. Then in one day a whole bunch of USA sales came in at once. Hope that happens this time again!!! Otherwise I'm going to have my worst Clickbank paycheck in eight months.
First off congrats on your endevours to do affiliate marketing and yes I was once like you and have had my ups and downs, I had no intention to offend you but was trying to suggest you not read these types of threads as it will expose you to all these sily conpiracy theories that some affiliates are conjuring up like "its their risk management system",these types of theories only serve to stir up others who are not getting sales into believing or making up other stupid theories. Its not called for.... but I am probably wastimg my time as people will believe what they want to believe. I read in one of your threads that you were gonna try one of infobooks theories about changing account - that statement alarmed me as I thought you buying into these theories again. That combined with your current financial situation is a dangerour recipe Lynda, and I dont want to sound pantronising or condecending but be careful as it will let to further disappointment, believe me I've seen it happen with my cousin. Just keep working at it Lynda , maybe tweak afew campaigns or even diversify and try some new products, there are plenty of new products being released here everyweek!! Good luck anyways and all the best!!
I have to say, I kind of agree with Patchkaa. I am my no means a "super affiliate", and I do have up's and down's, but it is NOT always CB's fault. Yes, I believe sometimes CB wrongly declines credit cards, yes I believe sometimes affiliates fall victim of cookie stuffing, and yes I believe the affiliate cookie may sometimes not transfer! There ARE flaws in the system, but overall, CB works. I work with several affiliate networks, and there are flaws with all of them - CB is actually one of the best. It's not perfect, and it's frustrating when it's not, but lets face it, CB will never admit anything, and we will never be able to prove anything. Make the best of what we've got I guess... Jim
Yeah, don't start a new account and make thousands of dollars like I did, instead do what Patch says and "just work harder you lazy piece of XXXX"! - hopefully those of you with a sense of humour will get my little joke! Lyndatreb, thanks for actually responding to this and not sitting back and being treated like a moron by this guy, who generally does nothing but respond to these type of threads claiming that there is never anything wrong with CB, it is all in our heads and we should try harder. P.S. Can't wait for the next installment from Patch! ;-)
You see I'm wasting my time, well dude just keep making millionsof accounts every week and hope that salesmight change, ignore that it might be concidence its happening. I wasn;t implying you were lazy dude, just saying you are just second guesing and making up theories as to why sales are panning out in your account a.k.a Risk management system Doing this will only just lure in other newbies into believing it may not be their approach but CB's doing. Dude maybe you should read this thread as an example of what people are really saying when they come up with such theories. http://www.warriorforum.com/main-in...-forum/65012-should-i-name-shame-warrior.html
Oh geez... why are all the arguments here only polar opposites of each other? There is a middle ground you know! CB screws up, as does any other network / payment processor. It only makes good business sense to accept that fact - Also accept the fact that you will rarely get an email from any network saying "Sorry, we screwed up". It's obvious that sales will get blocked from time to time with CB. Work around it, and chalk it up to the price of doing business. As a comparative example, here's a true and shocking story that took place this past weekend with another popular affiliate network I use: On Sunday morning they decided to "upgrade" their affiliate interface, for the benefit of all affiliates... Great! Unfortunately, at 9:27 am Sunday, link tracking ceased to function properly. All sales were being credited to the publishers accounts 100%. For my part, I could literally see the traffic hitting the target page and disappearing! This continued until today at 11:50am! 26 hours of blown traffic for some affiliates. Others got lucky in that their respective vendors recognized this error and payed out affiliates directly for sales made during the time period (based on the guesstimates and the honor system). Now if I were making 1-2 sales a day, it would be impossible to say I lost 2 sales on Sunday. But with historical data from different platforms, cross compared, it is quite easy to say I lost 15 sales (+/- 2) or 50 sales (+/- 8). (How many I really lost and got compensated for I think I'll keep to myself.) Now this is a pretty gross error, and do you think there has been any official news disseminated from the aff network (via email or other means) ... HAHAHA, don't hold your breath. My point is this: of all the things within your power to control (marketing techniques, landers, campaigns, etc) it can sometimes be hard to recognize that indeed the fault lies elsewhere, somewhere out of your grasp. But you can't dwell on that fact!... just learn to recognize the possible signs of external factors and formulate ways to deal with them. This game is 90% skill and 10% luck. Don't dismiss the importance of luck, and don't stop improving your skills. @lyndatreb Great post... very heartfelt. But I too do worry about your marketing plan. If I read you correctly, you say you are using PPC, yet only gaining a few sales a day. This is all wrong. Stop and re-think! You are either way under budget on your campaigns / not doing enough market research to convert properly or you are promoting the wrong products. Without knowing your specifics, I would urge you to build up a bigger cash float, scale up what is working successfully for you, and dump the rest.
I would assume that one sale amounts for about $20.00 in commissions. Right? So we're looking at 1-4 sales per day. In this case there is nothing unusual about having several days with 0 sales.
So my sales are still way down. I also got a message back from Clickbank regarding the email I sent them on Sunday. It looks like a cookie-cutter response to me. I'm posting my sales screen and their email below. Clickbank Email: Sales as of right now:
Seems to be happening far too often these days. Many people at other forums are also saying the same thing. I'm noticing it too. I'm sending about 200 hops a day to a product thats means to convert at about one in 40 and was doing so for me previously. I have not had one sale in my last 2000 hops and that tells me something is seriously up at CB - not impressed.
I'm kind of glad this crap is happening since it's giving me more motivation to stop procrastinating and start looking for other methods to earn money. The unpredictability of clickbank can drive a sane man insane! For example, this past weekend I was converting 1 out of 50 hops and ended up with 12 sales. The past three days.....600 hops and 0 sales. Same traffic, same landing page, same marketing strategy, same, same, same. I had to do self-psychiatry on myself this morning after still seeing zeroes so that I wouldn't go nuts! Anyway, today I'm going to stop being stubborn and get going on learning about other strategies. Keep your head up everyone!
It was like my sales hit a brick wall on the 22nd. I actually lost money with PPC this week -- first time that's happened to me. I am marketing using only Clickbank at the moment so that's what I've been concerned with, but does anyone know if people using other affiliate programs are reporting the same downturn in sales?
My sales have been down this week across ALL the affiliate netwoks I use. CB, in-house, and Plimus. My normal 1:40 conversion rate is sitting at about 1:225 this week. Don't forget, many people in the US, and other countries I imagine, get paid bimonthly. If this is the case, many of them get paid on the 1st and the 15th. So maybe payday tomorrow will help - I've seen this actually play out before. Jim