I have 2 products that I'm promoting from CB and when I click the link for one of them, I'm taken to the seller's page but in the URL I see at the end .../?hop=affiliatename. When I click on the hop link of the other product, I do not see my affiliate name at all in the URL. Is this normal and how is my affiliate name stored then if it's not in the URL? Using a cookie or something? For the previous product that I mentioned, when I click on order now button I'm taken to the ClickBank's order page and I can see my affiliate name on the bottom of the page. However, when I go this other product's sales page and click on the order button, it asks me for my name and email address and I cannot get to the ClickBank's order form at all without entering this information. I am not planning on buying this product so this is why I do not want to enter my information but I also cannot see my affiliate name anywhere on this page. I created the hop links for both products using CB's affiliate link creator that encrypts the URL.
This is as it should be, of course. Then you'll have to input your name and email address in order to get to the Clickbank order-form, because the only way to know for sure whether your hoplink's working is by looking at the bottom of the order-form. You can do that without buying it, you know? You can even get a new Hotmail/Yahoo/Fastmail account specially for the purpose, if you're worried about giving the vendor your real email address. How you can realistically decide you want to be an affiliate for a product you haven't even seen is a different matter, so let's just assume that the vendor sent you a review copy and you don't need one.
It depends on the site, but if the URL doesn't contain the affiliate ID, that doesn't mean it wont track your sales. Basically, assuming you are promoting a product with a decent gravity (say above 20) then you should be fine.
There's no great problem finding out, here, honestly. You simply need to look at the order page: it's as simple as that. Either your affiliate name is showing at the bottom (in which case all's well) or it isn't (in which case there's a problem). You just have to look and find out. The gravity of the product has absolutely nothing to do with it!
Not directly, except if the guy is worry about getting scammed by the vendor or something, you can be pretty sure a high gravity product isn't ripping off its affiliates through cookie stuffing or other shady business (otherwise it wouldn't have a high gravity).
These products both have over 20 gravity but it doesn't seem to matter as I have not made a sale yet. I just use banners and let people click on them and go to the seller's page. So far I have around 80 hops. I could make a landing page and use PPC, but I don't feel like putting more time and money into it to find out I did not make much in the end. Most of the successful affiliates spend a lot of time on tweaking their ads, their keywords, landing pages, writing articles, creating blogs, Hub pages, Squidoo, etc. It takes a lot of time and money so I just focus on making my site better and offer more features to my subscribers as this is my primary source of earnings which allow me to keep the site working. ClickBank's products are something on the side I want to test if they will make any money. If they do, great! If not, Oh well, I have not lost much. I know that if I invested all my time and effort into promoting CB's products and made nothing, I would be pretty pissed off.
Your affiliate id should show at the bottom of the clickbank order page. 80 hops isn't sufficient data to determine how well converting the offer is. But if I were you, I'd start using text links in addition to banner ads, they seem to be better converting.
For the record, I just couldn't disagree more with this opinion. In my opinion, the high gravity products are exactly the ones whose affiliate dealings are more likely to be open to question, for quite a variety of different reasons, some of which I've explained in considerable detail, with irrefutable illustrative examples, in other threads here recently. In my view, the lower a product's gravity is, the more likely it is that the vendor's dealings with their affiliates are strictly above board. As long as gullible/naive affiliates imagine that high gravities are somehow correlated with either high sales numbers or high conversion-rates (which they're not), vendors will have the incentive to massage their products' gravity-rates to make them higher, knowing that they can attract more affiliates that way. It's entirely fallacious, and it's actually harder to think of a more widely believed, more commonly perpetuated myth in the whole of internet marketing than this one.
Yeah...and also, the government uses satellites to spy on our brainwaves - better start wearing a tinfoil hat. You can stop with the conspiracy theories - 99% of Clickbank vendors are completely above board. Actually, it's very simple. Send some traffic to your hop link. Then check your analytics stats in a few hours. If you see the hops in your stats, then you're ok. If the traffic isn't showing up, something might be wrong. I know it's not as exciting as high gravity vendors stealing your business (and mind) like alexa_s would have you believe, but it's a lot more realistic.
And you know this ... how?! I don't claim to know 99% of Clickbank vendors, let alone be able to assess their ethics and integrity, myself. I said no such thing. It seems that when you're unable to dispute the fact that some people have opinions that differ from yours, you'll just blatantly misquote them to try somehow to make yourself right? Knock yourself out, kiddo, if you imagine that this forum's members won't see through that!