Affiliates Making Money from ClickBank – Problems You Can Encounter

Internet’s largest digital product bank – ClickBank – started in 1998. With exponential growth in the last decade, ClickBank now retails more than 46,000 digital products and they have 100,000 ‘active’ affiliate marketers earning up to 75% commission on each product sale.

ClickBank makes a sale every three seconds all around the world and according to them; more than 35,000 digital transactions are done every day.

Needless to say, ClickBank receives high amounts of traffic daily and not only this, the traffic converts into sales, which is the most important thing for an affiliate.

How Does ClickBank Work for Affiliates?

Creating an account is free of cost. You select products you want to promote through your website, using the ClickBank affiliate link and you are paid for every sale through your link, earning up to 75%. On a basic level, there is an immense opportunity out there to earn from ClickBank.

However, as a new Internet affiliate marketer, you will encounter certain hurdles along the way. Here we have tried to explain the major problems or issues you might encounter, along with possible solutions, wherever applicable.

Problems You Encounter

Not Choosing the Right Product:

It will help if you’ve had previous experience in marketing products online. Nevertheless, always remember that when you are an affiliate with ClickBank, you need to check the product’s ‘gravity’ before making your choice.

An uncountable number of Internet marketers have suffered losses in making money online just because they could not select the ‘product.’

There are three levels of product available – products with high saleability, products with medium saleability and products with low or average saleability.

It is very difficult to suggest which kind of product you should choose because there are a lot of factors you have to consider such as the market demand and consumer’s spending power.

But, as a new affiliate marketer, it is suggested that you select medium saleable products because as a novice, you may not find any success with high saleable products as there are other seasoned competitors high up the ladder. By choosing average or low saleable products, you will incur only losses.

Therefore, the safest bet would be medium saleable products. When you become a member and go into the user control panel, select a few products you are interested in and do a comparison check. Moreover, never select a product that offers commission below 25%.

Not Doing Correct Marketing:

If you want to see yourself among 100,000 live and active affiliate Internet marketers with ClickBank, you will create your own marketing hurdle if you get involved in ‘hit and run’ marketing.

Most affiliate marketers think online earning is easy and therefore, they look for the quickest way possible to earn money online.

Typically, people with such mindset will select a ClickBank product, advertise to send traffic to the landing page and earn a profit – this strategy is not faulty on the outset but when you do the math, you will see that by following this strategy, you are only getting one time customers and that too by investing lots of cash!!!

This is the wrong way, especially if you want to keep earning online for long term. Think like this – why would you want to blindly spend dollars to get customers and that too not for your own but for another company?

The ‘correct’ kind of marketing would be to follow a model that will bring in repeat customers without too much investment. It is much easier marketing to repeat customers that spend time creating new ones.

The preferred ClickBank affiliate marketing model would be to choose a handful of ClickBank products; create eBooks in the same niche and distribute it free of cost, embed a squeeze page in the eBook to send traffic to the squeeze page; capture leads coming to the squeeze page; set up an email auto responder with ClickBank products and see the profits grow in your ClickBank account.

Inability to Track Clicks to Publisher’s Site or Embed Deep Links:

ClickBank does not display what happens when a person clicks off your site and visits the publisher’s site. In other words, you can track consumers when they visit your site but when they follow your affiliate link and visit the publisher’s site, you cannot track what happens afterwards.

For instance, if you a promoting a software that offers a free download period, you cannot see if the person downloaded the software or if ClickBank sends a follow up mail when the trial period finishes.

Such kinds of systems makes tracking extremely difficult – you are not able to see how much percentage of traffic sent through your site has actually converted into sales.

Moreover, none of the ClickBank products will allow you to “deep link” directly to the FAQ, Testimonials and any other page of the target website. Your affiliate link will only directly link to the software’s home page – you cannot directly link to the download page.

Not being able to give “deep links” has its disadvantages – visitors may not be able to see the download link or find the appropriate testimonial. It is a fact that if a potential consumer is not able to see the information he / she desires, there is a chance that it will not convert into sales.

Inability to Directly Communicate with Publishers:

There is no feature in ClickBank that allows affiliate marketers to directly communicate with the product’s publisher. Suppose you are having some problems with the product or you need some information that the ClickBank support staff may not be able to provide, then where do you go?

It would have been resourceful if ClickBank had some kind of FAQ section for every digital product. Or a supportive mailing list would have been helpful.

Lack of direct communication between affiliates and publishers creates misunderstanding and problems, a stumbling block that only ClickBank can solve.

Confusing Payment System:

With ClickBank you “get paid on time, every time” and they provide every affiliate marketers with detailed sales reporting and accurate commission tracking but the biggest problem here is that your account should show sales from 5 different people before you can claim your earnings.

Not only this, out of the 5 payments, one should be done with Visa card and one from MasterCard.

Obviously, ClickBank may have initiated this for better security measures and to avoid fraud but it could have been done in another way as well. Waiting to claim your earnings is not right, especially if you are looking to use ClickBank to generate a few sales in a year.

Again, suppose that you could not make ClickBank a success and you want to close your account, which shows only 3 sales. You can close your account but you cannot claim any money as the amount gets forfeited.

Moreover, there is a “Commission Priority Rule” ClickBank follows. It means that “if a customer has visited a sales page on more than one occasion, as a result of following links supplied by different affiliates, the rule is that the last affiliate gets the commission.”

Does this mean that if the same customer buys the same product through two different affiliate links, which affiliate will get the commission?

Apart from this glitch, you are entitled to receive payments every week and direct deposit to your account is also available.

Final Thoughts

The purpose of highlighting these problems is not to dissuade you from becoming an affiliate with ClickBank. What we are trying to do is make new Internet marketing ClickBank affiliates become aware of the issues that you will encounter later on.

Feel free to tell us in the comments section about other problems, If any you’ve encountered with ClickBank.