Digital products affiliate programs

[genuwine4532]

Are there any other GOOD digital product affiliate programs, besides CB and Paydot.com?

I want to promote a certain product but I had read some threads on this forum that CB is having issues and so I am worried about using them.
and
Paydot.com site is not the greatest, first they charge a fee to affiliate, there is really no stats for sale history and many of the products when you click on the "promote" button you get a message "not approved yet or denied"--whatever THAT means?? and there is no further info on the status or approval process----BAD!!

Is CB still ok to use? Are there any other good digital product affil programs?

[Linda Buquet]

Lots of affiliates use CB and like it. I say I don't think newbies should start there for a wide variety of reasons. But if you know all the issues, know how to compete with all the CB pros, know how to protect your links and know about the payment oddities and feel like you are ready OR that's the only place you can find the product, then nothing says you can't go there.

There are a couple other places like that but I don't remember their names and they don't have as many products.

HOWEVER lots of people have their own affiliate programs for digital products and don't go through CN or PDC. So best thing is to search G for "product key words" + "affiliate program." If you find a program that's not on CB there may be less competition and link overwriting and stuff too. Just a thought.

[genuwine4532]

Thanks Linda,

That makes total sense, I will do the search.

I think my biggest concern about CB is the hoplink, I want to do Yahoo PPC with a product, and Yahoo actually allows lots of characters in the URL and redirects as far as I can see. So the hoplink can be cloaked and protected.

Would that be the correct thing to do?. To cloak the hoplink so that the display URL doesn't stick out like a sore thumb on Yahoo's sponsored results?

Does that make sense?

[Linda Buquet]

So you're not sending traffic to a landing page on your site? If you are direct linking, then I imagine cloaking the link is the right thing but I don't specialize in CB or Yahoo, so am only guessing and wonder if they would even allow cloaked links. The concern from the user experience would be someone could advertise green widgets and cloak a link that redirects to an adult site, for instance.
Always double check the rules of course.

[genuwine4532]

No I am sending them to the CB product landing page and Yahoo does allow redirects but cloaking is the question that remains unanswered, the problem with cloaking and CB as far as I can see is that people have problems with the cookie tracking when they cloak and so you can lose the commiss, the best thing to do from that perspective is to just use the hoplink in the display URL on Yahoo and everything will work out fine, EXCEPT of course that the hoplink is obvious to anyone who knows what that is. AND that is my dilemma, can this give an advantage to parasites?

[Linda Buquet]

Parasites work differently. I believe the way the main one that does the most hijacking works, is that it targets based on a user landing on a certain domain name/url. I'm not sure technically at what point the cookie overwriting pop up is triggered. But if it's triggered after someone hits the merchant domain, then I'm not sure the cloaking would help.

I'm fuzzy on this part so take with a grain of salt OR do more research but I think if the software is programmed to pop when the user hits a link with anything.hop.clickbank.net in it, then cloaking may help. But I know it can be programmed to target by specific domains too, so if it's set up to pop after someone lands on keywordelite.net for instance, then I'm not sure cloaking helps. But again, not certain.

[genuwine4532]

Thanks Linda,

I will take with grain and I think the best thing to do is just DO IT and see what happens, I have spent like 3 days on this and I think I will try. The most I can lose is about $50 which is worth the 70$ per sale commiss!!

Cross your fingers for me

Thanks AGAIN!!

[Linda Buquet]

Good luck! Let us know.

Just remember if the campaign is NOT successful, hardly any 1st trys at PPC are.
And it probably won't be because of parasites, so don't let that be an excuse or scapegoat.

Could be your ad, your keywords, the merchants landing page,
leaks on the merchant's site, all kinds of things.

It's a big puzzle, all pieces need to fit and a parasite is just one potential piece.

Here's a great article I was just reading about split testing one of the important pieces.
I never do it but I'm going to start after reading this. Makes so much sense.

Split Testing Ads - The How, The Why, and The When!

[genuwine4532]

Thanks, I'll let you know how it goes.

I will definetaly read the article right now!!

[gallito89]

Originally Posted by genuwine4532

Are there any other GOOD digital product affiliate programs, besides CB and Paydot.com?

I want to promote a certain product but I had read some threads on this forum that CB is having issues and so I am worried about using them.
and
Paydot.com site is not the greatest, first they charge a fee to affiliate, there is really no stats for sale history and many of the products when you click on the "promote" button you get a message "not approved yet or denied"--whatever THAT means?? and there is no further info on the status or approval process----BAD!!

Is CB still ok to use? Are there any other good digital product affil programs?

CB is definitely still fine to use, I've been following multiple reports of probelsm on different forums and all of them have explanations other than CB *****ing up. There is just a witch hunt mentality at the moment and as a result whenever people have sub-par month they blame it on CB because everybody else is. I still 100% back them, but I also use esellerate for selling a few digital products. I hate their statistics (currently 100% broken), but I still get commissions from them, I wouldn't recommend them to others for these reasons but for myself I don't really care.