Clickbank - Not a Good Place for Newbies to Start

[Linda Buquet]

Here is a blog about some problems at CB.
THere are lots of other stories too.

These are just a few of the reasons I don't recommend starting with
CB if you are a newbie.

The Death of Clickbank - From the Earners Blog
"The Clickbank debate has been roaring on a number of forums lately, Publishers are getting annoyed & a lot of people are starting to jump ship.

A number of rumours have surfaced about why sales are dropping, about why some big guns who regularly make sales every single day see periods of silence in their sales chart for no apparrent reason…."

Read the Rest: The Death of Clickbank

Here's a variety of other type of tracking problems: Clickbank's Tracking

BUT THE BIGGEST ISSUE IF YOU ARE A NEWBIE IS THIS:
Help Making my First Conversion

[diglet]

Whilst clickbank may not be the way to go for newbies I think getting involved in promoting affiliate programs is absolutely the way to go. Many people that are jumping ship from clickbank I understand are going over to paydotcom.com

I have promoted a couple of there programs via Adwords and done quite well.

Mark

[Syndr0me]

Aw.. that sucks.. but thanks for the info.. now i know why nobody is buying my stuff

[john238]

I must admit, it doesn't help that much for newbies when you have to get at least 4 sales from 4 different credit cards in the US before they realease your earnings. Plus they also deduct $2 per month if you are an interntional affiliate.

[mojojuju]

Hi, first post here. Nice forum.

Anyway, Clickbank has recently introduced an improved tracking system that can track sales in instances where cookies can't be set. For example, user's with paranoid browser settings that block 3rd party cookies or users that have Spybot installed.

Clickbank started the new system on the first of May, and my sales have been better since the change. I'd encourage newbies to give Clickbank another try.

You can read about the changes here Supplemental Hoplink Trackng!

[kuraykillua]

That's good to hear, something that should help.
-k

[Linda Buquet]

Hi mojojuju,

Thanks for posting that. I saw it mentioned in a blog earlier but did not have time to track it down to the official source. THANKS for letting us know!

[earner]

1st of May was precisely the date my affiliate sales through CB completely shut down. Nothing.... absolutely nothing... I was used to a steady $200-300/month and growing from just a handful of products on one page. Then nothing. Silence.

Then in the last week just 3 sales.

I've always found CB products to be quite hard to sell. Unless you are really hitting a tight niche it takes a lot of work. And time. Apparently there are 10,000 products in there, but they make it quite hard to find them. Being outside of the US it would be nice if products were tagged in some way to represent countries because a lot of their products are really only for the US.

Yes there are some "great products" that can display whole pages of CB products. But that's extra cost and again you can't usually filter for just what you want - so if you want to use these it's extra money and a lot of time trying things out. Time which newbies don't have, they probably also don't have the ability to spot those 3rd party applications, nor the technical skills right now to implement them.

I kept meaning to look into why my CB sales hit £0 for so long. But I finally got round to being adsense approved and so I find that easier.

With CB I'd already changed my minimum payout to $10,000. I figure I will get just 1 cheque per year. It costs me £4/$8 to pay each cheque into my account and takes about 6 weeks to go through the banking system. So I didn't want a cheque every 2 weeks as I was receiving. Too much hassle. One cheque per year is good enough for me.

In fact, I personally am finding adsense the easiest way to go. You don't have to sign up and trawl through some alien interface choosing products and grabbing links ... only to find that you have to wait to be approved, or that at 2 minutes notice you get an email saying XYZ Product is suspended. You also don't have to go check your earnings on 30 different sites. So adsense I find is:
1) paying me better
2) paying me easier

All the money is coming into one easy pot. So, now I will just build more adsense sites.

Everybody is different though. We are all trying and liking different things. Our sites are all different. So there is no one size fits all.

E

[Linda Buquet]

I'm not sure I'd want ANY company holding my money for a year.
Companies go out of business, tracking has hiccups, records can be lost.
Maybe set it for 500 or whatever you think would come in maybe quarterly or so.
???

[earner]

The world needs more trust! Yes a year does seem a long time, but I figured I could pop in and change it to the lowest figure anytime I want and it would automatically spit out a cheque on the next cheque run. But I am going travelling. No fixed abode. And all my mail will be going to my parents' which is 200 miles from where I will be. Up until now it's been a pain, a cheque comes through, I have to find my paying in book and write out the slip then go out to the Post Office to pay it in, who then mail it to my bank 100 miles away .... then I wait up to 6 weeks.

Clickbank have been around years, so it's low risk - and all my traffic is organic so I am not paying for it. I see my CB earnings as a nice few quid out of an experiment I put together in a couple of hours. I am always onto the next/bigger thing, trying to up my game to the next level. Sometimes things aren't worth stressing about or you get bogged down with the little stuff. I figure: keep looking at the stars and don't worry about the dog **** you tread in.... you're going to find some along the way.