Idiotic New Clickbank Fees Structure

Ok, rant time...anyone with sensitive ears should stop reading right now!

Clickbank has just implemented a buttload of strange new fees and it's easily on the top 5 most idiotic, incomprehensible, hurtful and just downright evil things I've ever seen a company do online so far, in my several years of working online for a living. They are outright penalizing both affiliates AND vendors for the stupidity of a small percentage of bad buyers and sellers.

Everything is supposed to be implemented by January and some of the biggest changes will be to charge affiliates and vendors when a customer requests a refund or there is a chargeback. The vendor will be charged a percentage of the retail price as a penalty, which they not only lose the sale, but they are now OUT MORE money because they have to pay the fee on top of losing the sale. Ridiculous!

In theory, this is meant as a way to weed out "bad" vendors with poor products, and we all know that Clickbank is loaded full of shady crap (especially MMO products), but they are going about it ass backwards. First of all, it penalizes the WRONG people. An affiliate shouldn't get dinged because of a vendor problem. Affiliates promote products in good faith, just like Walmart promotes products they don't manufacture themselves. Some are good, some may be bad, but it's not Walmart's fault if there is a product recall because of faulty manufacturing. By the same token, an affiliate shouldn't be faulted if a product they link to turns out to be "bad".

For vendors, it puts the cost of doing business too high and they are unfairly put at the mercy of those buyers who request refunds just because they know they can get a digital product free that way...and there are many unscrupulous buyers who do just that. There are forums full of people who swap stuff they get for free on Clickbank.

Part of these new "quality control guidelines" at Clickbank involve adding star ratings in the marketplace and, right now, color coding to show "risk management". Certain colors mean you're ok, but if you are orange or red it means your account is at risk of termination as being "unacceptable".

In my case, my account shows red, which baffles me completely. I've only had 4-5 refunds in the history of my vendor account and the last 2 were from buyers who simply didn't read what they were buying. My sales page CLEARLY states my product is an ebook delivered in pdf format that is downloaded upon purchase, yet both buyers requested refunds by saying they wanted a physical book. Doesn't anyone read what they are buying anymore? I notice a lot of Fiverr too that buyers order without even reading the description! That's like walking into a store blindfolded and buying anything they pick up!

I understand that refunds are part of any business, but should I be penalized ON TOP OF losing the sale because of an ignorant buyer who doesn't even know what they are buying? It's not my fault! I clearly state what the product is they are getting. It ends up making it not worth doing anymore. Clickbank now charges me a $4 "risk" fee on every sale, and since I generously give my affiliates 75% of the sale, that only leaves me with $1.24 earned. Uh, no thanks.

The final straw comes with the chargeback fee, which is $36-45. Chargebacks suck, but they almost always involve a stolen credit card or hacked Paypal account. Should vendors be on the hook for that? How is that the vendors fault??? So, if I'm only getting $1.24 per sale and I get stuck with even just ONE chargeback, then it has effectively wiped out all my profit for the previous 40 sales. Wow!! Unreal!!!

I can see a lot of vendors leaving Clickbank now because there's no longer any money to be made there, but make sure you research for good alternatives first. Plimus doesn't have nearly the fees, but they still suck because it's not a good place for new vendors. They have a stupid inactivity fee, which means they reward successful vendors, but anyone starting or struggling is left in the dust. Paydotcom is better because they only charge a flat $2 fee and don't gouge you like Clickbank does. Their interface is simpler and you have to pay your affiliates directly, but at least it's beginner friendly, if you need an easy place to start out. Have a look here. I'll be moving one of my other ebooks there soon.

Ok, rant over. Feel free to comment, if you have something to add, as I'm interested in hearing from the experiences of other vendors and affiliates as well. Enjoy your day!

Making Money From Free Classified Ads

I know many of you are using free classified ads sites as part of your overall marketing strategy, but have been finding it more difficult lately to produce worthwhile results. The big sites with tons of traffic, like Craigslist, will remove anything that even remotely looks like spam and many internet marketing type ads get flagged and removed in less than 15 minutes, which can be obviously very frustrating.

There are lots of tips on the net about how to avoid getting flagged, or at least keep your ad up longer, such as to word it more naturally, avoid adding links and simply use an autoresponder with your link in the email response. However, as with most things I do online, I'd like to suggest tryng a completely different approach.

What I do instead is post in Backpage with ads selling specific niche products and it works beautifully. Simply grab an affiliate product from Amazon, Clickbank, etc, and write an ad to sell it. Make sure the ad contains the niche product keywords, as an ad page can be SEO'd as well as any webpage, especially if the item is in a microniche with little competition.

Do NOT put an affiliate link in the ad!!! Too many people make this mistake and their ad gets flagged faster than they can count to 10. Instead, link to your own site, either to a product page or review blog post.

The advantage to using Backpage is that they are one of the oldest and largest classified sites online with a lot of traffic, plus they allow a clickable backlink for free AND they allow multiple city listings. Just post your ad as if you had the item physically in front of you, with the description and price, and give the link to your site where it can be purchased (and where your affiliate link is, of course).

If you use the Amazon affiliate program it's easier making money from free classified ads posting than dropshipping and you have a huge inventory of products to choose from. Good luck!

Affiliate Clickbank Payment Proof

I'm going to focus on the affiliate Clickbank payment proof here because the vendor program is set up differently and I plan to write a post explaining how that works in the future. All CB affiliates get paid every 2 weeks and this is my latest check in the amount of $153.53

Making money with Clickbank is mostly about matching the right product to your audience. I recently wrote a related post about website monetization that is relevant here as well. Basically, you want to find something to promote in the Clickbank marketplace that your own website visitors will WANT to buy. This is important! Get it wrong and you WILL fail!

For example, I've noticed some sites that are very poorly monetized lately. One was a site about depression that had ads for hosting on it (do depressed people suddenly have the desire to build a website?). Another was a site with baby products that had an ad banner for a CB ebook about forex! Unbelievable! Repeat after me: MATCH YOUR NICHE!!!

I'll admit that when I started in affiliate marketing years ago I made the same mistakes, so let's chaulk it up to newbie inexperience. I made NO sales at all until I finally got smart and put up a popular game strategy guide on one of my arcade sites and finally made my first sale. I found out game guides sell VERY well, but I also learned the number one lesson about making sure you spend some time finding the right product to promote. It's well worth the effort.

For those of you getting started with Clickbank, it's important to be aware of the biggest issue that faces all CB newbies: the dreaded "CDR". It stands for Customer Distribution Requirement and states that you must have sales from at least 2 sources (Paypal, Mastercard, Visa) AND 5 different credit card numbers BEFORE you get paid! For some people who only get an occassional sale, this can be a daunting task, esp. when you consider that most sales online come from Paypal and that's not even included as part of the 5 number requirement!

You could actually have 10 sales broken down into, let's say, 6 from PP, 3 from Visa, 1 from MC and STILL not get paid. At a sale a month average it would take you almost a year to earn about $200 and yet have nothing to show for it. I've read people complaining that this was a deal breaker for them and they gave up using Clickbank because of it.

One "trick" that many affiliates do is to simply buy through their own link as an easy way to meet the CDR. If you already have sales and you need that last one to come in to make up the fifth CC number and you're tired of waiting, then just find a product in the marketplace that is dirt cheap (the lowest is 3 bucks) and create your own hoplink for it. Then simply purchase the product through your link using your own credit card. A few dollars is a small price to pay to get all your earnings released to you after meeting the full requirements, if you have over $100 or so tied up there. Consider it like an extra 3% fee to get your check. I personally don't think the CDR is fair, but it is what it is, so it's best just to find a solution around it, since you can't change it.

They also hold back 10% of each check as a “return allowance” to cover any refunds or chargebacks. That rule isn't much fun either, but it's needed when dealing with some products that have a high refund rate, so they have to cover that possibility.

A final word of advice: mask your hoplinks! Some affiliates will attempt to steal your commissions, so it's good practice not to leave your affiliate ID "out in the open". It became such a problem that now Clickbank provides encrypted links in the form of a "hoplink shield", but it wasn't always that easy. Protect your links!

Good luck!

Clickbank Sales Tip

Here's a quick Clickbank sales tip today: match your product to your audience!! Yeah, I know, it sounds obvious, but I've noticed an alarming number of sites recently that just don't follow that very basic marketing strategy. What are they thinking???

There are WAY too many websites with clickbank product ads on them that have nothing to do with the content of the site, like a gardening site with adverts for forex...WHAT????

You'll get a much better conversion rate if you match up similar advertisements to your own site's niche. Currently, my best CB sales are coming from selling Facebook game guides on my network of arcade sites that get traffic from gamers. It works!!

Unique Website Domain Names Work Best!

My tip for today is something amazingly simple, yet overlooked by the average online affiliate marketer. I know many of you reading this are making money, or trying to make money, by promoting some product or another for a company by using their affiliate link address, which is usually quite long and unappealing. I've seen some REALLY long and cumbersome URL names out there being promoted!

To address this issue of long addresses (I couldn't resist the pun!) there are MANY places that have sprung up all over the net offering to "cloak" your URL or make it shorter. Horror stories of Clickbank commissions being stolen by other affiliates have created cloaking as the method of choice for many affiliates to protect their sales potential.

I, however, would suggest you consider a MUCH better alternative. For less then 20 bucks you can have your very own domain name that can be forwarded and masked (cloaked) to your affiliate website address. This address becomes YOURS and, being unique, is much more search engine friendly than competing with many similar affiliate URL's. Plus, when you own a domain name you get your own professional looking email address with it as well.

Yes, you could use a popular free service like Tinyurl to cloak your long link name, but I urge you to see the reality of that. There are tinyurl links all over the net now, to the point where you are competing with others with similar tinyurl names just as much as you would with the original affiliate url. A tinyurl or similar service url will never be found on its own unless you pay to list it through your keywords on a service like Adwords on Google.

I want to mention a tip here too, since there is much debate over the "proper" way to do URL forwarding or redirection so as not to be penalized by Google. The fact is that it's really a case by case basis, depending on your situation. You should "mask" your forwarded domain if you really don't want surfers to know the destination, as your own domain will stay in the address bar that way. However, keep in mind that your masked keywords used will be ignored by Google and, recently, Google (yet again) changed its algorithm so that it will even remove your domain from the search listings if it appears to be a phishing attempt, so be careful!

If you don't want to cloak or hide your affiliate link, but you just want an easier to remember name then use forwarding without masking the URL, but make sure to pick the "301" permanent redirect option or the search engines will ignore you again, or all sorts of other problems can arise down the road. This works great if you're on a free host as well, since you can just forward your professional sounding domain name to their subdomain or sub-directory URL they give you when you sign up.

The flexibility of having your own domain name and its benefits are enormous. It makes you stand out from the crowd, showing you are unique, which will increase your SALES dramatically. URL forwarding is very easy to set up through your domain registrar, so don't be scared off by thinking it's a difficult task. Look at it this way...which domain name do YOU think a potential buyer to your product would be more likely to click on, your own address at http://www.youruniquesiteaddress.com/ (for example) or an affiliate id at some place that sounds like www.affiliatetrackersalessite.com/id-3576901/saleshop??

My own address here at http://www.adegreeofsuccess.com/ is just forwarded to Blogspot.com, as A Degree Of Success is simply easier to remember and more to the point than http://adegreeofsuccess.blogspot.com/ , don't you agree? Getting your own domain name is a VERY worthwhile low cost investment, which you'll get back quickly with increased sales!

Click the link to increase your sales and make more money today by getting your own domain name now! You'll be glad you did!