clickbank review
Clickbank Review
In order to make money selling ebooks on your niche website you will need a payment processor. This is a company that will accept customers credit card payments, paypal, person bank cheques, etc and then pass the payments (minus a processing fee) back to you. Niche Profit Classroom strongly recommends using Clickbank as your payment processor. Why is this? In addition to collecting customer payments, Clickbank will also administer an affiliate program for your product. Currently, Clickbank is the largest and most popular online affiliate management program and as such attracts the best products and the best affiliates.
What are affiliates and why do you need them?
Affiliates are people who will promote your product in exchange for a cut of the sales price. This amount can vary from a few percentage points up to 75% of the retail value of your book. The main benefit affiliates provide your site (other than by trying to sell your product for you) is by building outside links to your sales page. Cumulatively these inlinks should work overtime to boost your site’s ratings in Google.
My Review of Clickbank
Since Clickbank was the largest and most reputable seeming payment processor and affiliate program manager (and recommended by Niche Profit Classroom), I signed up with Clickbank back in the spring of 2009 and have been using them ever since.
Clickbank: Benfits
Clickbank allows anyone to sign up and promote products (unless you happen to live in a country other than the 150 that are listed.) This means that Clickbank will draw many more affiliates into its programs compared to those that require a fee or extensive application. This is good for you as it means a constant stream of people will be going through Clickbank looking for products to promote.
Clickbank will automatically generate affiliate links for your product.
Clickbank will handle paying your affiliates for you and in all cases works to prevent fraud – for both the affiliate and the vendor.
Clickbank screens all vendors to make sure that their sales and product download pages meet basic Clickbank quality requirements such as clearly posted 60 day return policy and direct customer support contact information. This means that there is an overall higher quality of vendors at Clickbank and customers should hopefully feel more comfortable purchasing your product through this vendor rather than one with a reputation for being scammy.
Clickbank: Problems
I think Clickbank provides the most benefit to vendors with established products at high price points. Someone who is just getting started will not attract affiliates in high enough numbers to see tangible benefit.
It costs $50 to open your first account.
You can only have one affiliate product per account. This means if you want to see a second book with an affiliate program you will need to open a second account – this costs $38 provided you tell Clickbank you would like the second account deal – otherwise they will try to charge you another $50.
Payout is challenging. For new vendors, Clickbank restricts sending you the money you have earned until you have met certain restrictions like sales from multiple credit cards, mystery percentage held in reserve to cover any returns, etc.
Accounts with less activity will be charged FEES for each pay period without a sale. This ranges from $1 per pay period to $5. Someone who is only get a few sales in the beginning may never actually get his or her payments.
Is Clickbank Bad?
No, but if I was able to do it all over again, I might have started with another program like PayDotCom or PayPal just to ensure that I received money in my pocket right away.
