Monetize your Site with ClickBank
Admittedly, ClickBank marketing could be construed as a special case of 'Affiliate Marketing' and in many ways it is.
Clickbank itself is a huge marketplace of electronic products each available for purchase and immediate download. What makes ClickBank different to so many other similar offerings is the extent of their catalog (over 25000 products in virtually every niche) and the unrivalled 8-week guarantee they offer. If someone is not satisfied with their product and they apply within eight weeks they will get a full refund of the purchase price. This is quite amazing.
ClickBank products are all offered by individual vendors who host the products on their own servers and have their own sales pages. ClickBank acts as a clearing house for all payments. It also acts as a payment processor for any affiliates who are promoting these products. This is where ClickBank is so different from anything or anyone that's similar to them. It's free for anyone to join as an affiliate (and if you haven't done so already I urge you to do so here: Sign up Free & get a Free Clickbank Nickname. This gives you a free ClickBank id (known as a 'nickname' in ClickBank parlance) and it allows you to immediately begin promoting the various products in the ClickBank marketplace.
This is where the real beauty of ClickBank comes in. Most vendors offer between 30% and 75% of the final price as a fee for affiliates. As most products retail for some $25 this means that every sale you generate for a ClcikBank product will get you at least $10 in commission. Basically you don't have to make that many sales before you seriously begin to rack-up your income. This is why ClickBank looks like such a good prospect for monetizing a website and why so many people are jumping on the ClickBank bandwaggon.
Which is not to say that there aren't drawbacks to the ClickBank offering. The usual operating model is something like this: someone signs-up to ClickBank, gets their nickname and then selects one or two products to promote. After selecting these products the affiliate does some research, puts up a squeeze or pre-sell page describing the product, or adds a review to their site about the product itself. They then market this squeeze or review using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising (the commonest method) or by writing and submitting articles and getting good back-links to their review site. Many with large e-mail lists also market these products to their list. Visitors begin to come by the site, sales are made and money is earned. This methodology can be expensive (PPC) or it can be both time consuming and expensive (article marketing). But it does work and lots of affiliates are making a decent living using these methods.
ClickBank itself is geared towards this form of marketing and its whole operational ethos is in terms of putting potential affiliates in touch with vendors. There is a database of products available at ClickBank and this is updated every day with the newest and best selling products in their marketplace. However, the titles and descriptions associated with the products are all given by the vendors and tend to concentrate on how well ClickBank products perform for their potential affiliates. There is little or no information in there about how products can be effectively marketed to potential purchasers. It's assumed that affiliates will go out and look for the information they need themselves.
This is great if your business model is based on heavily pushing and promoting a few products very heavily. But what if this isn't your operating model. After all ClickBank has so many products in its database the you are sure to find something that will fit in with or suit your product niche. And as the database is updated every day you can potentially have fresh ad content every time someone comes to your website.
It's this lack of meaningful ad content that stymies many webmasters or blogger when they think about ClickBank, want to add the content to their website and find that they just cant!
Well, there is an answer and you can find it right here on this website. I've been running my own little ClickBank marketplace for years. It's been quietly pootling in the background making a few sales per month but not anything spectacular. One day, however, I was looking through the ClickBank products and noticing how old and out of date many had become. That's when I decided to have a look at the XML feed that ClickBank now produces from their marketplace — and it was horrible. All the information was geared towards affiliates rather than purchasers. But the feed was very up to date.
Now, I'm more than a half-way decent programmer so it didn't take me long to download the feed before uploading it into a database and creating a basic site around it (it took me three days all told). I even created a search engine so anyone coming to my site could look products up from anywhere. But the problem with the descriptions and titles still remained. They were way to affiliate-centric. I could always write a spider that screen scraped all the product pages and I began to do that. But when I looked at the product pages themselves they were written every which way and in all sorts of languages. If I tried automatic extraction of description text from them I would end-up with little more than description salad.
So I went for the brave decision of capturing an image of each website and writing the titles and descriptions by hand. I began with the most popular products and this yielded version 1.0 of my ClickBank marketplace. It was cool, it worked and I had search functionality that anyone could use. But as ClickBank is completely founded on recognizing an affiliate using their standard URL (called a 'hoplink') and the affiliate's nickname I reckoned that I could produce a search script that anyone could use on their website. Basically I could let anyone search my ClickBank database from their own website. This led to my releasing the ClickBank Search code. All you have to do is to pick the best kind of search box for your website (there are three) change each instance of 'YourClickBankName' in the code to your actual ClickBank nickname and you have a search system that will search the entire ClickBank marketplace for you. You can put this code on any website and most blogs. It will re-direct anyone who makes a search to my server and will populate and results pulled back with your ClickBank nickname so you make the profit from the sale. Actually, 92% of the results are given your ClickBank nickname the remaining 8% are given this site's nickname and the small amount of money I make goes to supporting my Help Stefan charity campaign.
Just think, on the back of my hard work you are making 92% of all sales driven to my website by the little search box you just placed on your site. Now that's not a bad return. The products that gain my nickname are picked entirely at random so even I don't know which they are.
Now that was great. But the code did require a little effort on the part of any webmaster who wanted to include it in their pages and it meant that people were navigating away from their site (unless the search results opened in a new window). There had to be something better! Now what's the advertising system that almost everyone is familiar with — Google's adesense, of course. These ads are there in pretty much every web search and on so many websites. Everyone knows about them and everyone's familiar with them. What if I allowed people to create their own Google-like ads but based on ClickBank products. It was certainly feasible and the code shouldn't be that hard to generate.
It took an evening's head-scratching and a couple of days' coding and eventually I cam up with my ClickBank Contextual Ads Generator. This is a completely automated form. You specify your ClickBank nickname, the format and colour of your ad block and then you can specify which section or subsection of ClickBank you want your ads generated from. You can even specify a set of keywords. The application then spits out a single line of code for you and all you need to do is to paste this into your website at the right place and the advertisement you've defined and chosen will be displayed. As you chose the section or ClickBank the ads are generated from they should fit perfectly with the content of your site (or with an individual page) and as he ads are created dynamically the content changes each time a page is refreshed and the content is updated each and every time ClickBank updates their website. Now that's pretty cool. As the content is delivered as an 'iframe' (in-line frame), just like Amazon uses, you can even include these ads in many Blogs. An example of the ads generated is shown above.
This still left some Website and most Blogs without the ability to add any of these easy ClickBank ads to their content. As a result I did some more head-scratching and a little more coding and I came up with another program. The ClickBank RSS Ads Feed Generator allows you to create your own RSS feed of ClickBank ads. Again it's form-based so that you can specify the type of ads you want, as well as how many ads are in your feed at any one time. You also get to chose the section and subsection of ClickBank to base your feeds upon or you can specify a series of keywords.
Once you're done a single URL is created for you. This is your feed URL and all you need to do is to plug it into your favourite feed aggregator and you can display the feed easily on your own site. You can also generate as many feeds in as many niches as you need. I use these feeds extensively throughout this site, particularly on the various recipe pages.
Even if you don't want to go into the 'classic' ClickBank marketing methods the three solutions provided to you by this site will easily allow you to add ClickBank advertising to your website or blog, whether you chose a search box, Adsense-like contextual ads or ClickBank feeds. All you need to do is to integrate these ads with your site's content and just use them as you would any normal ads or revenue source. Anyone can do this and as you're talking $10+ commission for all ClickBank sales (as opposed to pennies for AdSense) this could become your most profitable form of internet advertising.
Why not visit my code generation pages today and add these advertisements to your own site. I even have a ClickBank ads information page so that you can get more information.
You are here because you want more information about Internet Marketing but what I'm offering is a way to instantly monetize your website with what is probably one of the most lucrative systems on the market today. You owe it to yourself to add ClickBank to your revenue stream and now you can do it in the easiest and most painless way possible!
