The Best Affiliate Program #2

This is the second in my occasional series on Affiliate programs. Here I’m going to deal with the grand-daddy of all internet affiliate programs, ClickBank. If you’ve not heard of them, then you must have been asleep your while internet marketing career. If you haven’t joined them yet, then I urge you to join the ClickBank program here…

What is ClickBank you ask? Well, it’s a huge marketplace of up to 10 000 products each for sale and each available for instant electronic download. Most of the products on sale come with 40% to 70% affiliate commissions and on average products sell for $30… This is a great opportunity for you to market ClickBank products and to earn $15 or more on each and every sale.

There is one caveat however. When you join ClickBank you effectively become an affiliate of ClickBank itself. ClickBank then acts as a marketplace whose aim is to put vendors (those with products to sell) in touch with potential affiliates. But therein lies the major problem with ClckBank in that it’s purpose is to put vendors and affiliates in touch with one another. ClickBank promotes products based on how good they are for an affiliate to promote. This then puts the onus of marketing entirely on the shoulders of the affiliate themselves.

ClickBank does provide a search service for the products in their system. But, once again, this searches based on the information provided by the vendor and the descriptions are invariably based on how good the product is for the affiliate to promote. Only in rare instances are product descriptions related to how good the products themselves are to sell.

As a result potential affiliates have to research the product they are interested in. They need to write their own copy about that product before starting their marketing campaign. The truth is that if this were the only source of information on ClickBank products then there is no way that ClickBank could reach #2 in my list of the best Affiliate Programs.

Thankfully, however, a number of third-party vendors have come up with their own solutions to the deficiencies of ClickBank. One of the best of these has to be the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace. This site loads the ClickBank marketplace feed into its database every weekend, so the products you see are always up to date. Even better, a snapshot image is made for each product web page and each product description is annotated by hand before being uploaded to the database. This means that the search and browse functionality of the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace page gives you better results for your searches. You can even grab code on the Celtnet ClickBank Search System that allows you to provide searches on your own website that uses the Celtnet ClickBank system. Even better any results brought back by these searches have your ClickBank affiliate ids embedded in them so that you gain the affiliate income from any sales made.

If you don’t want the hassle of doing the ClickBank searches yourself then the Celtnet site provides several very clever solutions for you. Everyone knows the power of Google’s AdSense system and the contextual ads it provides. But Celtnet’s ClickBank system also provides a system whereby you can create ClickBank AdSense-like ads based on Clickbank categories or on keywords that you specify… So you can match the results you get to your website (or web page content). You then just create your ad block (and just like AdSense you can define the shape and colour of these blocks). The site’s latest developments are ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images which show product images in the ads. Such ads have been shown to give higher click-through rates.

All these ads use the hand-annotated descriptions provided by the Celtnet site, guaranteeing good click-throughs. They are easy to set-up and installation is a breeze. It’s because of this that I now rank ClickBank as my #2 Affiliate program.