Should You Be Using Clickbank?
Clickbank has been taking a heck of a beating lately. Marketers are complaining about low sales, high refunds and an unresponsive customer service department. Many have threatened to jump ship. Some have, but many hang in there. So what’s the real deal with Clickbank? Is it as bad as people say it is? Is it no longer worth selling Clickbank products? Is it better to sell your own product through an in house affiliate program? Lots of questions, but so far…no answers. Well, in this article, I’m going to try to give you some answers.
Let’s first go over what’s right with Clickbank. If you’re a product vendor, hosting your product with Clickbank means that you get free exposure in their marketplace and you don’t have to worry about paying your affiliates yourself. Clickbank does all the affiliate tracking for you, thus saving you a lot of bookkeeping and hours of time paying affiliates. As a vendor, this may be the biggest advantage to using Clickbank.
But what about as an affiliate? Are there any real advantages to promoting a Clickbank product as opposed to some other product? Well, there’s brand recognition. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Clickbank is a recognized name and a lot of potential customers trust purchasing products with the Clickbank seal of approval on it, especially since all these products come with the mandatory 60 day guarantee.
Also, the Clickbank marketplace, the way it’s laid out and with the stats provided, make it very easy to identify “good” products to sell, meaning products that convert well. This is great for affiliates who don’t want to spend countless hours looking for something worth their time.
However, Clickbank is not without its downside. For vendors, your product only gets listed in the marketplace beyond the first month IF you make at least one sale in each subsequent month. After that, the product falls off the pages. In addition to that, there are so many products, unless yours is a hot seller, the chance of an affiliate finding it is slim to none. So getting affiliates is not as easy as some would think.
Then of course there is that liberal refund policy. A customer can get a refund for no reason at all. And because many people know this, they will take advantage of that policy. This is especially true in the make money online niche.
Add to this the problem of having to get at least five sales from five different people using at least two types of credit cards, and for some people, vendors and affiliates alike, it can take some time before they ever see a dime from their efforts as PayPal purchases don’t count.
So as you can see, Clickbank is not a bed of roses. It has its good and bad. Ultimately, you have to decide if the good outweighs the bad.
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Clickbank seems to have a great business model, but it may not be working as well as some hope. If they raised the bar much higher on the quality of products allowed to be marketed through them, then those products would likely be more successfully marketed by affiliates.
I agree with you in regards to the fact that not all Clickbank products are of the highest quality. However, each affiliate has the option of what product to promote so the quality is something that is their responsibility to check since they are “putting their name on it” so to say. A second thing to consider when dealing with Clickbank and affiliates is that not all (probably a very small percentage) of vendors create quality tools such as graphic ads, banners, emails, articles, etc. to help an affiliate promote the product. If they did this they would draw more and better quality affiliates to promote their product(s).
i just signed up with Clickbank and i am very new to affiliate marketing. i just hope that i would earn on this program