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I would venture a guess that many affiliate marketers started their careers on Clickbank. With thousands of products and over 100,000 affiliates it is a paradise regardless of whether you are selling or you are a publisher seeking affiliates to sell your products.

As good as Clickbank is there are areas of the sales process that could use a little revamping in my opinion and that is when I went on a quest to see if there were any third party solutions. A couple of the issues that I felt needed to be addressed were the ability to send people to more than one landing page. Even though Clickbank allows you to have 500 products per account you can only send them to one landing page. Whatever landing page you have is what you are stuck with. Not a very good option. The only way I was able to get around it was to create numerous Clickbank accounts which became a bit pricey after a while. This was also the only way I could come up with to increase gravity on individual products. There are a couple other things like capturing my contact’s names and email addresses and the ability to integrate with other third party systems like DLGuard and Aweber.

As I searched the web for a solution I came across EasyClickMate. I did a little research and found that the software had many satisfied customers and decided to see if it would work for me. At first I was a little concerned because it originally came out in 2002 but it has been updated, improved and re-issued as of June this year (2009).

The easiest way to describe EasyClickMate would be to call it a custom affiliate management system. It basically allows you to manage your affiliates without the hassle of tracking and paying them. Clickbank does this for you.

Installation of EasyClickMate is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require a great deal of time. You do need to be careful when entering all the information so that everything is set up correctly from the beginning. There are several advanced features that you can set such as:

1. The number of active affiliates (those who are actually sending traffic to your site) to display
2. The ability to let your affiliate create their own landing/squeeze page. This is huge because it will allow super affiliates who may be better at writing sales copy to use their own. You also have the option to not have this feature shown.
3. When an affiliate signs up to sell your product you can automatically add them to your autoresponder.
4. A new feature that was recently added was the ability to ban countries. This will allow your sales page to be seen but the user will not be able to click on the order link to purchase. This was set up to help keep the “professional” refunders from continually stealing your products.
5. If you are good publisher and create banners and other tools to make it easier for your affiliates to sell your product you can easily direct them to the affiliate tools page.
6. Last but not least is the ability to run third party scripts. This is an optional feature and not for the casual user. You need to be able to code the integration or pay to have it done. However, depending upon your needs this offers a great deal of flexibility to the program.

The normal process of a Clickbank transaction goes like this:

• Customer goes to your sales page and makes purchase
• Customer is directed to ClickBank payment
• Customer is then directed to the thank you / Download Page

When using EasyClickMate the process is a little different.

• Customer goes to your sales page and makes purchase
• Customer is directed to ClickBank payment
• Customer is directed to the EasyClickMate page
• Customer is then directed to the Thank you / Download Page

This additional “layer” is where the purchase data is passed through EasyClickMate before redirecting the customer to the final thankyou/download page. This allows EasyClickMate to capture the customer’s email address and name (or any other information) in the admin area.

Adding products to EasyClickMate is also a fairly easy process but you must update you Clickbank account before you can actually use EasyClickMate. All you do is add your product name, price, sales page URL, alternate payment page (if you use this option), and the thank you/download page. Rather than sending the customer directly to the thank you / download page you can specify the be sent to your autoresponder opt-in page and then directed to the thank you / download page.

A complete set of instructions are supplied via PDF for both installation and integration with your autoresponder.

The admin interface contains your control panel and links to where all your statistical information will be displayed.

The Summary Page presents you with an overview consisting of the number of affiliates, total sales and a breakdown of affiliate sales vs. personal sales. This will allow you to see whether your product is traffic driven by you or whether this product is affiliate driven.

The Product Stats Page provides you with an overall picture of your product stats, to date. This includes the product name, hits, sales, and conversion ratio. You are able to select individual products to view so you know which affiliate referred the sale, the receipt number and the referring URL. You also have the option of choosing the month to view or all stats to date.

The next page is your Affiliate Stats Page which provides you with valuable information on each “active” affiliate. The stats that are displayed are only for those affiliates that have driven traffic to the product. You have several options on how to display your information. You can do the following:

1. Display the top number of affiliates (you set the number in the Control Panel)
2. You can view your top performing affiliates by year and month
3. You can view individual affiliate stats

The stats box itself shows the affiliate’s nickname, sales, hits, conversion ratio, and average ratio. The last two “ratios” are important because they can tell you where improvement might be made in each individual’s case.

The next page in the admin site is the Affiliate Resource Page. If you want your affiliates to be successful then I would advise to make this a priority on every product you sell. The more tools you give an affiliate the more they will be able to do for you. You are able to add up to 5 pages of resources for your affiliates. These resources can be banners, articles, email, etc. The resource pages must be placed in a specific directory in order for EasyClickMate to find them and display them correctly. If they are not there then the resource option will not be available to your affiliates.

The Ban Countries Page is very straight forward. You simply select the country that you wish to ban and click on the arrow to move it to the banned countries box and you are done.

The Customers Stat Page provides you with the same information that Clickbank provides. Clickbank information is simply passed back to your admin system for easy access.

The Export page gives you the option to export the following stats:

• Product Hits Data
• Product Sales Data
• Affiliate Data
There is also an option to backup your database.

Customization in my opinion is not as easy as the rest of the installation and setup if you are not familiar with html and php. It requires good attention to detail. However you can make it match your website so that everything appears natural.

There is an integration document that provides clear instructions so don’t be afraid to customize your pages just be sure to pay attention to the details. As I set up the installation I had a few questions which Adrian (Adrian Ling is the developer of EasyClickMate) was quick to answer. In my opinion the customer service he provided me was excellent.

I really like EasyClickMate because it solves the problems I mentioned early in the article. I no longer have to purchase multiple Clickbank accounts, I can allow my affiliates to use their own landing/squeeze pages if they prefer, I can track everything concerning my affiliates, sales and the ratios related to them, and last but not least is the excellent customer service that Adrian supplies. That is truly rare these days.

There are several other features that this review did not touch on but are certainly worth mentioning.

• CB-Swithing – The ability to send customers to another payment processor if Clickbank was down for any reason.
• Sales Letter Personalization – You or your affiliates can send personalized sales letters to subscribers. I have not tested this but I can see where it could easily increase conversion rates.
• Email Notification of Affiliate/Non-Affiliate Sales
• 100% Compatible with ClickBank’s hoplink and tracking code (“tid”)

If you sell multiple Clickbank products this package will make your life much easier and provide you with tools that Clickbank just doesn’t have. Please check out EasyClickMate at your conveninece and I am sure you will agree with me that this is a must have product for publishers on Clickbank.

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Related posts:

1. Should You Be Using Clickbank?
2. Affiliate Marketing Basics
3. Simple Ways To Achieve Success As An Affiliate
4. 7 Things You Must Have To Sell Information Products
5. Never Fail Using ClickBank Again!
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