ClickBank announced yesterday the launch of their new design. According to ClickBank, the functionality remains the same but they are trying to make improvements where they can and one of those improvements is a better design and an easier to understand layout. Personally, I really like the new design, I think they could still stand to make improvements and still make some things easier but I think this new design is a step in the right direction.
If you read my review a few weeks ago, I like and I use ClickBank but as I mentioned there are a lot of problems with the software they use and the network in general. One of the things I hate about ClickBank is the search feature for finding items and offers. One of the items I bought over a year ago through Click Bank was Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook. I wrote a review of the book recently and I went into ClickBank to grab a link to promote it. The item is called Super Affiliate Handbook. I did a search for that exact phrase in ClickBanks Marketplace. You would think it would come up as #1 but it wasn’t even on the first page. I had to browse to page 10 to find the item. That’s pretty bad.
It’s been that way for a long time. For a company that makes it’s money from consumers finding products and affiliates finding products to promote, you would think that search would be a top priority for them. Especially since they don’t offer a good way to just browse through the categories. Why make it hard for me to hunt for the product in order to get the link to promote it?
In my review of ClickBank a week or so ago, one of my complaints was that they really don’t offer much in the terms of links or creatives to promote the products and programs that are offered. That is still a big weak point but they have made some improvements in this area over the last month or two. Last month they announced the addition of a brand new Hop Ad Builder that allows you to create a block of rotating text ads, similar to the Google AdSense format.
It’s certainly an improvement over what they offered before (which was next to nothing) but it’s not great. You can’t specify a list of offers you want rotated in the mix, you can only provide keywords that you want it to use to find and rotate offers. If you remember, one of my other complaints with Clickbank is that they have a lot of crap offers and you will only hurt your reputation if you are reviewing and pushing items that have little value. I don’t like that I don’t have a lot of control over what ads will be rotated through using the hoAdBuilder. I am testing it out on the Blog so I can see what offers are passed through and what kind of interest my readers will have in it but I will likely remove it after my 3o day test. You can check out the details at ClickBank Hop Builde
More recently, someone created a Wordpress Plugin that allows you to quickly utilize the new ClickBank feature. It’s called the Hod Ad Plugin. It works pretty well, allows you to create the hop ads right inside wordpress and then create a widget to place it on your blog. Check it out by clicking here
If you have been trying to make money online for any length of time, you know that SEO and SEM are big pieces of the puzzle. It is an area that many people struggle with before things finally start clicking and they start to understand the basics. Amazingly enough, for both SEO and SEM, the basics are the most import keys to success with the search engines. There is always more to learn and you are certainly going to have an easier time of ranking if you have the more advanced techniques down but if you don’t have the basics, the foundation, nothing is going to happen for you.
So, if SEO basics are the most important thing to learn for getting ranked, what is the second most important thing? For me, that’s a no brainer, it’s data. If you don’t have the data, if you don’t know what keywords are being searched for and which ones drive conversions, if you don’t know what your competitors are doing, you are just stumbling in the dark with nothing to really focus on.
SEO Elite is one of the best tools I have used to get that data when I am optimizing a new mini site (if you don’t know what a mini site is, read my review of The Mini Site Formula from last month). Unlike a lot of the software and tools that are sold for SEO, it’s inexpensive and pays for itself in no time if you follow through and use it. The creator of the software shows you exactly what he has been able to do with it, he has used his tool to rank #1 for some very competitive keywords.
The SEO Elite software will show you the top ranked sites for the keywords you want to target and why they are ranked that way. It gives you a ton of info that can actually be a little overwhelming at first but they have created some great tutorials that teach you step by step on how to use the software and how to use the data. It will tell you what changes you need to make to your own web site in order to compete for rank with the sites that you are competing against.
It also has link building tools that will help you get those very valuable inbound links. Make sure you are careful with that tool, it is going to give you a big list of sites that you can approach for links, don’t use that list irresponsibly and start SPAMMING people, use it as a starting point. One thing I think SEO Elite should emphasize a little better is to communicate to customers that getting the most inbound links isn’t what is important, what is important is getting the highest quality inbound links that you can. Getting 100 crap quality links to your site is not as good as getting 1 or 2 high quality. So if you use this tool, don’t focus on mass quantity, focus on quality.
I have seen better tools, tools that are a bit more pretty but those tools cost significantly more than SEO Elite and the added features don’t justify the increased cost for me. They offer a 2 month money back guarantee and two months is plenty of time to test drive this software and see if it’s right for you. Check it out for yourself and look at the proof behind their claims by clicking here.
As with many of our reviews, this is going to be the first of two reviews on the ClickBank network. This review will focus mostly on ClickBank from the affiliate perspective. I will write a second post in the near future that will review this network from the standpoint of being an advertiser.
ClickBank has been around for a long time, they were founded in 1998 and they offer some pretty unique differences over your standard affiliate network. They found their niche early on and stuck with it. Clickbank focuses almost entirely on digital products like ebooks, software and membership sites. That is not a niche that any of the other big networks focus on. Sure they have offers in that space but no one has the breadth of offers that ClickBank does in that niche. For advertisers, what makes them stand out even more from the rest of the pack is that not only are they an affiliate network but they are also a payment processor, they will handle the full transaction for you if you have a digital product to sell. But, more on that in a future post, this article is about ClickBank for affiliates.
What I Like About ClickBank
ClickBank offers a huge marketplace of unique products that you won’t find elsewhere. They cover many different niches so for most affiliates, no matter what niche you are covering with a particular site, you will be able to find a product that matches your audiencee. At the top of my list for liking this network are the payouts. The payouts tend to be really big on Clickbank with offers regularly paying out 50% or more of the sale price. I would guess that the average commission is higher than all of the other big networks but I don’t have any data to back that up. It is very easy to get signed up and their is no approval process for individual merchants so you can hit the ground running and start promoting products immediately.
What I Don’t Like About Clickbank
Unfortunately, our list of things we don’t like about them is much larger than the list of things that we like. However, read the full review as overall we do actually recommend ClickBank as a source for products to offer on your site but there are a lot of things you should be aware of.
I find their technology to be pretty dated. The marketplace search functionality doesn’t work that great so it can take a lot of searching to find products you might be interested in. They don’t provide anything beyond the most basic tools and stats. They only provide you with a URL to promote the offer, there are few creative options when promoting an offer. If you want anything specific, you will need to contact the advertiser and ask them if they have ads available to use, they won’t be available through ClickBank.
They make it very easy and relatively inexpensive for Advertisers to sign up which is good and bad. Good in that there are a ton of possible items to promote and they are constantly adding new items, bad in that a lot of them are crap. I don’t personally recommend or advertise anything on this blog that I haven’t read, tried or experienced myself. Not everyone does that, not everyone has the money to test out everything first, that is a personal choice you need to make about your business. However, when it comes to ClickBank, I would highly recommend that you do not promote anything you haven’t tried. There are too many junk products out their and if you push junk to your visitors, they will not be your visitors for very long.
Related to that issue, because the quality level isn’t great, some ClickBank offers have a high level of returned transactions. If someone orders a product through ClickBank and then requests their money back or just claims they never authorized the purchase, you will lose your commission on that sale. That happens on every network but in my experience, it happens more on ClickBank than any other network I have worked with.
In closing, if you are careful about what you promote and go after quality products and can write compelling copy or come up with your own ads to run, I think ClickBank is worth a look. They have unique items and offers you won’t find anywhere else and do a great job of attracting niche products. You can check them out by clicking here.
