Alternatives to Clickbank

In a lot of areas of technology, there is a dominant player.  We know about how Microsoft pretty much dominates every aspect of PC technology.  There are smaller companies that dominate application areas to like Adobe for PDF file or Photoshop for photo editing.  And when it comes to the internet and online marketplaces, the dominant power there is no doubt Clickbank.    But it's good to know what alternatives are out there for comparison purposes.  And possibly the biggest real threat to the dominance of Clickbank is a site called PayDotCom.

Each of these fine alternatives has things to offer and some drawbacks too.  But it is worth knowing what to look for so you can make an intelligent decision.  There is just no question that Clickbank dominates the field for good reasons.    Clickbank is far and away the largest affiliate marketplace in the world.  So by putting your product on Clickbank, you could potentially see it picked up for over 150,000 affiliates if they notice you.  That is quite a sales army to cash in on.

An added benefit of utilizing Clickbank that makes it stand out versus PayDotCom is you can get this army of affiliates to sell your products far and wide and you don’t have to pay them a dime.  That is handled by the commission system which means you only see any money go to the ones that are successful and its part of the financial structure of the site.  That’s a brilliant way to organize their service and it has paid off for Clickbank and for the rest of us beautifully.

A few of the policy decisions Clickbank has made are not so brilliant and put them in the negative side of the evaluation.  The policy that is beneficial to Clickbank customers but causes a lot of problems is their iron clan refund policy.  This is an outstanding customer relationship approach because it sends the message that Clickbank stand behind the products sold on the service.  But in a world such as Clickbank's where the entire transaction and all products are digital, it pretty much leaves an open door to thieves and shoplifters who download products and then file for refund without explanation.

PayDotCom is an alterative to Clickbank that has not been able to capture as much of the market.  The commissions issue may be one reason their growth is slower.    Because Clickbank pays the affiliates and keeps that burden off of the merchants who come to the marketplace, the transactions are clean and more merchants feel freedom to participate in Clickbank.  And then because Clickbank has become the premier marketplace for digital products, more affiliates want to be involved which only continues to add to the momentum of the site to dominate this market.

From the other side of the transaction, when a merchant wants to put a product into a marketplace and then go through the support steps of linking to it from a web site and adding keyword optimized articles to drive traffic to the products, that merchant wants to know the largest affiliate base is out there to take it from there and really get that product into broad distribution and sales.  There simply is no better way to do that than to go with Clickbank.

In a way, Clickbank succeeds by its success.  And even though PayDotCom is a viable alternative, it's difficult to capture enough market to interest merchants and affiliates to switch.   And until Clickbank makes some major mistake, which they probably wont do, that situation is probably not going to change.

The Wizard of Clickbank

If you are attracted to the huge money making possibilities of Clickbank, you are not alone.  The affiliate marketing profit potential on Clickbank are huge and.   But like any new market, you have to learn how to work the system to your advantage. The quicker become a wizard of Clickbank, the faster you will make some real money in the digital marketplace.

Clickbank is in every way a real marketplace.  As such it is a place where legitimate vendors offer real products that add value to customer's lives and purchases are made.  Too many people see the internet as one big scam artist paradise.  But you are not a scam artist and you just want to make a good return on your product and make a good living like anyone else.  That is what Clickbank is all about.

From a merchant standpoint, you will have achieved "wizard" status when you are selling a wide variety of product consistently.  So to get started, shoot for putting five products into the marketplace.  Examine the product categories to find niches that fit your product catalog.  Don’t be drawn to the categories that promote money making schemes as they are just that - schemes which you don’t want to be associated with by your long term customers on Clickbank.

After you have your start up products to put onto Clickbank, waste no time in finding good keywords that will draw traffic to those items to get sales moving.  Keyword selection is a science in its own right but you can use internet tools to find good keywords that have a track record of pulling traffic historically.  Don’t be afraid to buy or use such keyword optimizers as any tool that can help you legally make money in your business is worth using.

If you can come up with twenty or thirty solid keywords that you can build your Clickbank marketing plan around, that’s a solid starting place.  With the keywords captured, now create articles around those keywords.  Now we are not all writers but there are good ghostwriters on services like Rent-a-Coder that can kick out these articles for you at a reasonable rate.  The writer may know keyword optimization rules but they are not that hard to get used to.  Basically if the keyword is in the article title and then 3-4 times per 500 word article, that’s pretty good optimization.

There are a lot of good article sites you can use to put your articles into internet circulation and that will drive traffic to your products well if your keywords do their job for you.  When you first are setting up for Clickbank, establish accounts on these article sites because you will use them a lot.  Don’t just rest with a few articles but try to get an initial set of four or five per product out there and then follow up  over the next week or two, try to kick out two or three a day around each product using those keywords and get them into circulation.

There are always new ways for you to get awareness of your product raised through various internet methods of promotion and you should explore them all.  You can place ads on popular internet services to build traffic to your Clickbank items.  RSS feeds and ads on related internet sites are also well proven methods of creating more sales for you.

You can see that the "set up" for these various services has to be a part of your entrance into the Clickbank system.  But once you are rolling, you will use them over and over and get plenty of good from your membership fees.  And you will have a system you can repeat with new products as well and build your Clickbank catalog and build profits along the way as well.

Tools Clickbank Gives You

Before the world of the internet, you made money by offering services to customers.  And part of what made you a success was a great set of tools.  So to be a great car mechanic, you need outstanding wrenches and a good shop.  A dentist has his drills and a stone mason his trowel.  So we should not be too surprised that to be a success in the world of internet marketing, good tools will make or break you here too.

Clickbank is clearly one of the real hot online resources to make big profits from affiliate sales but you still have to know your tools and know your stuff to make it work.  Anyone who takes advantage of Clickbank wants to become one of the great affiliates using the system.  So like that smart mechanism, dentist or stone mason, using the tools that Clickbank gives you to become a success will make or break you in this virtual world of sales and marketing.

The ClickBank calculator is a powerful tool because knowing how to use it makes enables you to compute your commission on each product without having to have a degree in math.  You can access the calculator at http://www.clickbankguide.com/calculator.htm/  Along with the calculator itself, this is where Clickbank lays out a table of most used prices so you can understand how the tool functions.  With these starter tools, you can create your own price tables that will be your roadmap to success.

At "template" is a common format that you can use over and over again in any setting to save you from constantly coming up with a layout for a letter, a survey or some other form of communications.  Often webmasters use one template for all the web pages on a site they are creating.  It’s a great tool for standardizing what works and sticking with it.  The tool set that ClickBank provides is a great source of such templates for you to supply to your affiliates or for you to use for your own internet marketing and merchandising.

Mass mailing through email is the backbone of any successful internet marketing campaign.  While in this day and age, avoiding becoming a spammer is a science in itself, that doesn’t eliminate the need for a good mass mailing tool to add to your arsenal of tools you will use to reduce the work of running your online business.  But because ClickBank knows that a tool to send out large amounts of emails to customers or prospective customers, they are there to give you a group email tool.

One problem that can become a nightmare to keep straight is what affiliates are to be considered future partners and which ones are future competition or "the enemy".  So a tool to organize your affiliate contact list can be gold when you get a large affiliate list which will happen when you become successful.  In addition to keeping tabs who are already onboard with you as an affiliate ClickBank's tools helps you track potential partners so you can contact them before they become "the enemy".  Better to join up with successful internet marketers and everyone work together to get rich than work against each other and lose.

Keyword optimization may be one of the hottest internet marketing tricks of the trade to really drive traffic to your website.  Keywords are what Google and search engines use to rank web sites so if you have your keywords "optimized" that means your web site will perform well on Google or Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.  ClickBank can help with finding the right keywords to optimize so as you build up your online content and article base, you are naturally driving traffic online to generate revenue from your site marketing tools.  Using this tool well is just smart merchandising online.

This is just a sampling of the types of tools that ClickBank provides to make you a success.  When you are a success, they are a success so take the time to learn to use these tools well and to discover the vast array of other tools out there from ClickBank so you can use convert this knowledge into online gold for your internet business.

A Little Bragging Goes a Long Way

Its one thing to have a great product and it's quite another to make sure customers know about it.  And that principle is even more vitally true when you list your product on the Clickbank marketplace.  There are literally tens of thousands of products available for affiliates to pick up and sell within Clickbank.   And even though there are over 150,000 affiliates, that is a huge marketing environment.

The literature about Clickbank would give you the impression that all you have to do is set up your account on Clickbank and get your digital product out there into the Clickbank market and, presto, you will see massive sales by the weekend.  But if it was that easy, there would be millions of people on Clickbank.  The laws of economics still prevail and this is a marketplace so even after you get your product out there, there are some basic things you must be prepared to do.

For one thing, to make it in any marketplace and Clickbank is no exception, you have to offer a product that gives value to the consumer.  For one thing, one of the most notorious problems in Clickbank is also one of its strongest customer service features which is the iron clad money back guarantee.  So the one thing you can do to keep that well known Clickbank issue from taking away the good sales you do get is to make sure your product is rock solid quality and that the customer gets more than he expects from the purchase.

Another very basic principle of marketing but its worth bring back up here because it is even more applicable in the virtual marketplace of Clickbank is originality.  For your product to stand out, it has to have something to offer the customer that nobody else offers.  That can be tough because the categories of digital products, which are all that Clickbank sells, are somewhat limited.  You cannot sell a product that requires a physical delivery.  It must be entirely digital which means you are talking about ebooks, digital music, online courses and software and games for the most part.

Clickbank does a good job of providing a categorization system so people looking for types of product can get to it and then for a special kind of product in your niche can find you.  But even with that, you are going to be "on the shelf" with a lot of other products that look and seem very much like your product.  Finding a way to make your product unique and one that touches a need in the consumer that nobody else touches is the goal of any business.  So look at the competition even when you are designing your product and long before you put it out there into the Clickbank to find that "hook" that will make the affiliate pick up your product rather than others like it and for customers want to buy it for its unique twist as well.

But even if you have the most unique and highly needed product there is, its not going anywhere unless you shout about it.  A little bragging goes a lot way in the word of marketing and on the internet, getting attention to your Clickbank product calls for a lot of bragging.  It starts with your product name and the marketing description you use to make the product shout out right from the Clickbank marketplace product pages.

Make sure the uniqueness of your product is highlighted in the title and every aspect of your description and marketing of the product.  Never stop thinking of ways to promote your product.  By making sure the world knows how great it is, you are also make sure that more people get to use it and your Clickbank sales are rewarding and profitable for you.