Gary Nugent’s

“Getting Started With Clickbank”

Report
Brought to you by Derrick VanDyke

http://www.ClickbankElite.net/ClickbankReport 1
CONTENTS
Legal Notices 3
What You Can Do With This Report 4
What Prompted This Report 4
What Is Clickbank 5
Joining Clickbank 6
A Few Simple Notes About Signing Up 8
How To Make Money From Clickbank 13
Even If You Don’t Have Your Own Product To Sell
Why Do All The Top Marketers Use Clickbank 16
...And Why Should You?
Insider Power Tips That Boost Your Earnings 17
Ghost In The Machine 20
Clickbank Payment Processing 20
How To Promote Your Links 21
How To Track Your Sales 22
Why Cloaking Your Links Is Important 24
Clickbank Elite And Cloaked Links 26
How To Sell Your Own Product On Clickbank 26
The Quick Way To Get Your Product Listed In The Marketplace 28
How To Leverage The Selling Power Of Affiliates 30
How To Become A Top Seller On Clickbank 31
How To Build Your Affiliate Army 32
Closing Thoughts 33
Recommended Resources 35
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Brandable Report
A brandable version of this report is available for $3.00. This will let you
insert your affiliate id into the report and you can then earn commissions
from any sales made through your branded report. You keep all commis-
sions earned.

Order Your Brandable Report Here

Legal Notices
Note: Yes! You do have the right to give people access to this
report. BUT You cannot charge a fee for people to buy it. You
can only give it away (that includes the branded version).
Copyright © Gary Nugent, 2006

DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES: The information presented

herein represents the view of the author as of the date of publication. Be-
cause of the rate with which conditions change, the author reserves the right
to alter and update his opinion based on the new conditions. The report is
for informational purposes only. While every attempt has been made to ver-
ify the information provided in this report, neither the author nor his
affiliates/partners assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or
omissions. Any slights of people or organizations are unintentional. If ad-
vice concerning legal or related matters is needed, the services of a fully
qualified professional should be sought. This report is not intended as for
use as a source of legal or accounting advice. You should be aware of any
laws which govern business transactions or other business practices in your
country and state. Any reference to any person or business whether living
or dead is purely coincidental.

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What You Can Do With This Report
Here’s what you can do with this report:

· You can give this report to your own list or contacts

· You can give this report as a bonus of your own when you are pro-
moting your own or someone else’s product

· You can give this report as an incentive to get people to join your
own list

What You Can Not Do With This Report

You can’t sell this report or charge any kind of fee for it!

What Prompted This Report?

Clickbank has been around for years but seems to really have come to
prominence is the last year as a real money-generating source of income. Of
course there have been affiliates who’ve been making a good living off
Clickbank for several years, but many new to the affiliate marketing game
are not that familiar with Clickbank or how it operates. Or, indeed, how it
can be used to find great products to promote.

So that’s what this report is about. You might think of it as a Clickbank

Primer or Starter Kit.

On the one hand, many affiliates are making a decent amount of money
from Clickbank. On the other hand, many more affiliates either aren’t mak-
ing a cent or the commissions they do earn are nothing to write home about
(and chances are that you’re one of them!). Maybe that’s because they’re
not aware of just how great an opportunity Clickbank presents.

So this report is my attempt to balance things out and to help YOU join the
ranks who ARE making good money from Clickbank.

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So let’s get started. Here’s what’s so brilliant about Clickbank:

· You don’t need to have created your own product; you can sell
someone else’s instead!

· Joining Clickbank is absolutely free

· It takes just minutes before you’re up and running as an affiliate

marketer

Why You Need To Read This Report

· You’ll find out how easy it is to get into affiliate marketing using
Clickbank and why some of the most successful internet market-
ers use Clickbank

· I’ll show you some of the techniques hugely successful marketers

use to make millions

· You can apply what you learn from this report and start making
money, whether you use Clickbank already or not

What Is Clickbank?
Clickbank is an online marketplace that lists over 10,000 digital products
(new products are added daily). Each product pays a sales commission
which incentivizes affiliates to sell the product. Commissions range from
1% to 75% but, typically, are around 50%.

It’s a great way to get the word out on products for owners, and it is an ex-
cellent way for affiliate marketers to earn money by promoting other peo-
ple's products!

The Clickbank product list is always changing as new products are added
and old products are removed.

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There are two ways you can make money from Clickbank:

1. By selling other people’s products; i.e. acting as an affiliate mar-

keter

2. By selling your own product (and getting affiliates to sell it for

you)

If you have your own product, that’s great, but the majority of people
won’t, so they’ll be restricted to option 1, selling other people’s products.

But, first things first...

Joining Clickbank
As I said earlier, joining Clickbank is free. All you need to do is go here:

http://www.clickbank.com/accountSignup.htm

And enter your details. The signup page looks like this (see next page)...

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Clickbank Signup Page:

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A Few Simple Notes About Signing Up
These are all pretty obvious points but are worth mentioning anyway.

Clickbank pays affiliates by check. Clickbank does take payments through

PayPal but regardless of how a buyer pays for a product, affiliates are only
paid by check. So it’s important that you enter your real name on the form
(so you can cash the checks!)

Make sure your address is correct. It’s not much good to you if your neigh-
bor or the guy down the block gets your checks, is it?!

A note for non-U.S. Residents. The ZIP code field has a U.S. bias. If your
post code has less than 5 digits, add preceding zeros or the post code won’t
be accepted. For example, if your postal code is 801, type in 00801.

Enter a valid email address. Your password will be emailed to this address
(without this you won’t be able to access your account). Notices of sales (if
you sell your own product) will also be sent to this address.

Clickbank requires a phone number. Now I’m always dubious about giving
out my number as I’ve received unwanted calls from telemarketers on pre-
vious occasions. Clickbank can be trusted though.

By the way, if you want to hear how one unhappy recipient dealt with
an umwanted telemarketing call, you should really listen to this re-
corded conversation (believe me, you’ll enjoy it!):

Lastly, you need to select a nickname (Clickbank ID) to use. This will be
the name of your account, so choose something meaningful to you. The
name is not case sensitive.

Once you’re satisfied that everything is correct, click the Submit button at
the bottom of the page.

If the nickname you chose is already in use, you’ll see this message appear
at the top of the screen:

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 Sorry, that username is not available. Please choose another one.

...and you’ll have to select a new nickname.

Once your application has been accepted, this screen will appear:

Now check your email for your confirmation code (this is also your pass-
word) and copy and paste the code into the Confirmation Code box. Then
click the Finish button.

You’ll then be redirected to a page that tells you your account has been set
up. The page also shows your account name and password. Make sure you
take note of both bits of information!

That’s It! You’re now officially a member of Clickbank!

Go here to login to your account: http://www.clickbank.com/login.htm

Once you’ve logged in, your Account Home page will appear (see next
page). This is the screen that will list your commissions earned by date.

The screen is broken into three sections. At the top are your Payperiod
Sales Subtotals. These are your commissions totalled by 2-week period.
You can click the dates to get a breakdown of any sales or refunds (yes,
they do happen!) for that period.

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Below that are the Daily Sales Subtotals which show your daily commis-
sions earned.

The third section, at the bottom of the page just lists some payment period
information.

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Now click the Account Settings tab. This page will appear:

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If you’re a U.S. Resident, you’ll need to apply for an EIN if you make over
$600 from Clickbank in a year. No sense in getting on the IRS’s bad side. If
you don’t already have ann EIN, click the TAX ID link and follow the in-
structions to get one.

Non-U.S. citizens can ignore this field.

The other field you’ll need to change is Payment Threshold. The default
setting here is $100, which means Clickbank will only send out a check af-
ter you’ve earned at least $100 in commissions.

I recommend you drop this down to a $25 threshold, at least when you’re
starting off so you get the spoils of your efforts sooner.

When you click the Reporting tab, it defaults to listing the paychecks
you’ve been sent. Click the dates for a more detailed breakdown of each
period. Click the Transactions lists subtab to see your transactions (i.e.
products sold or refunded, etc.).

Note: It’s important to be aware that refunds will happen. People want
their money back for many reasons. If you’re seeing a lot of refunds for
one particular product, maybe the product isn’t everything it’s cracked
up to be and it might be time to look for an alternative and dump the
current product entirely.

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How To Make Money From Clickbank Even If You
Don’t Have Your Own Product To Sell
Ok, so you you’re now a member of Clickbank but you don’t have your
own product to sell. Not to worry; on Clickbank there are over 10,000 prod-
ucts you can sell. All you need to do is find quality products to promote.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking just because a product’s listed on Click-
bank that it’s actually any good. Like any store, some products are fantastic
and some are complete kack.

So how do you go about finding products to sell?

Well, for ages that was difficult and time-consuming as Clickbank didn’t
provide a search engine. So what you had to do was click through hundreds
of pages looking at products and trying to find something worth promoting.

Then (only in the last year), Clickbank finally added a search engine to their
site. Now you can type in keywords and search the entire database (or spe-
cific categories or subcategories) for products that contain those keywords.
Let’s take an example.

Go to: https://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

…the Clickbank Marketplace page that contains the Clickbank Search En-
gine. Adsense products are always popular, so type Adsense into the Key-
words box and click the Go button.

At time of writing, 57 Adsense related products were listed in order of de-

creasing popularity.

The search engine also lets you order the results by Gravity, Earned Per
Sale and % Referred. This is what these terms mean:

Gravity:
Gravity determines how popular a product is by how many affiliates have
sold the product. Gravity doesn't tell you how many affiliates have sold a
product (i.e. a gravity of 20 doesn't mean 20 affiliates have sold it) but the

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higher the gravity, the more popular the product among affiliates and the
more copies are being sold by those affiliates. Products with a gravity of 70
or over are well established, and popular.

Note: Since high-gravity products are popular, there'll be a fair amount of

competition in selling them. These aren't the products for affiliate market-
ing newbies to promote. Competition from knowledgeable, well-established
affiliates will wipe you out (unless you're extremely lucky).

Newbies to selling Clickbank products are recommended to search for

products with a gravity between 10 and 70. These are potential rising stars
and won't be as heavily promoted as more popular products. Less competi-
tion means a better chance of getting sales yourself.

Earned Per Sale:

You might think this is the obvious data to sort on. After all, earn more per
sale and you you'll get a bigger bi-weekly check, won't you? Well, not nec-
essarily. Just because a product offers a big commission payout doesn't
mean it's popular. Bigger fees for a product also means less people are
likely to buy it (the bigger the fee the more the customer will think about
whether or not to part with his cash).

There's a balancing act to consider here. Should you promote a high-paying

product that only gets a few sales a month or a lower-paying product that
sells in bigger quantities? What products you choose depends on the niches
you're particularly interested in. Just don't let greed rule your thinking!

%Referred:
This tells you how many of the sales of a product were made by affiliates.
So a 60% value means that 60% of that product’s sales were made by affili-
ates. More affiliates means more competition. But more affiliates also
means the product is selling well, so it might be one where you can take a
slice of the action.

Popularity:
This is Clickbank's rating of a product's popularity in the categories and
subcatergories where it's listed. The higher the popularity the better. But the
more popular, the stiffer the competition.

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While the Clickbank search engine is a step in the right direction, it’s really
only a starting point in researching products to promote.

I’ve written some software that makes it easier to find and research hot
Clickbank products to promote, called Clickbank Elite. It will let you
search the Clickbank list of products:

· Find the most popular products in the main Clickbank categories

· Find the most popular products in specific categories & subcategories
· Find the products affiliates are promoting
· List only new products
· Search for products by keyword (search only the product title or the
title and the description)
· Search for products by Clickbank ID (i.e. For products owned by a
particuluar Clickbank member)
· Order the search results in various ways
· Projects let you search for products that are up and coming and aren’t
being heavily promoted by other affiliates
· Check the trends on products to see if they’re performing well or not
· Instantly create your hoplinks and cloak them from Commission
Thieves
· Check overall rankings for a product to see how it’s performing in all
the categories and subcategories it’s listed in
· Export your results to a spreadsheet

There’s more information on Clickbank Elite here.

Know Your Market

One thing you should do when promoting Clickbank products is to pick

products for a market you know. If you’re knowledgeable about the market,
you’ll be much more convincing to people and they’ll be more likely to buy
through your links.

One of the worst ways to promote is to pick some product you know noth-
ing about and whose market you know are not familiar with and try to sell
it. Your lack of knowledge will be all too apparent to potential buyers and
they’ll move on to someone else.

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Why Do All The Top Marketers Use Clickbank
...And Why Should You?
Selling Clickbank products effectively is not a relatively simple process.
While the three steps involved are apparently simple, two require some
work.

2. Sign up to Clickbank
Ok, this one is dead easy

2. Find hot products to promote

Seems simple. But it’s not. It gets easier with experience. Using the right
tools saves you a lot of time. You can then put that time into researching
other products to promote and boosting your commissions even further.
Clickbank Elite was specifically created to make finding hot products easier.

3. Promoting products for commissions

Again, a simple concep. Tons of ebooks have been written on how to drive
traffic to websites or successfully advertise on pay-per-click websites. This
is the make or break stage. Even if you find some great products to promote,
unless you can make people aware of them, you won’t make any money.
The top guys are all experts at this, which is why they’ve become so suc-
cessful. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have your share of success. Here
are some ways of driving traffic to your links:

· Mailing your own list of subscribers

· Joining a membership opt-in list
· Creating your own membership website
· Using Pay-Per-Click services like Google Adwords
· Advertising on traffic exchanges
· Emailing solo ads to ezines
· Joining a free ads site

There are many other options as well. Check out the Affiliate Marketing
Quickstart page for more options.

If you’re worried that you lack the knowledge for step 3 in particular,
DON’T! The greatest difficulty you’ll probably face is getting past the psy-

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chological barrier that things are working against you or that you really
can’t make this work. Don’t fall into that trap. Take baby steps. You won’t
solve all the problems in an afternoon. But you WILL solve them. And
things will get easier with time.

So don’t procrastinate! Don’t dither! Get started right away. Use the
“insider” power tips I use to make more money selling Clickbank products.

Insider Power Tips That Boost Your Earnings

With a little research, you can be up and running as a Clickbank affiliate
and, more importantly, earning commissions.

You could get lucky and pick some incredible products and the most effec-
tive way to drive traffic to those products. It’s more likely though that
you’ll need to spend time selecting and researching products and how best
to promote them.

Here are some tactics that’ll help you achieve success more quickly:

Tip #1: Only promote products that you’re passionate about

Passion speaks volumes. It enthuses people. If you’re an expert or any way

knowledgeable about a subject, you’ll be much more convincing when try-
ing to convince them to part with their money. If you express your passion,
people will want to share in it and they’ll be much more predisposed to
buying.

Start your affiliate marketing career in those areas you know most about.
Obviously, there has to be money in the market or people won’t buy. Don’t
give in to the temptation to sell the products that give the biggest commis-
sions, especially if you know nothing about the product or the market its
aimed at. That’s a sure-fire way to fail.

Tip #2: Only promote products that you’re familiar with

It’s important to know the products you sell. You’ll know their strengths
and weaknesses and be better able to sell them. Telling your readers how

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you benefited from a product is a great way of selling it. Try and use case
studies that show what things were like before you used the product and
after you used it.

Consequently, you should always buy a product you intend to promote. If

you’re dubious about buying it, then why shouldn’t your potential custom-
ers be equally as dubious? If you’re not convinced, why should they be?

Then familiarize yourself with the product. You can then sell it on its bene-
fits. If it has any drawbacks, you could mention those and offer a solution
as well.

Tip #3: Add more value

The classic way of promoting a product is to use your affiliate link and sim-
ply redirect people to the product’s sales page. That’s fine if the page con-
tains a good sales letter or if you’re simply testing response to that product.

One better long-term tactic is to write a review of the product. Don’t just
write a “this product is brilliant” type review. You’ve got to write it as a
user of the product, not as a sales pitch. So say what’s wrong with it or
mention things it lacks and provide solutions. That might be through infor-
mation you can provide yourself or through another product you recom-
mend.

Another effective strategy is to initially attack the product and then gradu-
ally come around to liking it and then to why you now find it indispensable.

One great tactic to mention is the Before and After results. Show how the
product has worked for you in a case study.

If you’re competing with other affiliates selling the same product, then you
need to give your visitors a reason to buy through your link, rather than
through another affiliate’s link (or through your customer’s own link). The
best way to do this is incentivize your potential customers by offering them
exclusive bonuses if they buy through your link. You want to provide bo-
nuses that are relevant to the product, not some crappy freebie you got last
week. And there’s no point in giving a bonus on cat-breeding techniques if
the product’s about digital photography. It’s all about adding value to the

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product and product relevancy. Make your bonuses better than anyone
else’s and people will want to buy through your links.

Tip #4: Don’t be like everyone else

Most Clickbank affiliates are lazy. They’re quite happy to simply redirect
people to the product sales pages. Maybe they’re just not clued in and they
don’t realise the money they’re letting slip through their fingers.

If you provide additional value through an honest review and/or extra bo-
nuses, you’re way ahead of those other affiliates and people will buy from
you.

A recent poll found that only 3% of affiliate marketers have built a list of
subscribers to their newsletter. All the top marketers have lists. Why? Be-
cause they’re lucrative. They almost provide a guaranteed income. You can
market to these people again and again and, if you’re honest and provide
quality information, they’ll buy from you again and again. You don’t have
to keep looking for new customers. You can just add new ones to your ex-
isting customer base. It seems such an obvious thing to do, it’s surprising
how few actually do it. Check out the Affiliate Marketing Quickstart page
for resources on list building.

By providing such a newsletter service, you’re saving people time and

money researching products. You’re also giving them shortcuts to the best
possible products so they don’t end up wasting their money on crap ones.

The more information you can provide, the more valuable a resource you
become to them. And they’ll be more inclined to buy the products you rec-
ommend.

One common newbie mistake is to take the shotgun approach to marketing -

finding lots of good products and trying to market them all at the same
time. Not a good idea. Concentrate on one product. Get that right and you
can then repeat the process for any product . If you try to market too many
products without knowing what you’re doing, some may do well, others not
and you won’t know why some are selling well. It’ll all be down to pot
luck, a roll of the dice. That’s not the way to do business.

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Ghost In The Machine
For most of my working life, I’ve been a computer programmer. When you
think about it, it’s an odd occupation. All you do, when you come right
down to it, is shunt electrons through wires and chips. There’s nothing solid
you can hold up at the end of the day and say “I made this” as you can with
any type of physical product like a table, a house or whatever.

Clickbank products are like that. All electrons and no protons. Ethereal pat-
terns in computer chips and on hard drives. Ghosts in the machine.

Everything in the Clickbank marketplace is a digital product. There’s noth-

ing physical to ship and there are no invoices to print and mail out. It’s all
handled electronically.

And none of it, not a single part of selling a product need cost you a dime.
Not even a cent! [True, you can spend money on advertising].

It’s a weird business when you really think about it!

You get paid if someone buys a product and Clickbank deducts some ad-
ministration fees from your commission. But if you don’t sell anything,
you’re never out of pocket.

Where else could you start and run a business with no startup capital or run-
ning costs?

Clickbank Payment Processing

Up until very recently, Clickbank only accepted payment for products via
credit card. But their credit card processing was one of the best in the busi-
ness.

You’ll find that many affiliate marketers take payments through PayPal. It’s
one of the most popular online payment processors on the internet. And
their fees are very low. PayPal allows people to accept payments by credit
card and echeck. Due to some bad experiences, some people refuse to pay

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for anything by PayPal so, if you only take PayPal, that’s a whole section of
the buying public that you’ll never do business with.

Clickbank realised the potential of being able to take PayPal payments, in

addition to the credit card transactions they were already taking, so they’ve
added an option to their payments pages that allows a buyer to order a prod-
uct either using a credit card directly or through PayPal.

If you do have your own PayPal account, you’ll never need to use it to sell
Clickbank products. Even if you’ve had a falling out with PayPal and
you’ve sworn never to deal with them again, Clickbank handles all the Pay-
Pal transactions independently of you (through their own PayPal account).
You just get your commission check every 2 weeks, regardless of what way
the buyer has paid for his product.

Adding PayPal to their payment options has been a very smart move by
Clickbank and has dramatically increased the customer base for Clickbank
products.

Clickbank take care of all the payment processing, any fraud issues, divvies
up the payment to the product owner and affiliate and handles all the back-
end stuff such as issuing refunds, doing credit checks and, most important-
ly, handling affiliate payments automatically (as well as mailing out those
all-important commission checks).

It’s this ease of use that appeals so much to affiliates. There’s literally noth-
ing more to worry about than promoting your links. If you’ve created your
own product, you just keep recruiting new affiliates, training them up (by
giving them material to promote your product) and they, in turn, keep send-
ing you new customers.

Clickbank simply offer the easiest way to take payments online. Every
other online processor seems kludgy in comparison.

How To Promote Your Links

Look at any product in the Clickbank Marketplace and you’ll see a create
hoplink link for it. Click the link and a new window will pop up where you

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enter your Clickbank ID. Click the Submit button, and your link will be
created - you just need to copy and paste it from the window. Clickbank
affiliate links have a simple format:

http://yourid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net

You simply replace yourid with your own Clickbank nickname. The ven-
dorid is provided by Clickbank or Clickbank Elite when you click the cre-
ate hoplink link.

All you need do is promote your affiliate link and start generating sales.
Take a look at the Affiliate Quickstart Page for various ideas on advertising
your links.

How To Track Your Sales

Up until very recently, tracking where your sales came from was a real
pain. Why should you even bother doing such a thing? Well, so you can see
what promotions are working and which ones are not.

Suppose you’re running a Google Adwords campaign. Wouldn’t you like to

know if sales are coming your way from that promotion or whether your
advertising budget is simply going down the Swannee?

The old way of tracking sales was to create a new Clickbank ID for each
type of promotion and use a hoplink with that ID specifically for each pro-
motion. So you might have

http://adw123.moresw.hop.clickbank.net

for your Adwords campaign for the product. Then you’d have

http://email123.moresw.hop.clickbank.net

for your email promotions and so on.

Obviously there are several problems with this:

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 1. You have to create numerous Clickbank IDs
2. The IDs are most likekly going to be gibberish rather than mean-
ingful as all the meaningful names are probably already in use
3. You’ll forget what particular IDs relate to, especially if you
haven’t used them in a while
4. You end up with a load of accounts you have to log into individu-
ally (all with their own unique passwords) so it takes an age to
check what accounts are earning

So when Clickbank announced it was going to add the option to allow

tracking codes to be added to hoplinks, affiliates rejoiced!

Adding a tracking code is simple. You simply add ?tid=XXXXXXXX to

the end of your hoplink. You replace XXXXXXXX with some combination
of letters and numbers that mean something to you. And it doesn’t matter if
someone else is using the same code because the codes are attached to your
unique hoplink!

There are a few rules to using Tracking Codes:

· Tracking codes can only be 8 characters long

· They can contain alpha and numeric characters only
· Any tracking code longer than 8 characters will be truncated
· Any tracking code containing characters other than alpha or nu-
meric values will have the entire tracking code removed from the
hoplink and order process and will not show up in your transac-
tion report
· Tracking codes received with upper and lower case characters
will be set to all uppercase.

[Clickbank Elite handles all these automatically.]

To check where your sales are coming from, log into your account, click on
the Reporting tab and then on the Analytics subtab. You’ll be able to
check your Tracking Codes under the Affiliate Reporting section.

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Why Cloaking Your Links Is Important
If you never heard the term Cloaked Link before, it means masking your
link so it can’t be seen directly.

Let’s say you’ve decided to promote a link for Clickbank Elite and your
Clicknank ID is myid123. The link you’re going to promote is:

http://myid123.morese.hop.clickbank.net

Now say you advertise that link on a webpage or in your email or forum
signature, any savvy Clickbank affiliate will know two things instantly:

1. Your Clickbank ID (myid123)

2. The vendorid of the product you’re promoting (moresw)

Now let’s suppose that same someone is curious about the product you’re
advertising and they want to look it over. And maybe they’d even buy it.
But they don’t want you to get the commission! [It’s an unfortunate fact
that some people just don’t like the idea of others profiting from something
they buy. But that’s the reality of the online world.]

So, what do they do?

They replace your Clickbank ID with their own. All that’s required is for
them to copy and paste the link into their browser and simply type their ID
in place of yours, so the link becomes:

http://anotherid.moresw.hop.clickbank.net

That other person then decides they like the product and they buy it. What
happens then?

Well, you don’t earn a commission since your ID wasn’t part of the link.
This is what is known as Commission Theft and it’s very, very common.

On the other hand, the owner of Clickbank ID anotherid earns the commis-
sion on the product. Suppose the product offered a 50% commission. an-

24
otherid would have effectively bought the product for half price! And you
don’t see a cent from the transaction!

Tip: If you want to save money buying products directly from the
Clickbank Marketplace, create a hoplink with your ID and paste it into
your browser and buy through that link. You’ll earn the commission
on that product back. Typically, you’ll be able to buy product for
about half price.

Tip: If you want to open your own Clickbank mall (and buy products
through it to save yourself money), then join CBDeluxe which gives you
just that. Silver membership is currently free.

Now, let’s suppose you create a weblink called Check out this great prod-
uct whose link is still http://myid123.moresw.hop.clickbank.net.

People can right-click on the link, select the Properties option from the
popup menu and see your link. So you’re back to square one on commis-
sion theft! You see how easy it is for someone to steal your commissions?
That’s why it’s important to mask your links by cloaking them. Now it’s
not 100% effective (what is?) but it will dramatically reduce the incidence
of commission theft.

Another reason to cloak your links is if you use Google Adwords for your
promotions. Last year (2005) Google introduced their one-ad-per-domain
rule. The rule was designed to provide a better user experience for searchers
by eliminating multiple ads that lead to the same domain.

That meant that multiple affiliates couldn’t use hoplinks that went to same
same domain. In fact, affiliates may bid on direct links, but they compete
with merchant sites and other affiliates in the auction. This competition re-
sults in a bidding war going on behind the scenes within the Adwords sys-
tem. Google suppresses duplicate ads, displaying only the ad with highest
AdRank (normalized click-through rate x keyword bid). The upshot is that
if you want your ad to be the one that appears, you’re going to pay through
the nose to get it there.

But there is a way around it!

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This is where cloaked links come in again. Essentially what a cloaked link
does is create a full-page frame on your domain (not the product owner’s
domain), and it loads the product’s sales page into that frame. So as far as
Google is concerned (and anyone visiting your link), hey presto!, they see
the sales page appear on your web domain. Since this doesn’t break the
one-ad-per-domain rule, it’s a common tactic affiliate marketers use.

But you can’t use this tactic without creating a cloaked link, and you need a
piece of software to do that for you.

Clickbank Elite And Cloaked Links

Luckily enough, Clickbank Elite has a built-in affiliate link cloaker. What’s
more, you can add page title, description and keyword information so that
the cloaked link page it creates can be indexed by the search engines. That’s
another bit of free publicity coming your way.

How To Sell Your Own Product On Clickbank

While there are 110,000+ Clickbank affiliates, at any one tine there are only
about 10,000 active products on Clickbank. If you want to join the ranks of
Clickbank sellers, how do you go about doing it?

First you need to have a product to sell.

You then need to create a sales page (webpage) for the product where you
embed your Clickbank payment link. That link will look like:

http://1.vendorid.pay.clickbank.net

vendorid will be the Clickbank ID you set up for your product. “1” is the
index of the payment page you’re using. If you wanted to use thank you
page number 3 (remember, Clickbank allow up to 99 thank you pages per
account), then your link would be:

http://3.vendorid.pay.clickbank.net

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Then you need to create a thank you page (a webpage) where you provide
instructions on where and how to download your product (and any bonuses
you might be offering).

Each Clickbank account can be linked to one sales page (and product de-
scription) and up to 99 thank you pages.

If you’re a seller, you’ll need to create a new Clickbank account for each
new product you intend to sell if you want affiliates to sell it for you.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to submit a Product Approval Request
(this is under the Account Settings tab). The information you need to pro-
vide are:

· the links to your sales and thank you pages

· a brief description of your product
· the price of your product
· whether you made a test purchase (to test your links)
· And some other bits of (obvious) information

Clickbank will then review your pages and product and either approve or
disapprove it. They may request changes to your webpages so they fully
comply with their terms of service.

Once your product is approved, you’ll have to pay a Product Activation

Fee. This is to cover the administrative charges in setting up your payment
page. This fee is $49.95.

Tip: For your second and following products, email the Clickbank staff
and ask for the discount rate and give them the Clickbank ID of your
previous product. The discount product activation fee is $29.95 (a sav-
ing of $20).

Once Clickbank have processed your fee, your product is live on Clickbank
but hasn’t yet been added to Clickbank’s marketplace.

Product activation is handled through email, so it’s a little clunky. You have
to email your activation fee receipt to Clickbank staff so they can verify
your payment. The next point is very important:

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Note: You can have your product listed in up to two subcategories. For the
best exposure, do select two subcategories under different overall catego-
ries. For example, an ebook about photography could be listed under Fun &
Entertainment -> Hobbies and Society & Cuture -> Fine Arts. Clickbank
will automatically list the product in the overall categories (Fun & Enter-
tainment and Society & Culture). Since your product is new, for a time it
will also be listed in the New Products subcategory of each of the over all
categories.

Tip: Make sure that you let the Clickbank staff know what categories
you want your product listed under. If you don’t, your product will re-
main uncategorized and, even if you make sales through your own
links, the product will not be listed in the Clickbank Marketplace. And
affiliates won’t even be aware it exists!

The Quick Way To Get Your Product Listed In The

Marketplace
A product must be sold once before it’s listed in the marketplace (assuming
it’s already been categorised). You can wait until someone buys your prod-
uct though one of your links (but that could take some time. But there’s an-
other very quick way to get listed and it doesn’t cost much (yes, there’s a
little extra expenditure required).

Here’s the quickest way of getting your product listed.

· Go into your Account Settings tab and click the My Products sub-
tab
· On that page there will be a list of Delivery "Thank-you page"
URLs. Click the edit link for your product’s thank you page
· Change the price of your product to $3.00 (the lowest price Click-
bank allows for any product)
· Then click the save link
· Now go and buy your own product from your sales page
· As soon as your payment is processed, return to the My Products
page and reset the price of your product to its original value

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That’s it. Your product will now be listed in the Clickbank Marketplace the
next time they update their database (updated daily). If you check your
Clickbank account, you’ll see that a commission of $1.77 will have been
credited to your account. So getting listed in the marketplace has only cost
you $1.33!

You can sell several products from the one Clickbank account (that’s why
each account can have up to 99 thank you pages) if you want.

Selling multiple products from one account simply requires that you create
a sales page and a thank you page for each product, and add your Clickbank
payment link to the sales page. Adding products this way means you don’t
have to submit a Product Approval Request and pay the setup fee.

You then simply drive traffic to your sales page and earn money.

The downside is that no affiliates can sell these extra products. Why? Be-
cause such products are hidden from affiliates. The only products affiliates
can sell are the primary products for each account. You can only set up one
product per account to get listed in the Clickbank Marketplace. Clickbank
will enable hoplink creation for only that product. And hoplink-enabled
products are the only products affiliates see.

If you only want to sell your own products yourself, then multiple products
per account is fine. If you want affiliates to sell for you, you’ll have to cre-
ate multiple accounts, one for each product, and pay the account setup fees.

If you want to learn how to sell products effectively on Clickbank, I highly

recommend Andrew Fox’s Dominate CB. This is a series of step-by-step
video tutorials that show you how to properly market your product, ap-
proach people with joint venture ideas and how to recruit affiliates.

Lesson Learned

One of the things I learned selling products on Clickbank is how to think

about the money you make this way. Initially, having set a price, I found
many people were buying through their own affiliate links so I was seeing
about half the selling price per sale and the customer was getting the other
half as a commission on that sale.

29
But thinking you’ve just been done out of half your profits is the wrong
way to think of it. You must only ever expect to make the price minus com-
mission per sale. As an example, if you set up a product with a $47 price
tag and a 50% commission, you should only expect to make $23.50 per sale
(a little less actually, once Clickbank have deducted their fees).

If someone buys the product directly (that is, not through an affiliate link),
then you get the $47 (less fees) for that sale. And you should look on that as
a bonus, not as a right!

Besides, every time your product is sold through an affiliate link, the Grav-
ity score for your product increases in the Clickbank database. The higher
this Gravity score, the more notice affiliates will take of your product and
the more sales you’re likely to make.

The more people who sell your product, the more money you’ll make (even
if your perception is that it apparently cuts into your profit margin).

Look at it another way. That 50% you get is pure profit. You don’t have to
deduct shipping or packing fees, storage fees, electricity/heating fees or of-
fice rental costs from it (as you would do if your product was a real-world
product-in-a-box sitting on a shelf somewhere).

How To Leverage The Selling Power Of Affiliates

Affiliates are your friends. Where else other than Clickbank could you re-
cruit a salesforce happy to promote your product for no up-front cost? Your
salesforce only gets rewarded if they make a sale and, if they don’t sell,
you’re not out of pocket.

It’s this very reason of being able to leverage the power of 110,000+ Click-
bank affiliates that makes Clickbank such a potent tool and why all the top
people launch their products on Clickbank (even if they launch on another
affiliate network as well).

Clickbank is, quite simply, an incredible marketing tool.

30
How To Become A Top Seller On Clickbank
It should be pretty obvious by now that becoming a top seller involves us-
ing affiliates to sell on your behalf. With over 10,000 products to choose
from, how do you attract affiliates and get them to want to sell what you
have to offer?

Educate your affiliates

Almost every Clickbank product has its own Affiliate Page. You need to
create one and put a link to it on your sales page.

But, what a lot of sellers do is just put up basic information like the stand-
ard affiliate link and leave it at that. That’s hardly going to inspire an affili-
ate, is it?

One thing you should certainly do is to capture the affiliate’s name, email
address and Clickbank ID. Why? Two reasons:

1. You can email them out links and marketing material tailored to their
Clickbank ID through an autoresponder. They only have to cut and
paste their links and they’re ready to go
2. You can keep in touch with them on a regular basis, letting them
know about new promotional material, product upgrades, changes in
price or commission level. This way you can keep your affiliates mo-
tivated
3. If you launch other products in the future, you already have a list of
affiliates you can contact to kick start you product launch

In order to do all this, you need to use an autoresponder to communicate

with your affiliates. I recommend AWEBER.

But if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to subscribe to an autoresponder
or setup the autoresponder messages, then you still have your Affiliate Ar-
mory.

31
How To Build Your Affiliate Army
You’re sending your affiliates out into the big bad world of internet market-
ing. Let’s be absolutely clear here. It’s a jungle out there (as they say) and
your affiliates are marching out into war.

It’s up to you if you want to send out doe-eyed innocents (cannon-fodder)

or well-trained and well-equipped soldiers of war (assassins).

How do you train and equip your affiliates?

You give them the weapons they need to use and tell them how to use
them!

And those weapons are things like:

· Simple text links

· Text and headlines they can use in Google Adwords promotions
· Lists of keywords they can bid on (give them keywords relevant
to your product)
· Graphics - banner ads (don’t just stick to the standard 468x60
size. Provide graphics in 234x60 and 160x600 or 120x600 as well,
at the very least)
· Graphics - box shots of your product; book shots of your ebook
· Graphic links - all your graphics should have a HTML code
block that contains the image wrapped in a link
· Email messages - ready written text that can be copied and
pasted into an email program or autoresoponder
· Solo Ads - text ads to send out to ezines for publication
· Press releases (take a look at http://www.prweb.com/)
· Email signatures
· Forum signatures
· Create a free report like this one and let it spread virally
· Anything else you can think of such as interview transcripts, au-
dio files, Camtasia videos. Whatever else you can think of to help
your affiliates sell your product.

32
I’ve made some of these tools available at the Clickbank Elite Affiliate
Page. But to see how a Clickbank veteran has done it, take a look at this
page.

The bottom line is that the more tools you can give your affiliates, the better
their chances of selling your product and they’ll be able to do it in a variety
of creative ways. And give them variations on each tool - several different
ready-written emails, different Google Adwords ads and so on. Yes, it’s
more work for you, but you are trying to sell a product after all!

Closing Thoughts
After reading this report you should be in a very good position to use Click-
bank as an affiliate, a seller or both (the best of both worlds).

Affiliate and Internet marketing is a constantly changing field. It’s not

something you know. It’s something you constantly adapt to.

Tools, software, ebooks and techniques come and go and unless you keep
up with the changing trends, you will be left behind as others digest and use
them.

So you must continually learn in this business. And that means buying new
tools, software, ebooks and learning new techniques. You just cannot afford
to rest on your laurels here.

All the top marketers stay on top of their game because their fingers are on
the pulse of this ever-changing industry.

How many times have you heard about conferences they’ve all been at, net-
working, comparing ideas, joint venturing and coming up with new prod-
ucts and techniques they sell to the rest of us.

Not one of them has said “I’ve made my money, so I’ll stop now!” No, they
keep plugging away, make more and more money. Why should you be any
different?

Get Moving!

33
Take what you’ve learned in this report and apply it. Do it today. There’s
nothing here that’s difficult. Don’t procrastinate. Seize the day!

Here’s to your profitable future with Clickbank!

Gary Nugent
Home Business Directory
Clickbank Elite

P.S. Sign up to the CBReport Newsletter for more information, advice, tips
and news about Clickbank and affiliate marketing.

P.P.S. Don’t forget, you can order the brandable version of this report for
just $3.00. This will let you insert your affiliate id into the report and you
can then earn commissions from any sales made through your branded re-
port. You keep all commissions earned.

Order Your Brandable Report Here

34
 Recommended Resources:

Clickbank Elite
Quickly and easily fond hot Clickbank products to promote. Search the
Clickbank database in a number of ways, check product trends, and cloak
your affiliate links.

Dominate CB
Learn how to make Clickbank work for you. Step by step videos take you
through how to become a Clickbank seller and how to inspire affiliates.
Learn how to turn resale rights products into Clickbank money-spinners.

Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash

This is the classic that started it all. And the new version comes with a 135-
page manual, 24 online videos, and lots of great bonuses.

Greg Heslin’s Google AdWords 1-2-3

This 124-page manual takes a different direction from Google Cash focus-
ing on markets instead of products. Both are essential reading.

Adwords Miracle
This is an eBook which deals very specifically with making money through
the effective use of Google's pay-per-click "AdWords" system. It covers
some quite advanced topics that are better suited to those who have some
familiarity with Adwords already.

Click Ad Equalizer
If you want to become a super affiliate, get this software. It will help you
find the most profitable keywords and products to promote.

Affiliate Project X
This is fast becoming the affiliate marketer’s bible with unrivalled tech-
niques and information. It’s a short 70-page manual but there’s absolutely
no fluff or padding, just hard-hitting methods. Includes some in-depth train-
ing videos. It leverages the power of your Adwords knowledge to sell affili-
ate products. See proof here.

35
CBDeluxe
A mall/storefront for Clickbank products that you can use to earn commis-
sions through people buying through your links or where you can save
money buying through your own mall links. Silver Membership is currently
free.

Cover Software Pro

Create stunning ebook and software covers, just like the professionals. If
you have Adobe Photoshop version 6.0 or higher installed on your compu-
ter, this is probably the single, most important discovery you'll come across.

Web Graphics Creator

Create Professional graphics for your web site with ease! Logos, page head-
ers, 3D eCovers (i.e. Ebook covers and software boxes), eBay ads, Flip-
Books, Animated buttons and more.

AWEBER
Probably the best autoresponder system available. Subscriptions cost
$19,95 per month but you’re able to created an unlimited number of opt-in
lists. Mails can be scheduled to got out a specific number of days after the
previous mail and you can also do broadcast messages at any time. Using
filters you can email only certain list members.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.:,;
-_!"'#+~*@§$%&/\´`^°|µ()=?[]1234567890

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