Whats with this awful trend at clickbank?

This has always been the future. Because you know exactly what your list needs based on how they opted in and you can react to the market place faster than your competition.

Annie, good to see you are doing your due diligence.

Most people don't go that far but it's precisely what's needed to be done if you are marketing as an affiliate.

The good news is that you're also checking the product out before recommending them. I don't feel sorry for anybody who blindly promotes products and endorses them. It's not "wrong"...because, after all, it's just marketing. I'm sure Walmart doesn't test every single product in their isles. (same thing if you are just marketing products). But it's bad when people "recommend" products rather than market them (there is a difference).

At any rate, just wanted to give you a thumbs up for minding your business and testing stuff out.

No, I'm sure.

On the other hand, they know what most of them are: they're not "closed mysteries" like so many Clickbank products.

And they test them empirically, according to whether they can sell them, anyway.

That's easier (i.e. requiring less thought/analysis/research) for Clickbank, of course, because unlike Walmart, they're running virtually no inherent financial risk themselves by "stocking" a product.

Just saying.

As ever, I'm with you all the way ...

It is indeed ... but it's like so many other aspects of internet marketing: there's a huge turnover of bottom-feeders comprising enormous numbers of people all "trying it out" (typically for some number of months) before deciding that "it doesn't work" and "it's all a scam really" ... these are all people who never really got going on the learning-curve at all and literally didn't know what they were doing.

I'm afraid many really don't: they really are too short-sighted and small-minded for that.

We see a kind of analogous thing in "article marketing", too, I think? There'll always be people selling spinning software, and huge numbers of people buying it and trying it, and the overwhelming majority dropping out, often announcing that "article marketing doesn't work", typically without even realising that "article marketing" wasn't actually what they tried! :p

For Clickbank vendors, it's "opt-ins and link-substitution"; for Clickbank affiliates it's "promoting high gravity products with an opt-in"; for article marketers it's "spinning software and directory backlinks" ... they're all different aspects of the same thing, really. They all arise from the same causes and they all typically have the same long-term outcomes.

On a brighter note, that does all make it very much easier for others with a bit of professionalism and judgement about them to rise reasonably quickly, in this line of business, to the very highly-paid upper echelons.

What bothers me more than anything else in this thread is not so much the
poor quality of the products (quality is sometimes very subjective) but the
fact that the sales page (if the OP is being truthful) says the product isn't
one thing and then when you open the product is is the very thing it
said it wasn't.

In other words, an outright, provable lie.

Something like this should be IMMEDIATELY reported to Clickbank, pointing
out what the sales page said and then showing the actual product and
what's in it.

Maybe if more people did this, these outright lies would be taken from the
marketplace for good.

Years ago, I reported a software product that was an outright lie and it
was removed. So yes, if you open your mouth and don't just sit there and
take this sh*t, things can change.

But only if you take the first step.

It's time to stop just bitching about this stuff here and actually do
something about it.

Enough is enough.

ONE word to describe clickbank: CRAP

LOL ... exactly so: if you were selling a speed-reading course, maybe the product was just too good for its market ... :p

I`m really interested what do you use instead of CB. Could you offer a REAL alternative for eBOOk affiliates?