How does clickbank work?

Hello Tony,

ClickBank is essentially an affiliate network and a payment processor. You can sell your products through them and tap into their affiliate base and they will accept payments for the product and cut you a check and your affiliates a check.

ClickBank handles refunds, chargebacks, figuring out affiliate commissions, etc.

There's a bit more to their services, but those are the bare basics.

You would have to sign-up for an account, then submit a product to them to get approved. You need to follow their guidelines for your pitch page (sales page/website) and your thank you page (product download page). Once approved, people can buy your product and Clickbank handles the orders/money, and you get paid every week from them (Clickbank takes a fee).

Clickbank is the most easy to use & reliable networks I've ever used. They do charge a higher commission per transaction but they take care of everything for you (payment, correct VAT charges, taxes...etc) which is something that Paypal doesn't do.

They also have a great marketplace for product vendors which makes it easy to get other people promoting your products ( as long as they are quality and they convert well ).

Like @relic32 and @alisonm mentioned, they do charge an "activation fee" of $49.95 for your first product. Once you pay that and you get your product approved you can customize your marketplace listing and begin selling and accepting affiliates.

Your affiliates will then be able to find your product in the marketplace, analyze your conversion stats and if they decide to promote it, they can do it without any approval from your side. They simply create their custom affiliate link and begin promoting.

Now, don't get me wrong...just adding your product to the marketplace doesn't mean that you will get affiliates. Not at all. Based on my experience, you can get 1 or 2 affiliates this way, but if you really want to make your product a success and increase it's gravity, you'll have to do some direct recruiting as well. This is usually done by contacting blog and list owners who might be interested in promoting your product and ask them to check it out. This is called JV marketing and obviously there's a lot more to it, but this is the basic concept.

Now again, based on my experience, the best way to attract good affiliates, is to first do something for them....Help them in some way. The best way is to find other product owners and send them some traffic and at least a couple of sales first, and then contact them asking to return the favor. This is how all the big boys are doing it.

One thing I'd like to add is that if you don't use the Clickbank Powered system (i don't), they don't take care of the product delivery for you. So before you add your product to their system, you'll have to build a sales page, a download page and also include their disclaimer at the bottom of each page and do a few other minor stuff to make sure you comply with their ToS. It's a pretty straight-forward process and in case you forget to do something, they will let you know and give you time to correct/fix the problem.

Hope this helps. If you have any other questions regarding Clickbank, just post them here or if you want, send me a PM.

Cheers.

I'm in the UK also and have used Clickbank at times for my own products.
You can get people to become affiliates to sell your product for you.
If your product sells well it will remain in the marketplace.
I set up a recurring billing product there which essentially was a membership program I was running.
You can also use Clickbank to promote other peoples products and earn a commission.

Don't forget to cloak your Clickbank affiliate links...

Clickbank is great, and it's my main source of income at the moment. It's an affiliate program with a massive range of products that you can promote. They also handle all the payments so everything is organized and fair for both the author and publisher.