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Will Clickbank work for members site?

by Julia B
11 replies
I recently set up a membership website (wordpress). It's going well. Members pay a 4-weekly fee and I'm using the s2Member plugin to handle payments and content restriction.

I've been doing OK on the marketing side myself, but early next year, I'd like to start getting affiliates to help sell memberships. This being my first experience of anything like that, plus I'm not a professional web developer, I'm looking for a simple and safe solution to enable this.

I've been looking at Clickbank, but that seems to be mainly deal in ebooks and I'm not sure if/how it works with membership sites.

I'm also not sure how I'd make the transition - would I still be able to use s2Member, or would I have to install a Clickbank plugin of some kind to manage affiliate memberships? And what would this mean for my existing member accounts?

Another concern would be that I'd like to have some control over how it was marketed. I wouldn't want affiliates to sell the site as offering something it does not actually include or to the wrong type of customer. Does Clickbank allow vendors to have control over the way their product/site is represented by affiliate marketers?

Thanks guys. :-)
#affiliate marketing #clickbank #membership #membership site #put #site
  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Hi Julia, long time no see?

    There are plenty of "membership sites/services" sold through affiliates at ClickBank; it isn't a problem in principle.

    In reality, it's terribly difficult to have control over how your affiliates market anything, however/wherever you sell it. ClickBank has some appropriately worded guidelines about affiliates not misrepresenting, not spamming, and so on and so forth, but in reality it's extremely difficult for them to enforce things, of course, and I think one can't really altogether expect it of them? I'm sure they take appropriate action over obvious "breaches" that are actually pointed out to them.

    You can, if you wish, elect to "white-list" all your affiliates (i.e. not let "just anyone" create and use a hoplink for your product/service, without "vetting" them first), but I don't know any vendors who actually do this, and I don't know how off-putting it might/would be, to potential affiliates.

    .
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeAmbrosio
      There are very few sellers who require affiliate approval. It is difficult to control how affiliates sell your product. In the past I left the affiliate program open and watched as best I could to see if anyone was spamming. Normally you'd get complaints and you can track spammers that way and remove them from your program.

      I know in JVZOO, you can set to approve your affiliates if you want and you can also easily ban them. And you can set up membership sites (integrates with S2).

      It's a crap shoot and there's no "best" solution. Make sure you have well-written and easy to understand affiliate rules and terms. If you can afford to, have it legally written and specify your rules. Spammers don't get paid, etc.
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      • Profile picture of the author Julia B
        Thanks Mike-Amrosio. Interesting. I'll take a look at JVZOO that sounds promising. :-)
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    • Profile picture of the author Julia B
      Hey, lovely to hear from you again Alexa. Hope all's going well for you.

      Thanks for the advice. I'd like to start by only allowing site members to be affiliates for a while, so maybe I could take the "white list" route to begin with. But maybe Clickbank isn't the best tool for that?
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  • Profile picture of the author MWatson
    Well Chris Farrell's membership is on clickbank. It's one of the best MMO/IM memberships available IMO.



    Cheers,
    Mark
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  • Profile picture of the author jbsmith
    Definintely legitimate concerns - I recently transitioned one of my membership sites from my own merchant account to Clickbank (mainly due to ongoing pain of PCI compliance which moving to Clickbank helps with since they handle PCI on their own payment system) - while the integration with my membership software is not AS elegant than with merchant account, it is still pretty good.

    The mismatch can happen in the case of any changes in membership status - ex cancellations, upgrades (if you allow that), holds, etc...

    Make sure you do think through scenarios of new signups, cancels, holds, refunds, upgrades - any other scenarios that apply to you.

    As far as handling affiliates - no issues there, in fact this is easier for me that it was in past.

    Jeff
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    • Profile picture of the author Julia B
      Thanks Jeff. Would it be possible to have the site on Clickbank but keep using s2member to manage the members that came in through that? Not sure how it would work.
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    • Profile picture of the author Julia B
      Thanks everyone. I guess I'd only really want clickbank (or similar) as a way to handle affiliate payments and for starters I'd like to test the water only allowing existing members of my site to be affiliates. But maybe there's a simpler option...?

      I have lots of long term clients so I'm confident in the service mrrightme and I'm already using the pro version of s2member Mark Singletary.
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  • Profile picture of the author mrrightme
    If your product is really good and you are not afraid of refunding, clickbank is a good choice.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mark Singletary
    If you want to continue using S2Member, you'll need to upgrade to the pro version in order to process payments through Clickbank.

    Mark
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