Your company is already well into “social networking” – establishing an affiliate program as significant and formidable as Clickbank’s is no small feat. Maintaining a community of committed individuals and businesses is considered by many social networking experts as a check mark in the success column.

My advice – recognize there is no “code” to crack – there’s no special trick or formula. Rather, like search engine marketing and generating greater findability for your company, there are many approaches and details that contribute to overall success.

The recommendation (in this thread) to build specific social network applications (such as FaceBook) is a good one – but make sure you add Google Gadgets and OpenSocial compliant application support. But I think it makes sense to formulate a strategic approach to social networking. In a much broader sense, I’ve suggested (below) four ideas and one trend that could prepare ClickBank for social media success –

1 – IDEA: Social Media Newsroom; this is a new evolution of an old idea.

Like most businesses, your staff and executives are making social connections across many online social networking systems; Linkedin, Naymz, Twitter, and other social systems relevant to your business, are attracting your employees as they seek out new ways to sell, support, and represent your business. You may even have a social forum of your own, a blogsite, or marketing partners that allow you to participate with high-value con-tent about your products and business.

A social media newsroom provides a unified representation of all your businesses’ social and news media content. The objective of this is to make it easy for your website and blog visitors to find and make connections quickly and efficiently with your conversational content and people that can respond to customers, journalists, and prospects.

In my view, the expanse and distribution of social media for just one company is so great that creating a single page to accommodate such information is impractical. This leads me to believe that a social media newsroom must include a custom social media search application that is specifically designed to aggregate content from flow applications that contain content about ClickBank. This transforms all that is “social” about your business into a single, highly leveragable, asset. Here’s a simple example – http://media.expansionplus.com.

2 – IDEA: All businesses should solidify their social “footprint” by aggressively securing brand-name based identities in popular social media platforms.

I was surprised that “ClickBank” was available in Twitter and to be sure it was available, I registered it. I also did the same on Identi.ca, and Ping.fm. Your marketing/brand management group should not allow this to happen so easily. Everywhere social media is emerging, the ClickBank identity should be secured. (Note – I’ll sign my “ClickBank” account identities over to you upon request – just send me the email address they should resolve to)

Once you have your identities in place, you should use them to broadcast the voice of the company – frequent updates into Twitter, Identi.ca, etc will cause people to take note and follow you; this is an ideal pub-sub model for customers that depend on the latest advise, commentary and ideas. You can also use flow applications to generate feedback on new ideas and solicit the social horizon for advice. If you need help identifying the right places to secure, feel free to contact me.

3 – IDEA: Establish a ClickBank account with GetSatisfaction.com.

This is an ideal way (with little cost and some effort) to embrace social media and transparent customer support. Build your GetSatisfaction presence with plenty of participation from your staff and integrate other social content into this new space.

4 – IDEA: Establish a social media monitoring practice in your company.

It’s a good idea to become aware of what’s being said about your company on the social content plane. There are many ways to do this, but a bit too involved to try to elucidate the implementation details here. Give me a shout if you want some guidance on this.

5 – TREND: Conversations Moving Toward Flow Applications.

Blogging 1.0 was great; commenting… not so useful. Flow applications; a natural extension of commenting that enhances the conversation and will dramatically impact the emergence of Blogging 2.0. It was only a matter of time before the idea of “Blogging 2.0” made its appearance. Conversations are moving away from blogs (specifically business blogs) as content consumers attempt to participate [more] in the conversational aspects of the blogosphere. I don’t believe this shift is intentional; rather, it’s simply the market of content consumers (and providers) voting for better interaction and conversational services. If anything, it underscores why Twitter has grown so quickly and why other services such as Ping.FM have emerged. Understanding and capitalizing on this trend is highly recommended. More – http://blogsite.com/public/blog/210687

Best of luck with your social media strategy…

Cheers! –bf

I’ll tell you exactly how to break into social networking, as you are where we were last year.

Start by building a simple Clickbank Facebook app, and make it beneficial to the Facebook user to use it. Start with one social platform and go from there (Facebook is really the only one that matter right no, but that could change)

I would be happy to help you with this. We were, after all, the first to develop a database driven Clickbank mall years ago, and that is what we built our FB app to run on.

Happy to share the technology, it benefits us all.

Oh, you just have to fly me out there; I hate travelling on my own dime, but the consulting won’t cost a nickel. You guys helped me retire to affiliate marketing, so its the least we can do. :>)

Cheers,

The “Ronster”

Ron Davies CD, MBA
1499988 Ontario Ltd

For your consideration, I’m one of those affiliates and consumer customer that would love to atract some spanish market if only Clickbank would do its research and find out what they are missing on.

Do not waste any moke time and get on board snd watch your site get a grand bust in sales and affiliate response.

I remember when I started out, I found it very confusing what I should actually be doing (the features are clearly explained, but it feels dry and intimidating)

More affiliate training would definitely help a lot. Why not stack odds of success on your new signups’ side by providing a more comprehensive set of guidelines and even blueprints…

Also, this blog is great for established publishers or affiliates, but it does little for the new guys, which are those you seem to be after with this “campaign”.

Clickbank has the position to be a thought leader in this industry, yet it barely communicates with its signups and it’s public face is sorely lacking in comparison with what could be accomplished if Clickbank really set out to tell people who they are and what they do (always stressing the benefits).

What about some case studies, interviews and general involvement in the industry? Not really expensive and CB is in the perfect position to gain a tremendous amount from such activities…

Put up a ClickBank profile on FaceBook, twitter and some of the hotspots-I am sure you will develop a bigger following!

Most of the people in the world listen to WIIFM.
[what's in it for me]
If you don’t offer an incentive, why would anyone even try, some may even think he may hurt them with more competition even tho I know that is not the issue.

Also, I never see you on the net. Do you not promote yourselves? And why is it “lean”. It always seemed to me you have very little competition.

Do you even have a marketing plan and goals set?

I say all these things for good because I love your company and want it to do well.

Yes, money counts… a LOT! A referral fee for other publishers would be good. It’s not the amount that’s important, it’s the fact that there’s something in it for publishers.

But beyond that, you can think about:

– producing some widgets that people can just plug into their website and leave. Perhaps it could advertise the top sellers in a filtered list (filtering options are important). Most widgets now are also tailored to fit all the main social networking sites – the easier you make it to do, the more people will bother/be able.

– some “shop” style tools.

Look around at what some of your competitors are doing. They’re producing all sorts of online gadgetry that we can drop into our websites and forget.