MSNBC and Entrepreneur.com posted an article highlighting affiliate marketing as a great way to make money online, and ClickBank was mentioned as one of the best affiliate networks and digital marketplaces to work with.

This is another great example of how affiliate marketing is becoming more mainstream all the time, and is being recognized as a great way for creative entrepreneurs to succeed online.

The article also has some good tips for beginner affiliate marketers on how to get started and the various ways you can make money. It’s worth a look if you’re still learning the ropes.

6 Easy Ways to Make Money Online- MSNBC.com

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

Affiliate Summit is the premier affiliate marketing conference in the U.S. Affiliate Summit East 2009 is going to be held August 9-11 in New York City.

Attending Affiliate Summit is a great way to learn the best strategies and techniques in affiliate marketing and to meet and network with other top vendors and affiliates. ClickBank will be attending, presenting, and exhibiting at this year’s event.

ClickBank is pleased to offer ClickBank clients a 20% discount on any Affiliate Summit pass.

To get the discount, enter the coupon code ASE09CLICKBANK20 during registration. You can also save money by registering before June 12.

We hope to see you in New York!

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

By now I suspect most of you have seen the updated look and feel of the ClickBank website. We’re very excited about these changes as they not only make the site more attractive, but also easier to understand for prospective clients. Our new colors of red, green, yellow, and taupe give us a bold, fresh look that differentiates us from the competition.

To further assist prospective clients we also updated our vendor and affiliate pages. The 5-step slideshows show beginners how ClickBank works.

The changes to these pages are not aimed at our current clients, but rather at prospective clients who aren’t familiar with what ClickBank can do for them.  If you’re a current ClickBank client, though, don’t feel left out. We have some additional changes planned to make the site easier to use and navigate. No need to worry, though, we won’t change anything substantial, including the order form, without testing it first.

Oh, and one last thing - the ticker is real and accurate. Pretty cool, eh?

As you’ve probably noticed by now, ClickBank has a new look! In the spirit of the many improvements we’ve made so far this year, we’ve made significant changes to our company colors, as well as the look and feel of the navigation bar and the layout of several pages on the website.

This is the first phase of making the ClickBank website more attractive and easier to understand for new clients.

Please note that these changes do not affect existing functionality or page locations, so you can continue to use the ClickBank system in the same way you always have.

Posted by: Dave Gale, Guest Blogger

For years, article marketing has been an effective tool for affiliates to generate visits and sales from interested consumers.

Here is a brief overview of how article marketing works and how it can benefit your efforts as an affiliate.

First, you should identify a product niche that you’re knowledgeable about, and then write an article related to that topic. At the end of the article, you can add a ‘resource box.’ Typically, this is a couple of sentences about you and what you have to offer, followed by a link to your website, where you can then direct people to useful products in that niche.

The trick here is to use those sentences to entice people to click on your link. An easy way to accomplish this is to offer a free report or other freebie related to your niche market.

Next, you’ll submit that article (for free) to various article directories on the web.

The two main directories to start with are:

www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com

To find more, just do a Google search for ‘article directory’ or ‘article directories.’

Please note that one of the conditions of publishing your article in these directories is that you allow other people to republish your articles as long as they don’t change the content and leave your name and the resource box at the end of the article intact.

Don’t worry; this is a good thing, as it will lead to more traffic for you! There are two main ways this practice will get you additional traffic.

1) Getting Published

Website owners in the niche market you are writing about will come to these directories looking for suitable articles they can use as content on their websites or ezines.

If they pick your article to publish on their site, their visitors will see your website link in the resource box at the end of your article, which could generate extra traffic for you with no additional effort or expense on your part.

2) Search Engine Rankings

Article directories can rank highly in the search engine results, so your article may get a good search engine listing by being on some of these sites. This is especially the case if other websites link to your article.

To try to get a good search engine ranking, you should target specific keyword phrases you want to rank for and make sure to include them in your article. The less competitive the keyword, the better the chance your article will rank well in the search engines.

A note of caution-don’t overdo your keyword targeting by stuffing loads of keywords into the article. If you do this, many people won’t want to read your article or click on your link, and the search engines may punish you for writing “spammy” content. This completely defeats the purpose of article marketing, which is to provide useful information that gets people to take the action you want them to take.

Instead of repeating your keyword dozens of times, just get your main keyword in there a few times, and start the article title with your keyword if you can. Your best bet is to strike a balance between having your keyword in your article enough to get noticed by search engines and keeping it readable, informative, and enjoyable for actual humans. After all, it doesn’t matter how many visitors see your article if it doesn’t convince anyone to click on your link!

In addition to getting your articles ranked in the search engines, you can also increase your own website’s search engine rankings by linking to it from your articles. With each article you submit, the more links you’ll have to your site, and the better your rankings will be.

That’s article marketing in a nutshell. Give it a try, and be aware that it may take some time and effort before you start seeing results. The best article marketers put a lot of time and effort into improving their work, just like any author, but since it’s a free and simple way to generate traffic and sales, it’s well worth the time you invest!

Dave Gale is an Internet marketer specializing in information publishing. To read more of Dave’s articles, visit http://www.publishingsuccessblog.com.

Broomfield, Colo. – (April 22, 2009) – Dush Ramachandran, vice president of sales, marketing and business development for ClickBank, has been appointed to the advisory boards of Affiliate Summit and Affilicon, further strengthening Ramachandran’s ties to affiliate marketing circles in domestic and international arenas.

Both advisory boards work to provide thought leadership and industry expertise to Internet and affiliate marketers. Board members leverage their connections and standing within the industry for the betterment of the business and all of those associated with it.

“I look forward to working with Affiliate Summit and Affilicon to help ensure the success of Internet and affiliate marketers worldwide,” said Ramachandran. “Working with ClickBank’s community of 100,000-plus marketing affiliates, I can offer a well-informed, global perspective of the industry and what is needed to move it forward.”

In addition to being considered the source for thought leadership and industry expertise, Affiliate Summit and Affilicon hold several annual marketing conferences that are considered to be the premier must-attend events for marketing affiliates, exhibitors and online merchants. Conferences and events are held in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia, drawing marketing affiliates, exhibitors and merchants on an annual and semi-annual basis. As an advisory board member, Ramachandran will assist with the selection of speakers and topics at upcoming Affiliate Summit and Affilicon conferences.

Ramachandran joined ClickBank in 2005. He is responsible for ClickBank’s sales and marketing activities and alliances with affiliate and vendor organizations worldwide. Ramachandran has held executive leadership positions with domestic and international firms such as Requisite Technology, Conceptual Technologies, Computervision Corp., Prime Computer, Inc. and Datapoint Corp. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore University, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management.

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development and Marketing

Have you ever gone to the market or the grocery store early on weekend mornings, just after the fresh produce has been unpacked and stacked? Have you noticed just how full and red the tomatoes look? How crisp the lettuce leaves are? Just how desirable everything smells?

Your marketing plans are very similar. The fresher they are, the more likely they are to succeed. You probably built your site, wrote some articles, or developed your product a few years ago, based on the information you had at that time. The traffic started to build and sales came in steadily, but things have started to slow down now. You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with the way sales are being tracked. If you’re an affiliate, you may wonder why your traffic isn’t converting as well as it used to. The answer may lie in the freshness (or lack thereof) of your marketing mix.

The target market you aimed at when you first built your site or developed your product may have changed, and your message to them may need to change as well. The keywords that you used in your search advertising campaigns when you first started were probably converting well at that time, but may have become a bit stale by now. Consider re-investing in some research to determine which search terms in your space are converting well. You need to keep your marketing message and methods fresh to keep pace with the changing environment around us.

Even two years ago, widespread use of social media tools like Twitter to promote websites or products was virtually unknown. Today, however, it is a vital weapon in the arsenal of the savvy Internet marketer. So, for example, a marketing mix that does not include social media needs to be updated to take advantage of its popularity and reach.

Even products that were hot sellers six or nine months ago are not as hot today. When gasoline prices hit record prices last summer, the number of products that dealt with increasing fuel economy in cars skyrocketed, and their sales numbers rose to match the demand for them. Since gas prices have declined, so too has the popularity of these types of products. Today, with a global economic downturn well underway, the products that are doing well are those that enable people to weather this rough economic climate.

Constantly test and re-evaluate your product and your marketing strategy for freshness, and update any part of your mix that is becoming stale. You wouldn’t want your products or your promotions to suffer the same fate as last week’s produce, would you?

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

Last month, we told you about HopAd Builder, our powerful new tool that affiliates can use to promote ClickBank products through targeted text ads on their sites, and get the full affiliate commission for sales made to visitors who click on the ads and buy.

The response to HopAd Builder has been great, and several third-party developers have started creating free tools that extend the functionality of HopAd Builder and make it easy to use on certain types of websites.

One example of a HopAd tool is a plugin for the popular Wordpress blogging software, called the HopAd Plugin. It is available for free at www.hopadplugin.com and it allows owners of self-hosted Wordpress blogs to integrate HopAds into a blog in a simple and seamless way.

If you’re a Wordpress blog owner and you’d like an easy new way to make extra affiliate commissions by displaying ads for ClickBank products related to your blog’s content, be sure to check out the HopAd Plugin!

Do you have any experience using the HopAd Plugin? Know of any other great free tools out there? Leave a comment and let us know.

Posted by: Ashley Watson, Account Specialist

Whether you’re a ClickBank affiliate or vendor, it can be very easy to become stagnant in your marketing activities. Once you’ve found a particular niche or method of advertising that works for you, it can be very difficult to change your methods. Why would you want to fix something that isn’t broken, especially when any change could potentially lower your profits?

The important thing to keep in mind is that digital products, like any other market, fluctuate based on seasonality and trends in the outside world. Even highly successful products that pertain to a wide audience experience these sales fluctuations, so you need to take these changes into account if you’re going to maximize your profits.

What influences changes in market activity?

Many different factors contribute to the market being in a constant state of change. Some of these factors aren’t surprising, such as the state of the economy or seasonal changes. However, some things are less obvious, such as the current sports season, school semesters and breaks, and holidays. It’s important to ensure your marketing campaigns are taking these factors into account so you can get the most out of your efforts.

What can you do to maximize on current trends?

So, what can you do to capitalize on an ever-changing market? First, I would suggest taking time on a regular basis to research current events. What is going on in the world to influence sales trends or cause higher levels of interest in certain subjects?

Here are some specific examples of events that affect sales, and the types of products that are influenced by these factors.

State of the Economy: We are in a recession. Consumers are spending their money more carefully, so they look for products that offer a high return on their investment, or that save them money. Some products that sell well in a recession include alternative energy solutions, foreclosure guides, guides to making money at home, and even e-books on manifest reality.

The New Year: New Year’s resolutions are extremely popular every year, and lead to a big increase in sales for health-related products such as diet programs and fitness guides. The spike in sales is temporary, but significant.

Valentines Day: Romantic guides become very popular in the US market every February.

Sports Seasons: Some product types, such as fitness products or sports betting guides, tend to sell better during a particular sports season.

School Semesters: Products that may help you capitalize on the seasonality of the educational system include computer maintenance software, study guides, guides to teaching abroad, and guides for school applications.

Holiday Season: During the holiday season, customers are slightly less inclined to buy digital products, as they save to purchase physical goods as gifts for their loved ones. However, products that address pressing needs tend to be less affected by this trend. There are also products that deal directly with the holiday, such as recipe e-books and gift idea guides, which sell well during the holiday season.

There are billions of potential customers, all of whom are unique and who are affected by cultural and seasonal trends in different ways. By staying aware of these trends, and being proactive about changing your marketing methods to stay in tune with these changes, you can maximize your efforts and be more profitable than ever.

Posted by: Greg Lems, VP of Information Technology

Please note: This post is intended for readers with knowledge of web programming.

Some Clickbank clients have expressed the desire to retrieve transaction information from their accounts programmatically. In the future, we expect to implement a web-based solution for programmatic access to client data.

For now, clients who wish to programmatically access their Clickbank account data can do so using a special link on the Clickbank site that creates a CSV file with one day’s worth of transactions from an account. A sample of PHP code which accesses this data is shown below. However, any language which provides http access and session management can be used to access Clickbank account data.

To access Clickbank transaction data, a program must perform two operations:

1)      Authenticate by performing an HTTPS POST to https://www.clickbank.com/account/login (note: no trailing slash) and passing authentication information (see example below for specifics).

2)      Call the CSV download URL for the desired date. The format of the request is:

https://www.clickbank.com/account/dailyTxnCsv.htm?dt=YYYY-MM-DD

Below is an example of PHP code which authenticates, calls the CSV, then parses the data and prints it out. Make sure to replace ACCOUNT_NICKNAME and ACCOUNT_PASSWORD with your appropriate credentials, and select the date you want (in this example we use 2008-11-06).

<?php

# Get transactions for 2008-11-06

#

$baseurl = “https://www.clickbank.com”;

$login_args = array(

‘j_username’ => ‘ACCOUNT_NICKNAME’,

‘j_password’ => ‘ACCOUNT_PASSWORD’

);

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, ‘cookie.txt’);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL,

$baseurl.’/account/login’);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($login_args));

$login = curl_exec($curl);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL,

$baseurl.’/account/dailyTxnCsv.htm?dt=2008-11-06′);

$csvfile = curl_exec($curl);

curl_close ($curl);

$lines = explode(”\n”, $csvfile);

foreach ($lines as $line) {

if (strlen($line) > 0) {

list($date,$time,$receipt,$tid,$pmt,$txntype,$item,$amount,$publisher,

$affiliate,$countrycode,$state,$lastname,$firstname,$email) = explode(”,”, $line);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Date:”, $date);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Time:”, $time);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Receipt”, $receipt);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Tracking ID:”, $tid);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Payment Type:”, $pmt);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Transaction Type:”, $txntype);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Item:”, $item);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Amount:”, $amount);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Publisher:”, $publisher);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Affiliate:”, $affiliate);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Country Code:”, $countrycode);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”State:”, $state);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Lastname:”, $lastname);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Firstname:”, $firstname);

printf(”%-20s %s\n”,”Email:”, $email);

echo “——————————————–\n”;

}

}

?>

Fields returned for each line in the CSV file:

Column:	Example:
Date	2007-01-29
Time	07:23
Receipt	7BXK1N4J
TID	ADSENSE1
Pmt	VISA
Txn Type	Sale
Item	1	(note, this field may also contain alpha characters)
Amount	$120.18	(note, negative amounts appear as $-120.18)
Publisher	PUBNAME
Affiliate	AFFNAME
CC	US
St.	WA
Last Name	THOMPSON
First Name	JERRY
Email	JERRY@YAHOO.COM

By using this type of script, you should be able to get all the information you need about ClickBank transactions in your account. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns by leaving a comment.