Posts Tagged ‘affiliates’

Service provides greater flexibility for ClickBank users

BROOMFIELD, Colo.- Sept. 9, 2008 – ClickBank, a privately held online retailer for buyers and sellers of digitally delivered products and services, today announced the ability for ClickBank clients to receive payments for affiliate commission and sales via weekly direct deposit (ACH & XACH).

“During the past two years in our efforts to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, we have made a number of critical improvements to our services and offerings,” said Bob King, ClickBank CEO. “The latest improvement is weekly payments. With this offering our clients will have greater flexibility to manage their cash flow and reinvest into their businesses.”

In July, ClickBank introduced direct deposit into both domestic and international bank accounts. Now, direct deposit users can choose to be paid weekly, cutting the wait time to receive electronic payments and providing ClickBank clients faster access to capital.

“Direct deposit and shorter payment cycles will help many Internet marketers manage their cash flow and reinvest their ClickBank profits,” said ClickBank client Michael Rasmussen. “It’s not only a good business move for existing clients, it will bring in a lot of new ClickBank affiliates as well.”

To be eligible for weekly payments and direct deposit, a ClickBank user must have first received three paper checks within any 90-day period. Also, only accounts in the following countries qualify at this time: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States. The company is expecting to expand direct deposit to other countries in the future.

Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager – Client Account Management

There is a saying that goes, “You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” I don’t know who originally spoke those words, but I believe they could have been in reference to ClickBank’s refund policy.

In my 8 years with ClickBank, one of our most controversial policies has always been the refund policy. Our clients tend to love it or hate it. If they hate it, they hate it for one of two reasons: either (1) they think the refund period is too long or (2) they think it’s too short. We have a refund policy that allows for returns within 60 days to protect both our clients and our customers, but we hear from both publishers who think this is way too long, and those that want the refund policy to last 6 months, a year, or more! Obviously, there are different opinions about what is a “fair” refund policy length.

While not everyone agrees on what the refund policy should be, the one common denominator we all share is that we want to reduce refunds as much as possible. With that in mind, this post is dedicated to sharing a few tips to help you in that endeavor.

1) Be easy to contact

• Prominently display your customer service email address on your Thank You page.
• Provide your customer service hours and a time frame in which customers can expect to receive a reply from you.
• Realize that email is not 100% reliable, and take advantage of the area within your ClickBank account where you can add a customer service phone number. This number is not provided to customers after the purchase or on their sales receipt; it is only provided to them by our customer service staff if the customer calls or emails stating that they are having trouble reaching you by email.
• Coming soon- as of September 9^th, you will be able to list a customer service/help desk URL in your ClickBank account. This URL will be provided to customers on the order confirmation page and on their sales receipt.

2) Provide an honest description of your product on your sales page

• Set your customers’ expectations appropriately. Many people are still skeptical of digital products and of buying products through the internet. Make sure you tell them what they’re going to get as thoroughly and honestly as possible, so they feel they got their money’s worth and walk away satisfied.
• Explain which programs or software applications the customer will need in order to download your product. For example, keep in mind that not everyone has MS Word.

3) Provide impeccable customer service

• Autoresponders are efficient, but they are extremely impersonal, and they do not and cannot address each individual issue that a customer may have. While it’s a good idea to use autoresponders to provide customers with answers to frequently asked questions, you should also make sure to provide customers with a way to get answers from a real person if the FAQ doesn’t help them.
• Offer courteous, professional, easy-to-follow answers to customer service inquiries. You may answer all of your customer service email, but if the instructions are not written in a way that the customer can understand, they will say, “Forget it,” and ask for a refund.

Despite our best efforts, it’s highly unlikely that any of us will be able to please all of our customers all of the time. However, following these tips will help you help you please some of the people all of the time, and save a significant percentage of your sales from unnecessary refunds.

Posted by: Bob King, CEO

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Affiliate Summit East in Boston. I was on a panel discussing the State of Ad Networks, but that is not what I’m going to write about today. While reviewing the agenda for Affiliate Summit, I noticed a breakout session related to affiliate marketing and social networking. I attended the session with great anticipation that I’d learn something to help me “crack the code” on how ClickBank could participate in social networks and drive our business to even greater heights.

I was sorely disappointed, not because the speaker didn’t do a good job, but because he presented a lot of really good tactical ideas for individual affiliates to tap into social networks, but nothing to spark my awareness for ClickBank’s opportunity. (Maybe that’s my problem.)

Now I’m not totally ignorant of how social networking works, even though I’m the oldest guy in the company. I realize we probably aren’t going to be successful with a full frontal attack of advertising or calling the CEO of a social networking site and trying to cut a deal. I realize we have to participate for awhile and build our credibility with users. I know that blatant commercialization is a big no-no.

So here’s my dilemma. I’ve got to run a grassroots effort to spread the word about the virtues of ClickBank, but we run a pretty lean operation here. I can ask our employees to do their part, but there aren’t many of us. However, there are thousands of you out there; can you help spread the word about the benefits of ClickBank? I’m not asking people to spam the social networking sites, I just know that ClickBank can be a great help to the kinds of people who participate in social networks, just like it’s helped you and many others.

If you have any other ideas on how we could “crack the social code,” leave a comment and let me know. I’m always looking for great ideas on how to spread the word about ClickBank, and who knows better than people like you, who are out there being successful online on a daily basis? I look forward to hearing your ideas.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

One of the best things about working at ClickBank is looking through our huge catalog of products and seeing thousands of examples of people who are making their lives, and the lives of others, a little better by sharing their expertise. What makes ClickBank so special, even among affiliate networks, is that you don’t have to be a huge company or have a big inventory of products to participate. You just have to be an expert, and be willing to share that expertise with others.

You may be saying to yourself, “I’m not an expert at anything! If I was, I’d be out lecturing or already have a book written.” OK, so you might not be a whiz at financial planning or be able to write a 300-page book on car repair, but if you start thinking about your hobbies and interests, I’m confident that you can find your expertise. Do your friends go crazy over your special chocolate chip cookies and beg you for the recipe? Is your garden the pride of the neighborhood? Have you walked a family member through setting up a secure wireless network in their home, or removing spyware from their PC? Then you’re an expert!

The beauty of ClickBank is that we have many product publishers who make a nice modest income from sharing their expertise in areas like these, even when they’re selling their products for $20 or $30. Sure, they’re not necessarily going to retire on the money they make from them, but wouldn’t it be nice to make a little bit of extra cash by sharing knowledge you would normally give away for free? It’s especially nice when you know that your expertise is helping others and making their lives a little better.

Take a little time and think about what makes you an expert, and then take a crack at creating a product and selling it through ClickBank. With your knowledge and a huge group of affiliates looking to promote great products, you’ll never know how successful you can be unless you try!

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

If you sell or promote digital products through ClickBank, wouldn’t you like to know where your customers are, and what days of the week and times of day they buy your products? With ClickBank’s introduction of the Instant Notification API, whether you’re a publisher or an affiliate you can do all that and more.

The Instant Notification API, or application program interface, provides a way by which information captured at the time of purchase can be provided by the ClickBank system to another computer. If you are signed up to receive instant notifications, you can set up a program on your computer to receive the information that ClickBank sends as soon as a transaction takes place.

Ordinarily, this transaction information is sent to publishers by means of a notification email, which needs to be parsed in order to collect this data. With the API, all of this same information can be collected instantaneously, as each transaction occurs. Additionally, now affiliates can also gather this transaction data as the sale occurs, which was previously only possible for publishers.

With the API and a corresponding data collection program in place on your computer, you can easily determine from which country or zip code most of your sales originate and direct your advertising efforts to media in those markets. You can analyze the times of day that are most popular with your customers and use day part bidding, or Ad Scheduling as Google refers to it (covered in an earlier post by Beau Blackwell), to show your ads at the times when your customers are most likely to see them and make a purchase.

Publishers with multiple accounts can take instant notifications from all their accounts and have the day’s sales aggregated and displayed, showing sales for all of their products across various geographical locations and time zones. Since the API will output information on all transactions, including sales, refunds and chargebacks, this capability can give you a minute-to-minute update on the status of your business through ClickBank.

Please be aware that this service is intended for use by experienced programmers. If you don’t have extensive programming skills, you should consider enlisting the services of a programmer to help you take advantage of the Instant Notification API.

Be sure to check out details on the Instant Notification API and explore how it can give you a better handle on your business.

Posted by: Laura M., Advertising Manager

For publishers who are just starting out or want to expose their product to thousands of affiliates, advertising in ClickBank’s Marketplace has always been a great option. With that in mind, ClickBank is proud to announce the expansion of its advertising program to include Marketplace sub-categories. Now affiliates will be able to more easily connect with publishers who fit their niche.

On July 1, we added 160 new advertising slots on our “Money & Employment” and “Computing & Internet” sub-category pages (8 ads per sub-category). Throughout the rest of the summer, we will continually open up more sub-categories until all of them are available! The next sub-categories we will open up for advertising are “Home & Family” and “Marketing & Ads” on July 15. Make sure to seize this opportunity to get your product in front of interested affiliates, as spots in the Marketplace fill up quickly!

For details and pricing information, please visit:
http://www.clickbank.com/advertise.html

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

If you’re an affiliate who runs your own site and promotes it through Google Adwords, improving your Quality Score can be the difference between an advertising campaign that’s mediocre and one that’s extremely profitable. One tactic for improving Quality Score is to make sure that your Web site has a privacy policy, and that your landing page directly links to it. Many affiliates skip over creating a privacy policy on their site, especially if they have created many different Web sites to feature different products.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to become a legal expert, BBBOnline has created a privacy policy template that you can modify to fit your Web site. You’ll just need to plug in a few details about your site, and add or delete certain sections of the policy to reflect your site’s details and marketing policies. Then you’ll need to create a link to the page, preferably in the site footer so it will be linked to from every page within the site. For 10 minutes’ worth of work, it’s one of the easiest ways to improve your site and get better performance out of your advertising efforts.

Even if you don’t use Google Adwords, having a clearly worded privacy policy can make your site appear more trustworthy to visitors, leading to higher conversion rates. One of the biggest hurdles to making a sale online is convincing nervous visitors that their personal information is safe with you, and a privacy policy can go a long way to reassuring them that they can trust you. It’s unknown whether Google rewards sites with a privacy policy in natural search results, but for the small amount of effort required, it’s well worth adding a privacy policy just in case they do.

Service provides more convenience when paying for online subscriptions

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – June 24, 2008 – ClickBank, a privately held online retailer for buyers and sellers of digitally delivered products and services, today announced it is offering PayPal for recurring billing – yet another strategic option for product publishers seeking to increase business and meet customer needs.

ClickBank is using PayPal’s recurring billing solution to give product publishers an easy way to sell subscription-based content and services, such as online newsletters or annual software licenses. It has proven to be very popular with customers, growing rapidly each month since its introduction.

“Currently, nearly 20 percent of ClickBank’s total business transactions are conducted using PayPal,” said Bob King, ClickBank CEO. “Allowing customers to use PayPal for recurring billing will further fuel demand for our popular subscription-based products and services and, by providing a new payment option, enhance the ClickBank experience for publishers, affiliates and customers.”

“We are excited to have ClickBank on board using PayPal,” said Jim Hunt, director of merchant relations at PayPal. “Using our recurring billing functionality gives customers security and convenience when shopping online.”

ClickBank is a world leader in online commerce systems with more than 100,000 active affiliates, 35,000 unique digitally downloadable products, such as e-books and software, and over 12,000 product publishers from around the globe that register more than 25,000 daily transactions.

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

At parties and social gatherings people often ask me what I do, and I tell them I work for ClickBank. This answer is usually greeted with a puzzled look and a quizzical “Who?” But when I tell the ClickBank story, the puzzlement is often replaced by wonderment and admiration, and the inevitable follow-up question is “What’s the secret of ClickBank’s success?”

Even though the person asking the question is always different and is perhaps expecting a different answer every time, I answer the question in exactly the same way every time: “Our affiliate network.” If it weren’t for our incredible army of motivated and innovative affiliates, all of the hard work we’ve put into ClickBank over the years would not amount to very much.

It is our simple, low-risk approach to becoming a ClickBank affiliate that causes an average of 2,000 people to sign up for a ClickBank account every day. And a fair number of those people go on to become successful and earn a decent income from ClickBank. Some of our affiliates have even completely replaced their traditional income with their ClickBank earnings. With over 110,000 active affiliates generating revenues, ClickBank’s affiliate network is truly at the root of our success.

We think affiliates are so important to our success that we’re going to be at the Affiliate Summit in Boston on Aug 10 to 12, and our CEO Bob King is going to be on a panel discussion about trends in affiliate marketing. If you’re planning to attend the Affiliate Summit this year, come see us at Table 23 at the Meet Market on Sunday Aug 10, between 12:00 noon and 6:00. We’d love to meet you, and say thanks for being the secret of our success!

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Working online is great. You can work from anywhere at anytime ­ – at home, your favorite café, even the beach. All you really need is a computer, Internet access, and maybe a cell phone. This ability to connect in near real-time around the globe from anywhere you choose is a major attraction of an Internet-based business.

On the other hand, there is still no substitute for meeting face to face. Whether meeting a colleague, client, or business partner, technology still can’t replicate a handshake or take the place of a live discussion. I was reminded of this recently when I had the privilege of meeting a group of ClickBank clients “live and in person.”

On Friday, June 6^th, ClickBank management met with a small group of clients in London for our second European Advisory Board. We invited a diverse group of product publishers and affiliates to spend the day with us and provide their thoughts and opinions on a wide variety of subjects important to the entire ClickBank community. During the meeting we had in-depth discussions on our product roadmap – what new and improved capabilities we plan to build in the coming months and years, how to better serve our current clients, and how to attract and recruit more product publishers and affiliates to the ClickBank community. The discussions were open and honest, and provided our management team with excellent insights into what is really important to our client base. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended this year’s meeting. We genuinely appreciate your active participation and the generous use of your time.

This Advisory Board meeting is one important channel for feedback, but by no means the only one. In fact, another major vehicle for client input is just around the corner. In the coming weeks we are initiating our second annual client survey. The survey is sent to a random sample of ClickBank clients, so if you receive an invitation to participate, please do. The survey is a great opportunity for you to tell us what you think.

And if you get the chance to meet with your business partners or customers live, I highly recommend it. It certainly takes more time and effort, but it’s almost always time well spent.