Posts Tagged ‘features’

Guest Author, Miles Baker

Written by: Miles Baker, ClickScoop

ClickBank has several powerful features that affiliates and vendors can take advantage of in order to increase their profits. Recently, ClickBank has upgraded and added many new features that have a proven capacity to increase your sales. Below you will find 5 of these ClickBank features that are my favorites. Some of these features are new, and some have been around awhile, though all of them have the potential to rock your profits!

Feature #1: TID & VTID Tracking

Who TID & VTID Tracking is for: Affiliates and Vendors

How TID & VTID Tracking Works:

A TID is a ClickBank tracking I.D. It’s a string of letters and/or numbers up to 24 characters in length appended to the end of a ClickBank HopLink. Using a TID allows you to track your hoplinks based on the TID associated with it. There is no limit to the amount of TIDs you can use. ClickBank TID’s are also available for Vendors to use as well, the difference is the variable “VTID” instead of “TID” and that the Vendor TID is appended to the paylink instead of the HopLink.

How TIDs Make You More Money:

Using TID’s provides you with the information you need in order to determine where you should be focusing your efforts.

Tracking your sales with TID’s allows you to pinpoint exactly where sales are coming from. For example, if you want to track links from Twitter you could append the TID of “twitter” to your HopLink. Inside your ClickBank reporting you will see all the statistics associated with that TID for clicks, sales, refunds, etc.

One of my favorite uses is to use TID’s to track what specific pages on a website the sales are coming from. This allows me to focus my efforts on my most profitable pages in order to get higher rankings in the search engines.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/all-about-hoplinks/#TID
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-basics/creating-a-payment-link/

Feature #2: PitchPlus (formerly known as One-Click Upsell)

Who PitchPlus is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How PitchPlus Works:

PitchPlus allows vendors to add additional products to sell to their customers after the initial purchase.  Once a customer enters their payment information and confirms their purchase they are presented with an upsell page.  With a single click the customer can purchase the additional product without entering their credit card details again.

As a vendor you create the products to sell as your upsells. The PitchPlus Advanced feature offers the ability to present up to three consecutive upsell offers as well as downsells. In a downsell scenario, if a customer decides to decline the upsell offer they could be presented with another product or the same product at a lower price.

How PitchPlus Makes You More Money:

Adding upsells to your products increases your overall earnings per customer for both vendors and affiliates. Since the customer is not required to re-enter their credit card information, the one-click upsell can convert extremely well assuming you have related and appealing offers.

Personally I’ve found PitchPlus to be one of the easiest and most effective ways at increasing income as a vendor.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/one-click-upsell/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/pitchplus/

Feature #3: Joint Venture

Who Joint Venture is for: Vendors & Affiliates

How Joint Venture Works:

ClickBank Joint Venture is a newer and extremely versatile feature.  This allows vendors to split their earnings with partners, promote other vendor products as upsells, and even allow vendors to offer 2^nd tier affiliate commissions.

The Joint Venture feature also works for affiliates.  Affiliates can partner together and split profits from their affiliate sales.

The Joint Venture feature allows you to set up contracts within your ClickBank account.  In the contract you can specify a range of details such as how commissions are divided, start and end dates for the contract, and much more.

How Joint Venture Makes You More Money:

Partnerships are extremely profitable because you leverage one anothers’ strengths. The Joint Venture feature makes collaborating and partnering with people much easier. With the Joint Venture feature the trust factor is increased because one partner is not relying on the other partner to pay them; ClickBank is dividing up and making the payments. Additionally Joint Venture is accurate, easy, and hassle free to split up payments between partners.

There’s really an unlimited variety of ways you could use this feature. Here are just a few short examples to give you some ideas…

• You could have someone write product reviews for your blog and in exchange you could give them a portion of the sales that those reviews generate.
• You could partner with someone to create a new product and split the profits.
• If you’re a vendor you could find another vendor and cross promote one another’s products as one-click upsells.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/account-help/account-tools/joint-venture/

Feature #4: Recurring Billing

Who Recurring Billing is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How Recurring Billing Works:

ClickBank Recurring Billing gives vendors the ability to sell their product at an initial price, and then setup a rebill price for each subsequent payment for the duration of a rebill product. In addition, this gives vendors the ability to offer a trial period for the product as well.

How Recurring Billing Makes You More Money:

Creating Recurring Billing Products gives vendors a continuous revenue stream over time. With regular payment schedules, such as bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual, vendors can earn more per sale on average than with a standard product.

The recurring billing feature can also be used in combination with PitchPlus Advanced.  This combination can be extremely powerful in generating additional income that is also residual.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/creating-a-recurring-billing-product/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/promoting-recurring-billing-products/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/recurring-billing-subscription-and-membership-products/

Feature #5: Marketplace Search

Who Marketplace Search is for: Affiliates

How Marketplace Search Works:

The Marketplace search capabilities were recently enhanced and now allow users to search by a variety of product and vendor criteria.  You’ll find Marketplace filters and attributes to search by on the left hand side of the ClickBank Marketplace. Additionally you can use the ‘advanced search’ link next to the search box for additional search features.

How Marketplace Search Makes You More Money:

Finding the right ClickBank products to promote will help you make more sales and increase profits. Using the Marketplace Search you will be able to find which vendors are offering higher payouts, use PitchPlus, offer rebills, offer affiliate tools, and much more. You can even find out which vendors offer $1 trials. Using this information allows you to find and promote the products that are the best match for your marketing efforts as well as find vendors who will make you the most money overall.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/advancedMarketplaceSearch.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2011/12/08/new-and-improved-marketplace-search-capabilities/

About the Author

Miles Baker has been marketing online since 1997 and has been a ClickBank client for over 12 years. He currently resides in Fort Collins, CO where he runs ClickScoop.com, a community for ClickBank Vendors and Affiliates.

With thousands of products currently in the ClickBank Marketplace and new products being added daily, finding just the right product to promote can be challenging. If this applies to you, then you’re in luck. The ClickBank Marketplace just got better! For your convenience, we have added advanced search options to the Marketplace page, making it easier than ever for you to find the perfect product to promote.

In addition to new product search filters, you can also select product attributes based on your requirements such as language, billing type, upsell and more, simply by checking a box. Click on the video below to see a demonstration of the new and improved Marketplace search capabilities.

Visit the ClickBank Marketplace now to start searching for your next profitable product to promote.

As part of our continued efforts to create new ways for ClickBank clients to make their products available to new markets and to continue to grow their businesses, we are pleased to announce that ClickBank is now supporting 2 new languages and 18 new currencies.

New Languages

These two new languages, Portuguese and Italian, are the latest additions to a growing number of languages supported by ClickBank including English, German, Spanish and French. At this time, Portuguese and Italian are supported for end customer experience only (i.e., Order Form and Customer Support) and the website and website behind the login are not yet supported for clients in these languages. We do, however, offer full customer and client support in English, German, Spanish and French. These new languages open up opportunities for you to sell your products globally to an international audience!

New Currencies

We are also excited to announce the addition of 18 new acceptable currencies to our previous total of 13 acceptable currencies, creating flexibility for both you and your customers. New currencies include Mexican Peso,
 Brazilian Real, Argentinean Peso, 
Chilean Peso, Colombian Peso,
 Russian Ruble, Korean Won,
 Singapore Dollar,
 Indian Rupee, Thai Bhat, Turkish Lira, Polish Zloty, 
Czech Koruna, 
Indonesian Rupiah, 
Malaysian Ringgit, Chinese Yuan, 
Hungarian Forint and
 Philippines Peso. For a full list of the currencies ClickBank supports, click here. With 31 currencies to choose from, you have more opportunities to sell to new paying customers and more reasons for your products and promotions to convert.

What This Means for Vendors

You can now translate your products, Pitch Pages and Thank You pages to earn more in these markets. Additionally, we now offer Customer Support in Portuguese and Italian to support your sales. If you have a top selling English language product and you’d like to take advantage of these new languages, we can help. To learn about how you can work with a licensee to have your products translated and promoted in these new markets, check out our ClickBank Bestseller Program. For more information on going global with your product, click here.

Additionally, accepting new currencies means that there’s a greater chance that customers who typically pay in these new currencies will purchase your products once you get them to the Order Form.

What This Means for Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate and are familiar with one of our supported languages, you can now promote translated products in these high-opportunity, low-competition markets! To find products in the Marketplace to promote that have been translated into other languages, go to the ClickBank Marketplace, click on Advanced Search, scroll down and select the product language you would like to appear in your search.

Additionally, ALL affiliates can benefit from the addition of the 18 new acceptable currencies. Even if you’re promoting an English language product, you may see higher conversion rates in the local regions of the new currencies.

For more information on languages and currencies, click here. To learn more about the ClickBank Global Bestseller Program, click here.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

This week, we’re excited to use Tech Tuesday to announce a new feature that is now available to all ClickBank vendors- Custom Order Form! Until now, this feature has been in closed beta testing with a few select vendors so we could measure its effectiveness in improving conversion rates for vendors. We’re happy to report that based on our testing, most vendors saw a marked improvement after implementing Custom Order Form in their accounts. Now all ClickBank vendors, even people just starting out, can take advantage of this conversion boost.

What is Custom Order Form?

The idea behind Custom Order Form is that by providing a more seamless shopping and buying experience for your customers, they’ll be more likely to complete their purchase when presented with a version of the ClickBank Order Form that looks more like your Pitch Page or website.

Custom Order Form gives vendors the ability to customize the ClickBank Order Form to match their site, by adding matching header graphics, color schemes, and more. It also gives vendors the ability to pass this customization to the ClickBank Success Page where customers access their purchase, increasing their level of trust and confidence in their purchase.

How to Get Started

To create your own Custom Order Form now, we recommend checking out our Custom Order Form Help Center article. It has all the instructions you need to start taking advantage of the increase in conversions today!

At ClickBank, we recognize that partnerships are among the biggest keys to success in the affiliate marketing business. Having great relationships with other people in the industry such as affiliates, copywriters, subject matter experts, virtual assistants, or affiliate managers can be the difference between making a few dollars online and having a thriving Internet-based business.

Until now, managing the administrative side of partnerships, whether it’s figuring out revenue sharing on a given sale or working with affiliate managers to determine the effectiveness of referred affiliates, has been challenging and time-consuming, if not impossible. With that in mind, ClickBank is very proud and excited to announce the availability of our extensive new Joint Venture capabilities.

ClickBank Joint Venture is a powerful new way to automate payouts, refunds, bonuses and more between multiple parties. It even allows for something which many ClickBank clients have wanted for a long time, which is 2^nd tier affiliate commissions!

Joint Venture includes four different types of JV contracts you can create, with each serving a unique and useful function:

• Traditional JV Contract- Allows a product vendor to give a portion of their earnings from a sale to another client, such as a partner, copywriter, designer, customer service manager, or anyone they wish.
• Upsell JV Contract- Allows a product vendor to upsell another vendor’s product and split the proceeds of the sale however they wish.
• Affiliate Referral Contract- Commonly referred to as 2^nd tier affiliate commissions, this type of JV allows a product vendor to share a portion of their earnings with an affiliate manager or JV broker who referred the affiliate that led to a particular sale.
• Affiliate JV Contract- Allows two or more affiliates to share the affiliate commission on a sale. This is a great way for affiliates to partner on an advertising campaign or collaborate on projects.

For more information on how to set up and use all the different kinds of Joint Venture contracts, please see our Joint Venture Help Center article!

ClickBank is excited to announce and invite you to the first ever ClickBank Exchange! The ClickBank Exchange is an Internet marketing conference that will take place on August 19th-20th at the Crowne Plaza Times Square in New York, NY. Our event will be action packed, with two days of high level educational content and networking opportunities.

An amazing collection of speakers and panelists has been assembled to teach you the strategies and shortcuts to building your digital empire. We’ve gathered a mix of industry leaders and under-the-radar marketing “ninjas” to share the specific tricks, as well as the business philosophies, that have helped them dominate the Internet marketing industry. Here are some of the many topics we’ll be covering at the Exchange:

• Keynote panel: How to build your Internet marketing empire
• The latest SEO tips & tricks from the CEO of SEOMoz
• The secrets of killer copywriting that really converts
• How to drive massive amounts of free, qualified traffic through Facebook
• How to be a marketing rockstar and get raving fans
• And much more!

In this day and a half of inside information guests will get real time cash creation secrets from the top Internet marketing millionaires that ClickBank has assembled. The speaker line-up includes:

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Yanik Silver
• Joe Polish
• Chris Farrell
• Rand Fishkin
• Ryan Lee
• Marc Ostrofsky
• Jeff Siegel
• Mike Hill
• Joe Sugarman

And the list doesn’t end there! Discover the full lineup here.

ClickBank Exchange attendees are sure to learn more money-making techniques at this event than at any other event this year.

Click here for more information and to register today!

ClickBank is proud to announce that we’ve introduced several new features designed to help our vendors and affiliates take advantage of the rapid growth of mobile commerce. These features will improve the mobile customer’s shopping experience when accessing ClickBank vendor Pitch Pages and the ClickBank order form, as well as giving affiliates an entirely new way to promote products to mobile customers.

Hop Traffic Management

This feature allows vendors to specify a mobile-optimized version of their HopLink Target URL (commonly referred to as the Pitch Page) and Thank You Page. ClickBank’s Hop referral tracking system will determine whether a Hop is occurring on a computer or a mobile device, and will route the customer to the appropriate version of the HopLink Target URL accordingly. This will improve the shopper’s experience and should result in higher conversions among mobile customers.

Mobile Order Form

If a customer reaches the ClickBank Order Form on a mobile device, we will now display a version of the order form that is visually optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices. Since users will no longer have to scroll or zoom in to view the order form, this should also result in improved conversions.

HopCode 2D Barcode Encoded HopLinks

We have introduced a new kind of HopLink that affiliates can use to promote products. When you click the Promote button in the Marketplace, enter your affiliate nickname and click Create, you’ll now see a barcode to the right of your HopLinks.

This barcode, which we call a HopCode, is encoded with your affiliate information just like a HopLink! When a mobile device user scans this HopCode with a QR code reader on their phone, they will be directed to the vendor’s HopLink Target URL, and you will earn the normal commission if a sale occurs.

This feature opens open many opportunities for new places to promote ClickBank products.

For more information about any of our mobile features, please visit our Help Center article.

Today ClickBank is announcing an exciting new feature now available to all vendors, to help both vendors and their affiliates get more out of every sale. Over the past year, ClickBank made the PitchPlus feature (formerly one-click upsell) available to a select group of vendors, and their success with this feature was impressive. Vendors who participated in this pilot program have sold more than $40 million worth of upsell, cross-sell or downsell offers to date. These are all purchases above and beyond the initial sale!

There are now two different versions of the PitchPlus feature that you can take advantage of and incorporate into your sales process.

PitchPlus Basic

With Pitch Plus Basic, the beginning of the order process works like any other ClickBank purchase; a customer visits your Pitch Page, clicks the payment link, then enters their payment information on the ClickBank order form and completes their purchase.

In a non-PitchPlus purchase, the customer is then taken to a confirmation page where they see their order details and can access the product. In a basic PitchPlus purchase, however, the customer is instead taken from the Order Form to an additional Pitch Page of your choice! The customer is given the opportunity to accept or decline the additional offer, and are then taken to a ClickBank Confirmation Page, which contains links to the individual Thank You pages of the items purchased. If they accept the additional offer, they’re able to purchase it immediately without having to re-enter payment details.

PitchPlus Advanced

Vendors must be approved for the PitchPlus Advanced feature, but once approved they can create PitchPlus flows with up to three additional offers. Like PitchPlus Basic, the order process begins like any other ClickBank purchase. After the customer enters their payment information on the ClickBank order form and completes their purchase, the vendor can display up to three additional offers to the customer within the same purchase cycle.

Within each step of the PitchPlus flow, you can decide what action to take if the customer agrees to the offer or declines the offer. Once the customer completes the flow, they are taken to a ClickBank Confirmation Page, which contains links to the individual Thank You pages of the items purchased. ClickBank automatically displays the correct combination of purchased items.

Vendors who wish to take advantage of these advanced multi-step flows must submit an application for access to PitchPlus Advanced to the ClickBank Security Team.  We will review your application, account history and intended use and respond to you directly regarding your request.

Remember, PitchPlus Basic is available to all vendors, while PitchPlus Advanced version is only available to approved vendors.

What Does This Mean for Affiliates?

Affiliates can earn additional money from PitchPlus sales too! Affiliates can receive a commission for each successful upsell purchase, with the commission rate for upsell purchases set by the vendor.

Affiliates can identify vendors in the ClickBank Marketplace who use PitchPlus offers by either looking for the PitchPlus icon ( ) or by choosing Advanced Search and selecting the Upsell checkbox under the Product Type section.  Affiliates can earn more with every promotion by promoting products from vendors who utilize PitchPlus.

Summary

The PitchPlus feature (formerly one-click upsell) is now available to all vendors. And remember, affiliates can benefit from the PitchPlus feature too by promoting products that come with additional offers!

PitchPlus is a great way to:

1) Make more money by offering additional, relevant products during the checkout process

2) Easily sell more products to customers who are already ordering from you

3) Attract more affiliates by offering extra commissions on upsell purchases

For more information on PitchPlus and for help setting up your PitchPlus offer, click here.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Earlier this week, we released several major improvements to our system that will help both vendors and affiliates grow and improve their businesses. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of what we released.

Help Center

You’ve probably already seen the new Help Center tab on the right-hand side of our navigation bar, but if not, be sure to check it out! The Help Center contains many new articles for both affiliates and vendors, covering everything from creating a ClickBank account to attracting more affiliates and learning about common ways to promote products. It’s a great place to look for any information you need about being more successful as a ClickBank client.

New & Improved Client Analytics

We’ve made major improvements to our Client Analytics, allowing you to see more detail than ever about your sales and promotions. Our improved Client Analytics lets you look at trends, order form impressions data, reporting by various dimensions like geographic location, and more.

To view the new Client Analytics, log in to your account and click the Reporting tab. Then click Analytics NEW! on the right side of the subnav:

To read more about all the features Client Analytics has to offer, and how to use it, see our Help Center article.

Integrated Sales Reporting

Clients can now track successful orders (conversions) by linking the ClickBank order process to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing, giving you more information about sales and the effectiveness of promotional efforts than ever before.

Read more about Integrated Sales Reporting in the Help Center.

ClickBank API

The ClickBank API makes it possible for a wide range of computer programs to securely access ClickBank account information on behalf of ClickBank account owners. Some of the functions available to users of the API include the ability to:

• Request a refund for a customer’s purchase
• Request a cancelation for a customer’s subscription
• Retrieve a list of transactions in a ClickBank account for a given timeframe

Read more about the ClickBank API in the Help Center.

ClickBank is developing a new upsell feature that will allow certain ClickBank vendors to attempt to sell additional products to a customer after an initial purchase. After a sale occurs, vendors will be able to show a sequence of Pitch Pages for other products in their account, and if a customer opts to buy any of these products, they will not be required to reenter their payment information.

For example, when a customer completes an order, ClickBank will display the vendor’s first selected upsell Pitch Page. The customer may accept or decline the product, after which the vendor can show another offer in a sequence they’ve specified, or proceed directly to a confirmation page showing all of the items purchased and their corresponding download links. Regardless of how many upsell offers the customer purchases, they won’t be required to enter their payment information again.

To ensure this exciting new feature meets your needs, we would like your feedback for the following:

• Are you interested in this feature?
• Do you think you’ll use it?
• Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for ways to improve this feature?