ClickBank Blog » Technology

Tech Tuesday: CBpress Customizable Marketplace Plugin

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:18:02 +0000

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

In this week’s Tech Tuesday, we’ve got an amazing new WordPress plugin to share with you. It comes from Matt Broich, the affiliate marketing expert who runs CBEngine, one of the top ClickBank analytics and market research sites. With CBpress, Matt and his team have created a plugin that lets you build “ClickBank mall”-type WordPress sites quickly and easily, and then customize them to target customers and convert like crazy. Since this plugin has so many features and options, I’ll let Matt tell you more about them:

Marketplace
CBpress Marketplace allows you to create a customized online mall with up-to-date ClickBank products and pricing. You control the titles, descriptions, products, and even categories presented on your site. During the CBpress installation process, a WordPress page is automatically created with the [cbpress] shortcode.

Import the ClickBank Marketplace into your own blog in less than 60 seconds.
Set up a WordPress ClickBank Marketplace page with a [cbpress] shortcode.
Seamlessly auto-sync with your WordPress theme.
Choose which categories to display.
Choose the order in which products appear.
Enable or disable certain products from appearing.
Control display further with Product Filters.

Here are some screenshots to show you what it looks like. Click on the images for a larger version:

CBpress Main Admin Area

Importer Function

CBpress Marketplace Front End Example

The Niche Setup
CBpress lets you create niche marketplaces. For example, if your site is geared towards health and fitness products, you can set the “Health & Fitness” category as the starting point for your marketplace page by setting the Health and Fitness category as your root category.

Choose what categories you want to display using the “Category Manager” page.
Create custom marketplace categories.
Setting Root Category: Display whatever category (like Health & Fitness) you wish on your marketplace default page. That can be an established ClickBank category or a custom category.

Category Manager

Marketplace Default Page

Set a Feature Category
You can display custom products on the front page of your marketplace, along with categories.

Front End Marketplace

Short-Code Assistant
A CBpress icon shows above the WP post editor that helps build product shortcodes that you can quickly insert into your WordPress posts or pages. Shortcodes save a lot of time so you’re not having to hardcode ClickBank product lists/ads to your individual blog posts and pages. It can be done on the fly!

Shortcode Insert

Product Titles & Descriptions
Many ClickBank vendors write descriptions geared towards attracting affiliates rather than customers. Here’s what CBpress does to remedy some of these issues:

You can limit the number of characters that display under each product listing.
You can edit any product title or description! This is also good for SEO purposes, giving you unique content.
By default, any edits you make will remain intact each time you run the product importer.
You can use the “advanced search” to find out what product titles or descriptions have changed.
You can enable the Smart Filter setting to automatically strip out titles/description words geared to affiliates, leaving a description better suited for customers.

Custom Product Lists
Custom lists give you the ability to easily display subsets of affiliate products within pages, posts, widgets and more:

Create groups of ClickBank Products you want to promote
Place that list on your blog using the Custom List WordPress Widget
Put the list in your blog post with a WordPress short-code

Admin Product Search

Product HopLinks and ClickBank TID Tracking:

You can add ClickBank’s TID tracking globally or set up a TID for individual products.

Tech Tuesday: Free Affiliate Tools Page Plugin

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:37:58 +0000

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

We’re excited to announce a new series here on the ClickBank Blog: Tech Tuesday. These posts will feature the best in tools and technology designed to help ClickBank clients and Internet marketers build their businesses and make more money. Some of those tools will be free and others will be paid, but we’ve got a great new free tool to kick things off!

WordPress is one of the most popular web publishing platforms out there, and is used by many Internet marketers because it’s so simple, powerful, and best of all free. We’ve recommended in the past that ClickBank vendors use it to host their Pitch Page and Thank You page, but Internet marketing and programming genius Jack Born has created a free plugin for WordPress that does something else really cool: it creates dynamic, powerful Affiliate Tools pages that vendors can use to provide valuable resources to their affiliates.

Jack and I recorded the following video to show off the plugin and talk about how you can get the most out of it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To download Jack’s amazing (and free) plugin, visit http://affiliatesaleschannel.com/freeplugin

BONUS: Jack has created a second video where he goes into more detail about all of the available features and uses for the plugin. Be sure to check out this companion video too!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks for joining us for our inaugural Tech Tuesday- we’ll be back with more great technology and tools for you very soon!

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The Power of Data

Beau Blackwell — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:19 +0000

Posted by: Greg Lems, Director of Application Development

Here’s a riddle: What travels at the speed of light, takes up virtually no space, and changes constantly, yet is vitally important to ClickBank publishers and affiliates? Data!

The key to being effective as a ClickBank affiliate or publisher is having the knowledge of how one’s efforts to attract and convert customers are faring. Data is the key to this knowledge. In recent months, ClickBank has built functionality to help our clients receive data that is vital to their success as publishers and affiliates.

Starting last year, ClickBank made the “tracking ID” (or TID) functionality available to affiliates. This allows affiliates to pass parameters via their Hoplinks that show up at order time, enabling them to track anything they are interested in. Keywords, campaign names, anything that affiliates adjust to try to improve performance can be recorded in the TID and analyzed after orders have been placed.

ClickBank Analytics (available on the “Reporting” tab of your account) takes TIDs and many other factors into account to provide important data to affiliates. It shows how many Hoplinks have been attributed to an affiliate’s account, and also how many sales have occurred. Affiliates can view this data by publisher, to see which of the publishers they promote have the highest conversion rates. They can also view this data by hour or TID. All data is also downloadable by CSV (comma-separated values) for use in analysis tools or charting packages, such as MS Excel.

Additionally, ClickBank Analytics is useful to publishers as well. They can see how well their pitch pages convert, even breaking performance out by affiliate or hour of day.

Another new data-related feature we recently introduced is instant payment notification (IPN). If you choose to enable it, ClickBank will notify your server on a near real-time basis of every transaction event you were involved in, either as a publisher or affiliate. Programmers can write code to receive ClickBank IPNs and create a whole host of functionality, such as a running total of sales for the day or other dashboard features.

In upcoming releases we plan to build upon the data-related functionality we offer. One feature that has been frequently requested is charting or other graphical functionality on the analytics page. We look forward to hearing more from our community about your data-related needs.

As Director of Application Development for ClickBank, I’m keenly aware that there’s a world of programming opportunities available to our clients who want to analyze their ClickBank data. My job is to make sure people can access it and make good use of it. In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss tips and tricks that programmers can use to interface more closely with ClickBank systems.

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