To put it very simply, Clickbank is a virtual marketplace that was founded in 1998. It is a privately held company having offices in Broomfield, Colorado and Boise, Idaho.
Clickbank is an online retail outlet that sells over 50,000 different products.
What Is Clickbank?
Clickbank is an online retail outlet and an online payment processor. The products featured on Clickbank are digital products like e-books, software, and videos. It is regarded as the best place for people to buy or sell their digital products.
If a person has a digital product or service that they are interested in selling, they can register at Clickbank as a publisher. As a publisher, people can make use of the over 100,000 Clickbank affiliates to find buyers for their products and multiply profits.
Individuals who would like to use the online retailer as a resource to create income can do so as an affiliate. Clickbank affiliates are simply people who market or promote products by publishers and earn commissions.
Every publisher, whenever they publish a product, offers a certain percentage of their product’s value as commission to affiliates. Affiliates can earn commissions up to 75 percent.
The payment technology that Clickbank uses allows any publisher or vendor or seller to automatically pay commissions on sales to any affiliate that successfully links a paying customer to that seller. The customer is billed by Clickbank, then the seller is paid and then the affiliate. Clickbank maintains security and quality control over each and every transaction.
Advantages of Clickbank for Vendors/Sellers/Publishers
Clickbank offers many advantages for e-commerce businesspeople.
The following are some of those advantages.
Credit Card Payment Acceptance Without Merchant Account
If you are selling an e-book or software and do not have a merchant account, Clickbank allows you to sell your product and accept credit card payments without having to get yourself a merchant account. You can even accept e-checks or online checks. Although Clickbank does require a fee, the ease of being able to accept credit card payments is definitely worth it.
Affiliate Program for Your Product
If you are a vendor, you can create your own affiliate program. You have the freedom to decide the commission percentage that you would like to offer any affiliate who successfully sells your product. You can choose anywhere from 1% to 75% depending on how you would like to structure your affiliate program.
Your Product Is Advertised for Free
As a seller or publisher, your product gets exposure through the free listings on the Clickbank site. Your product will also appear through the search facilities of other sites associated with Clickbank. This means that your product is advertised for free.
Referral Commissions
You can also earn money via referral commissions on the thousands of products in the Marketplace.
Advantages of Clickbank for Affiliates
There are many advantages of being a Clickbank affiliate and some of them are:
No Registration Fee
There are so many different affiliate programs available on the internet. Most of them advertise that joining is free but they charge when someone would like to become an affiliate. Clickbank is free. There are no registration fees and no hidden charges to becoming an affiliate.
Prompt Payment
Unlike most of the other affiliate programs on the net, Clickbank pays regularly and promptly. The payment is given every two weeks and the payments are on time.
Great Products
The sheer number of products available makes it easy for an affiliate to choose the products that he or she would like to promote. Products range from e-books, videos, software and many more. The moment a
product that is being promoted by an affiliate sells, a commission is earned.
The percentages are very good. An affiliate can earn as much as 75% of the value of the sale of a product. This makes Clickbank a lucrative endeavor for many affiliates.
Clickbank Terminologies
There are many terminologies that are unique to each organization or program and the same holds true for Clickbank. If you are new to the online retailer, you may get confused with all the terminologies that may be new to you or different from the site you used to do business with. Here are some of the more common terminologies that you will find as you start your partnership with Clickbank.
Publishers/Vendors
Vendors or Publishers refer to the people who have digital products that they are selling or wish to sell. A person can be both a vendor or publisher and a promoter. The main thing to remember is that a publisher is the one that creates the products being sold.
Recurring Billing
Both promoters (affiliates) and publishers (vendors) will get to meet these two words rather often. Recurring billing refers to subscriptions that pay monthly. If you are offering a product or a membership of some type that requires monthly payments, Clickbank takes care of the nitty-gritty. You only need to relax and wait for the profits.
Promoters
These are the people who promote the products on Clickbank. They are also called affiliate marketers. They go through the Clickbank Marketplace to look for products to promote and find buyers for those products.
Gravity
Gravity refers to which products are not being promoted actively but selling, and which are not doing so well. Simply put, the higher the gravity, the more attractive the product is to affiliate marketers because it means the product sells well. Therefore, if you are a promoter or an affiliate, you need to look for products that have high gravity.
However, this does not mean that you should not sell products with low gravity. There are products that may not be selling well simply because no one has taken the time to promote it properly.
There are many more words and phrases that you will come across as you develop your partnership with Clickbank. It does help if you take the time to learn about what the words and phrases mean as they play a role in your dealings with the online retailer.
