Some Clickbank Basics

Some Clickbank Basics

You have to be somewhat in the know to even have heard the name "Clickbank" much less know what it is.  This is funny because the truth is that Clickbank is far and away the largest internet marketplace for digital products and affiliates who want to sell them in the entire internet.  That puts Clickbank in its niche on a par with Amazon or Ebay and yet few have heard of Clickbank.  It just keeps running smoothly serving the internet community without fanfare.

When Clickbank came along, it really stepped into a nightmare scenario of online marketing and smoothed out the rough edges.  In the infancy of internet marketing getting set up as an online marketer meant you had to find someone to handle credit card payments.  To do this you had to have what was called a "merchant account" with an actual credit card company and the requirements to qualify for such an account were out of reach for most new internet merchants just trying to get established.

As an example, if you got your internet business up and running, you could not get a merchant account unless you were running a minimum of $1000 a month through your business.  Of course it was almost impossible to get that kind of business moving through your site if you could not offer credit card payment so you were stuck.  But from the credit card company's point of view, they were protecting themselves if you sold something online and there were a lot of refunds to be processed which made the entire relationship unprofitable for them.   So it was a lose lose situation for the credit companies and even more so for the new internet marketer just trying to catch a break in the business.

ClickBank responded to this market need with the business goal of creating a marketplace where sellers and buyers could work together selling digital products with greater ease to benefit everybody.  And considering that since then Clickbank has grown to represent over 10,000 products and serve the needs of over 100,000 partner affiliates, they certainly have been a success in their business mission in life.  They even stepped in and solved the merchant account problem by handling all the money movement collecting sales for the products they represent and distributing it to vendors easily and with no fuss so a vendor can quickly get a product out on the marketplace with very little cost or effort and see that product begin to return profits very quickly.

ClickBank knows that to continue to be a success they have to make doing business through their marketplace simple and profitable for vendors with products and affiliates who want to sell those products.  They offer a smorgasbord of tools especially to affiliates to study products to see which ones to broker and to see statistically which ones are already a success or on a trend toward greater success soon.  

For the affiliate this means a lot of help figuring out how to be a success and then tracking that success every step of the way and making adjustments to your product mix quickly and easily.  For the vendor this means that affiliates have a natural mechanism to pick up their product and get it out on the internet markets quickly.  That means quick sales with little or no effort in the marketing process for the vendor.

This is not to say that ClickBank is internet marking for idiots and it certainly is no place for scam artists.  The regulations for both affiliates and vendors are complicated and you need to understand them.   So take some time when getting signed up with Clickbank to understand what is expected of you.  Make no mistake, Clickbank is a marketplace like any other.  Your product will stand and fall on its own value so you will have to offer something of value to customers.  But as a genuine market its one of the best the internet has to offer and the huge success in terms of products sold and satisfied affiliates attests to that.