Back to ClickBank As Your Affiliate Marketplace?

For years, ClickBank was out in the cold, left to the use of either completely unknown marketers in obscure niches, or to the huge marketers with a huge launch a year.

That might very well change now.

 

The Role of ClickBank

ClickBank was among the first affiliate portals. Then, as now, it offers a platform for product creators to sell their virtual products like eBooks and memberships.

It covers every niche from yoga and weight loss to dog training over guitar lessons and Internet marketing.

In order to get your product on their marketplace, you had to pay a fee up front. Then you had to hope for your product to get approved. And then that it would sell and cover your fees.

From memory, most products back then cost around $97, so it didn’t take many sales before the costs were covered.

When the $7-script came out and offered a cheap alternative to ClickBank, all the minor marketers grabbed the chance to get their $7-products up for sale and have affiliates promoting it too. And for Internet marketing product there was the WarriorForum, too. An active community and the price of having your product up for sale was low. Only $20 back then.

Even the smallest and most unknown marketer could be almost certain of making at least a couple of sales.

WarriorPlus Spotted a Hole and Covered It

While WarriorForum was great for selling your stuff, you relied on the forum’s traffic and your own. Once new products were launched, your product was pushed further and further back, and after a short while no longer visible on the first few pages of the WarriorSpecialOffer part of the forum.

There was no way to bring affiliates on board.

And a lot of marketers struggled with basic things such as adding a PayPal button to their thread. How do you combine HTML from the button code with BB Code from the forum?

Mike Lanz, a member of the Warrior Forum, saw this hole and sat up a portal to cover it. He called it WarriorPlus, and for years it was closely related to the WarriorForum.

He charged a fee to set up your product, WarriorForum raised their price to $40, and suddenly it became quite an investment for the small first-time marketer.

Along Came JVZoo

They offered lower fees than WarriorPlus and no entrance fee at all. It was free to set up your product and you only paid fees if you sold something.

New marketers, as well as old, streamed to JVZoo. They were the bright-shiny new star.

WarriorPlus had to brush off the dust and change their pricing. Now you could also start over there without an upfront fee, but on the other hand, you had to pay fees when you sold products. Just like on JVZoo. Fair enough.

Affiliates Went Crazy

Thanks to WarriorPlus and JVZoo, they could get paid instantly. On ClickBank, they had to wait 60 days and then wait for the check to arrive. Here? The money went straight to their PayPal account. Oh, joy!

The joy lasted for a long time, but the system attracted low-quality affiliates so vendors had to be stricter. Nowadays, it’s difficult to get approved as a new affiliate.

Bad Vendors

Here’s the recipe for success (if you care about nobody but yourself):

• Find a guy who has made a product in his mother’s basement. Preferable videos. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, if he’s snoozing and slurping coffee on the video. As long as you can find a sexy angle to his product, like he once made $718 with an investment of only $4.37. It doesn’t matter that he spent more than he gained on all other attempts.
• Write a brilliant sales page promoting this wonderful no-product-needed method that will turn a newbie into a millionaire in a split of a second.
• Spend more time on a JV page. You must record a video yourself, telling your affiliates why this is the best purse lining product since hotcakes sold by gangbusters. Oh, and also tell them that they can win money!
• In other words: Set up a content. Hype it up. #1 wins $10,000 (only condition: at least 70,000 sales), #2 wins $5,000 bla bla bla.
• Spread the word about your launch. Make sure it’s in MunchEye and all similar places.
• Keep posting about it on Fakebook. Make all your friends go woooooot!
• Launch, mail your Jvs daily, increase the prices, create scarcity, and then tell your audience that you’ll remove the offer soon. Really soon.
• Get WSO of the Day (called different things on JVZoo and WarriorPlus) and sell even more.
• Keep the offer available forever.
• Rinse and repeat.

Okay, WarriorPlus saw what was going on, but since this made them quite a bit of money… What to do, what to do? Okay, they could come up with some strict policy things like:

• Not allowing you to do free offers until you’re selling for a certain amount. (The big sharks already do, the little fish don’t.)
• Not allowing you access to the marketplace. First, you must request unless you already are selling for a certain amount. (Hm, yeah, well…)
• Not allowing more than one request per week.

Monkey Capers

And over at JVZoo other things happened. Owners and leaders tore each other’s hair out in public over video, open letters, and stuff.

I have no idea what’s really going on as I haven’t used them for years. I had enough after they TWICE charged my subscribers double and didn’t reply to support tickets.

So What’s Left?

WarriorPlus seems to only support the big guys using the above recipe for success. JVZoo is busy fighting.

There are a few other platforms like Zaxaa and PayDotCom with basically no active affiliates.

Good Old ClickBank

That’s right. ClickBank survived all this. They did a lot of weeding out bad products. But they kept their main business idea:

Vendors pay a one-time fee for joining.

They pay a fee for each sale.

ClickBank charges the customer and pays the vendor and the affiliate after 60 days.

Unlike at JVZoo, you know you’ll get paid even if you’re on delayed payment.

Unline JVZoo and WarriorPlus an affiliate doesn’t have to request permission from every single vendor to promote. When he joins and is accepted at ClickBank, he can pick any product that’s available in the marketplace.

I begin to see ClickBank as a serious alternative to WarriorPlus and JVZoo.

What do you think? Have you had any experiences – good or bad – with the different networks? Let me know in the comments.