Clickbank, It’s Broke… Fix it!
You’ve heard the saying. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Well Clickbank, I have some news for you… IT’S BROKE SO FIX IT!
You really have one of the best things going in terms of a huge marketplace of promotable products, quick and dependable payouts and most importantly, I trust Clickbank.
BUT… with just a little tweaking you could be sooo much better. I KNOW you have to be making enough money and have the skilled manpower to make a few simple updates to your marketplace.
A few things I wish you would address:
Your Database Feed
It’s nice that you offer a feed with your products, the only problem is that most affiliate marketers are unable to use it in its present format. Surely you could easily create a feed that could be simply imported into WordPress and/or a standalone, uploadable script that would provide your affiliate marketers to select a template, select product categories and then have it populated with products, kind of like Amazons A-stores. It can’t be that hard so please look into this.
My second issue with your feed/marketplace is that even when someone with a little more skill comes along and is able to use the feed as is or convert it into an importable, excel based feed which is the approach I took, you get a horrible site in return as every product description looks like this “Make up to $270.50 a sale. Net EPCs upwards of $6.10. Promote XYZ Today. Grab your affiliate tools right now at xyz.com/affiliates”
You can see the site I converted the clickbank marketplace feed and imported into wordpress here wahvidz.com (just plum full of descriptions aimed at affiliates). Don’t these vendors realize that they are actually hurting themselves.
SOLUTION: Allow ie: make it mandatory that vendors fill in two description fields. One aimed at affiliates and one aimed at prospective buyers. Show the one aimed at affiliates when logged in and the other is the one included in the feeds.
There are already plenty of wordpress plugins that use the clickbank marketplace feed to add adsense type ads on blog pages and sidebars. Unfortunately, these look pretty bad when the descriptions are aimed at marketers and not buyers.
Another thing that needs addressing immediately…
Clean up the marketplace
Going through products to promote, I can’t count the number of products that go to dead websites, parked domains, don’t even offer clickbank as a purchasing option, only accepting paypal, etc, etc, on and on and on.
I know that with thousands of products, it would be virtually impossible for you to police every listing with any consistency but why not utilize your army of affiliate marketers?
It should not be that technically difficult to add a simple “report this” link/button alongside each product. I even have this feature on some of my wordpress blogs so I know that it can be done.
If you would take care of these things, it would make doing business with Clickbank an even better experience than it already is.
Thanks,
Gail

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