You’ve done the hard work. You’ve researched your niche, you’ve developed a product and you’ve placed it for sale on Clickbank, now you just sit back and wait for the army of clickbank affiliate to come along and promote your product. But wait, how come nobody is sending sales?

Maybe it’s because you’ve made it darn near impossible to promote your product. I promote a lot of clickbank products so let me tell you a few things that makes me skip over a product and go to the next.

1. Forcing me to sign up / register my email to get to your affiliates page.

Do you think I want all ten thousand vendors sending me emails every day? Especially when most of them turn towards trying to sell you stuff instead of just sending information pertinent to the product I’m selling for you.

Guess what… there’s another product right above and right  below you in the clickbank marketplace I can promote. Know all those emails you get from abcxyz@gmail.com or other nonsense email addresses. Well, that would be people that would like to promote your product but don’t want to jump through the registration hoop to promote your product for you. I mean why should we. We have already registered at Clickbank. If we have to sign up for each product individually on top of signing up for clickbank, there’s really no reason to even use them. That was the whole purpose. Sign up at clickbank and promote thousands of products.

Now, if you weren’t selling your product through clickbank then it would be an entirely different story. For example, this skin care product I promote that pays out $90+ per sale or this line of forex products that pays up to $700 per sale or even this line of herbal products which pays commissions on all reorders for life.

Fyi – you can still collect email addresses but at least provide a link to bypass the subscribe process and allow us to access the materials to promote your product for you. I’ve seen this on many clickbank vendor affiliate pages now and that’s perfectly cool. If you want to get our email address, give us a reason other than to access your promotional content. Something like “sign up to receive our weekly promotional articles”. You know, like hey we are always updating our promotional content, articles, emails promo copy, etc.., be sure to sign up so you have fresh material to promote our product.

2. Not Having Any Promotional Content.

I mean, it’s obviously not mandatory that you do but keep in mind that your competitors very well may have promotional content and if they do, it puts them a step ahead of your product in deciding which product to promote. Even worse when you require an email registration to access your affiliate page and then having nothing there.

3. Monetizing Your Sales Page With Adsense

I really despise this. I can’t even imagine what is going through your mind to list a product on clickbank and then fill your salespage up with google ads or some other advertisements which your affiliate will not get credit for. I mean really. It’s your page and you’re free to do what you like but I hope you don’t expect any serious affiliate to promote your product because they’re not going to.

4. Over Emphasizing Your Affiliate Page Link

Ok, you want affiliates, I get that. That’s probably why you chose to list with Clickbank but you really don’t need to put “make money promoting this product” links all throughout your page. A little link at the very bottom of your page that says “Affiliates” will suffice. Nothing more, nothing less. Affiliates know where to look, trust me. Keep the focus of your salespage about selling your product. If you have a good product, a well written sales page, an easily assessible salespage and promotional content, you will get affiliates.

5. Forcing Email Subscriptions To Access Your Salespage

You know what I’m talking about. You’re browsing through the clickbank marketplace looking for a product to promote in a particular niche. You click the link and land on a squeeze page. How many sales does the affiliate lose because people back out at that point. While your “testing” may say that conversions are better with the squeeze page, my common sense is telling me that people are leaving before they ever even get to see your salespage. These are people that may have purchased but now we’ll never know.

The other question is, “am I going to receive credit if they purchase from your emails”? Since your first priority is to get that email address for follow up marketing, I would like to be assured that I will be getting paid for those referrals.

6. Your Salespage Looks Like It Was Designed By A 5 Year Old

I understand that not everybody can design websites. I couldn’t either when I started. But that doesn’t excuse you from the fact that we are sending you potential customers. Take the time to learn how or pay someone to do it for you. Yes, it is that important. You want to make money, we want to make money. If your salespage doesn’t make us want to buy your product, then why should we send anyone else.

7. Selling Too Many Products On One Page

When you set up a product for sale on clickbank, you are basically given one url (landing page). You can sell multiple products without paying the initial fee again but all your links will go to the same landing page. I’ve been to salespages which listed dozens of products. I send them to a link for product A and they land on a page with products A-Z.

Either pay the extra money and set up a unique account for each product you want to sell or use a product like ezClickmate which allows you to sell multiple products – from multiple websites – with just one ClickBank account. It does a lot more too and it is pretty cheap. A lot cheaper than paying clickbank for each product and a lot more profitable than losing sales and affiliates because of a cluttered up landing page.

8. Not Using Your Marketplace Description Properly

More and more people are using tools to convert the marketplace feed to to importable blog posts, adsense style ads, etc… While this may not cause you to turn an affiliate away it may cause you not to make as many sales as you might have. Have a look at WahVidz. This is one of my websites that I converted the feed into an importable csv file.

Here are two examples of products listed in the Home » Arts & Entertainment » Art » category

Product #1

Brad Blaze has turned his passion for drawing caricatures into Australia’s largest caricature entertainment company. He teaches you How To Draw in a series of video segments and he teaches you How He Makes An Awesome Living Drawing At Events in an ebook.

Product #2

Portrait Profits 2010. Affiliates Earn 75% by Promoting New ebook on how to convert Photos into Beautiful oil paintings. Huge Untapped Markets No painting or photography experience required. Excellent profit margins Very Unique Rare concept for the Newbie

Now which one do you think a potential buyer would click on? I really blame clickbank for not having two separate description areas for vendors. One to promote to potential affiliates and one to promote to potential buyers and then providing the first one when logged into the affiliates area and the other when using the marketplace feed

9. Using Popups That Won’t Close

Nothing like visiting your sales page (or sending a customer) and a big box pops up on top of your page with no way to close it. You may have something very important there we would like to read but we can’t. This says to me that you either are more focused on collecting email addresses than selling your product or you just don’t know how to code properly. Either way it is not an ideal experience for your visitors and I can’t really justify sending traffic there.

10. Offering Alternative Payment Options

It’s your right to use whatever payment method for your products you like but why even bother with Clickbank if it’s not to plug in to their affiliate network? Here’s someone that obviously wants to have affiliates promoting their product but seems to have no qualms cheating affiliates out of their commission by adding a paypal button right below the clickbank button.

Well, this is one that I won’t be promoting. If you want affiliates to promote your product then make sure they are getting credit for any sales they refer, otherwise, most affiliates will simply skip over your product and the next thing you know, you’re posting on some marketing forum wondering why you can’t seem to get affiliates to promote your product.

Well, that’s about wraps it up for now. As I come up with more things that bug me, I’ll come back and edit this page accordingly. If you have anything to add, just use the comment box below.

Take care,
Gail

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