Anyone selling digital products online has probably already heard of Clickbank for affiliate marketers, one of the world’s largest affiliate networks. Whether you’re an experienced affiliate marketer or just starting out, you may want to consider using the platform. Clickbank currently connects some 12,000 vendors with more than 100,000 affiliates, and it also has a good reputation for on-time payment. However, the platform is not without fault either, and affiliate marketing is not as easy as many people might claim. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most significant pros and cons of this major affiliate network and online payment processor.
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Advantages of Clickbank
The most obvious advantage of Clickbank is that there is a vast pool of digital products available to choose from. Whatever your niche is, you should be able to find a related product to sell on your website, even if it is something relatively obscure. As an affiliate marketer, you can take a look through the various categories until you find a product that interests you and one that will likely interest your current website visitors. With new items being added on a daily basis, you’ll never run out of products to advertise either, and best of all, you don’t need to worry about doing any of the production involved yourself.
Another major advantage of using the Clickbank platform is the great potential it offers to become a major earner. Providing that you follow the best practices of affiliate marketing, including having an exceptional, content-rich website and a relevant product to market alongside it, the commissions from Clickbank are typically high enough to make your efforts very much worthwhile. Although commissions on products are chosen by the vendors themselves, they are typically in the region of a generous 50 to 70 percent on every sale that you make. These high commissions in turn mean that you’ll be able to make a passive income for the longer term.
The third most significant advantage of the platform is that it is easy to get into, and you don’t need to invest any money yourself either, since Clickbank makes its money from its commission on vendors’ products. To access the platform and start browsing through the available products, you simply need to sign up. When you have chosen a digital product to advertise on your website, you’ll be able to use their own payment platform, mobile checkout, custom order forms, subscription management, refund policy and much more. Clickbank provides all of the features of a fully-fledged e-commerce platform, and you can use their own system rather than worrying about setting up your own payment and online shopping platform on your website.
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Disadvantages of Clickbank
After familiarising yourself with the various advantages of the Clickbank platform, you might be tempted to give it a try right away, but it is also important that we understand the drawbacks as well. While you don’t really have anything to lose by signing up and unobtrusively advertising one of their affiliate products on your website, it is important that you choose your affiliate product very carefully. The biggest problem with Clickbank (and any other affiliate marketing network for that matter) is the vast amount of valueless junk being peddled. With a greater emphasis on quantity than quality, there are many digital products, including programs and electronic guidebooks, that are little other than spam.
As is the case with any form of affiliate marketing, you need to choose a product that you yourself believe in, and given the large amount of useless products on Clickbank, it can be hard to find something that falls into this category. It will take some time until you can find something that’s truly worth advertising on your website, but it is important that you invest the time and effort rather than risking harm to your reputation by advertising a product that your visitors are not likely to be impressed by or interested in.
Many of the advantages of Clickbank also come with their flipsides. Also because there is such a vast pool of products to choose from, there’s a lot of competition for affiliates, particularly with the better quality products that actually offer some genuine value to consumers. Unfortunately, novices are not likely to be able to compete with the long-established and high-powered affiliates who already dominate the search engine results.
In conclusion, while Clickbank is undoubtedly a good affiliate network with a solid business model and a well-established reputation, newbies will not have an easy time of it without a high degree of patience and effort.