ClickBank is an Internet Marketing e-book publisher – is what mosts review of ClickBank will provide, and then also tend to be positive about the company – largely because most reviews are provided by affiliates with something to gain by selling the company.
The biggest themes on the ClickBank product roster are get rich quick on the internet, lose weight, get a girlfriend, get a boyfriend, get your girlfriend back etc. Other more specialist sectors include advice on child custody, divorce, and there are more dubious offerings available, promising inches on the male anatomy, and mechanisims for generating free eternal power.
The trash available discredits any good products – and there are some – largely in the language training space. The main issue with the site is that the typical product profile targets people who are desperate or naive or a combination of both, and the sales letters promise too much to be true. This is the space most often occupied by the con artist and victim.
ClickBank is reputed to be fast at offering refunds, however some of the products are designed to be too embarassing for the user to ask for a refund on, or designed to have so much information, so that the buyer blames himself or herself for not following the volume of guidelines provided, rather than understanding that it was more of an elaborate con.
ClickBank encouranges users
(1) to create an ebook and promises an army of affiliates available sell it – taking a commission but earning it.
(2) to become affiliates
as a way to make a good income.
The probable reality is that a small portion make money out of the remainder of the clickbank participators, and that only a handful of sales occur outside of the community: e.g ClickBank is more akin to a glorified pyramid scheme. There are quite a few internet forums selling internet marketing products out there that operate essentially on the same principle.
The search engines penalise sites that have sales letter content – down grading pay per click ad quality, and accordingly up grading the cost per click – making it difficult for anyone with an ebook to sell it via online advertising and make a profit – principle being that useful information is preferred by the web user over sales pitches.
But there are other difficulties that are looming larger – and will make business increasingly difficult for ClickBank: one is the FTC, that is enforcing the illegality of un-declared money making affiliate links embedded in ‘reviews’ , and the other is websites that are targeting scam artists, such as saltydroid.net.
If you are tempted to write and sell an ebook – it is better to chose a platform that has a solid product roster, such as Amazon. If you want to become an affiliate: this is becoming shakier ground. The affiliate ‘method’ was to create a website, somehow gain visitors for that site, and then recommend products, and hope that people buy through the affliate links, and not realise that the reccomendations made by the affiliate were financially incentivised. This method is now illegal from an FTC perspective, even if the mechanisims for tracking the payments for the sales you generate were robust, and the chances of getting commissions on every sale generated are small. As an additional point, sites with affiliate links are also penalised by the search engines – so anyone thinking that it is easy to make a profitable affiliate website at home: be warned.
One problem with the site is that it might seem credible and trustworty and the basis of a solid business. The second problem with the site, as mentioned above, is that it is promoted endlessly by affiliate marketers, so the chances of genuine reviews about the site being found are small.
