Hi Y’all. We’re talking affiliate programs that I’ve used and tried to make money with over the years in these last few posts. We’ve had part one and part two and now we move to part three; hold on to your seats.
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Clickbank is one affiliate programs I’ve never specifically written about, hence no link to an article I’ve written. Clickbank is a program that you see a lot of big time internet marketers talking about all the time. They say they create programs, then set it up with Clickbank to help them market their products by allowing us to find products on their site to market, as publishers with their landing pages. There are some nice products there, but a lot of junk as well I have to say. I did purchase one product from them that I liked, 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online, that I thought was pretty good and I marketed that thing for a long time on this blog.
And this is where things fall apart for me. According to them, I’ve never had any clicks on any of the products I’ve marketed from them, and I’ve never made a single dollar. I find that hard to believe, but it’s why I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to market anything else they offered except for the book I’ve given the link to above. A month ago I finally removed that product from my sidebar as well; I guess just having me think it was great didn’t translate to anyone else. But over 5 years I haven’t been credited with a single sale. Maybe others have had better success than me; can’t tell you.
Solutions Medical is an affiliate program that I hooked up with to market medical billing books through my medical billing site, which I talked about on the part one post. Unfortunately, it’s another affiliate I’ve never made a single dollar from, although they do show some clicks here and there.
TTZ Media is an interesting little affiliate program in that it can highlight certain types of ads that you can put wherever and the products will rotate. You can pick one product or many products and change colors as you want to. Below is an example of the types of ads you can create:
According to TTZ, I’ve had almost 2,000 clicks over the years, but I’ve never made a single sale. Once again, it’s a program that I didn’t use a lot, but did have it on some of my other sites here and there, as well as popping it into a blog post every once in awhile. So, once again, I can’t tell you how well they pay or what payments are like. I can see how this might work for some people, but it’s never worked for me.
J-V Network is a lot like Clickbank. What you do is look through the tons of offers they have and sign up to help promote and market that program. I actually did a test with something called Tweet My Blog, which I had on this blog as the first program I used to send my blog posts to Twitter, which was neat except I couldn’t get rid of its marketing on my blog itself. That is, if anyone clicked on the link in Twitter they came to the blog and had a large banner ad at the top of the blog that obscured even the title of this blog.
Anyway, I had that post above and I heard from 3 people who said they’d added it to their blogs as well. When I went to check my stats it didn’t show I’d had any clicks, which of course means it showed me as not making any money from those sales. That was disappointing and I wrote them, but never heard a single thing back. I’ve never gone back to try it again, and I’m not sure I will. I do still get email every once in awhile from someone that’s created a new product that they’d like help marketing, but I’m just not in the mood for now.
There you go, 4 more affiliate programs I’ve dealt with. And there’s still more coming; well, you asked. 🙂
Hi Mitch,
Making money with Clickbank is indeed dicey because of how easy it is for someone to steal or compromise your commission; an even bigger crapshoot is whether or not you’ll ever get paid what you do earn because of their payout requirements. I’ve long thought the hoops they make you go through to get paid the money you earn is unconstitutional — if it isn’t, it is definitely criminal.
I’ve earned numerous commissions with them, however, I’ve only received ONE check. The garbage terms requrring X number of sales from X number of states made with X number of different types of credit cards … and then they “take back” your commissions based on the length of time “between” sales. I guess you could call that a storage fee, similar to how long you leave your car at the garage after it’s been repaired.
I’m waiting for the FTC to either slap them with some hefty fines … or something.
Then it’s a good thing I pulled the last thing I was marketing for them, Vernessa, and at this point, since I’m not losing a thing, I can’t see me going back to it. I’d heard about those bogus rules as well, but since I hadn’t even made one sale I didn’t really care all that much. Now… why waste my time.
Another thing about clickbank that isn’t great is the refund rate…a lot of people purchase those products and then return them or ask for their money back after reading the ebook or watching the videos, for example. Just another thing to consider I guess.
That’s also a good point Jordan. I sold something through someone else where that happened as well; months later the guy dropped the affiliate program and that was that, though I’d also purchased the program for myself.
Click Bank is doing fine for me, but there are no stable level of sales. Medical niche was my favorite for nearly 2-3 years and conversion have always been very high. Probably been lucky launching a video which became viral and gave me good start. After that for those 3 years, returning customer base was steady. Currently just maintaining website for local traffic market in UK.
Glad it worked for you, Carl. For me it’s a dog and I don’t need it ever again. Medical works as long as you understand the business, and since it’s my background I hope it shows my competence better than the competitors.
The thing is that I know how to promote, I like reading, but for sure my knowledge is not sufficient, so most of the time, I am using official references in PDF format to build trust.
I have to second Clickbank. I have been having some good success with it lately and am seriously considering focusing on it full time…:)
I’m right there with ya Mitch…:)
Mark
Glad you’re having success Mark; I’m never trying them again. Maybe you misread what I had to say about them?
Hi Mitch,
Everywhere I turn, I realize that there is such synchronicity in the universe. I decide to look into affiliate marketing and, voila, here you are writing about it.
I added a few that were related to my niche, decided that I did not like all the clutter in my sidebars, so I created a Resource Page. I only have a few at this time because I only feel comfortable recommending product that I have used.
That’s one way to go at it, Rachel. There are things you do that, if you could find the right product, would be great to have on your main page, such as The Secret and things like that. But there are many places to find products, which is why I’m putting all this information out there.
Hi there,
One thing I’ve found in clickbank market place is that, whenever I type a keyword and press Go, there will be a lot of irrelevent searches pop out. Can anyone help me to solve this problem?
Rob
Robert, I can’t. You’re right, it used to pull up all this garbage that made you wonder what the heck they were doing.