A ClickBank merchant account allows you to define
and sell up to 50 separate products. If you have more than one product
in your range, it makes sense to sell them from a shared ClickBank
account. Here are three good reasons why:
- Every active ClickBank account incurs a setup
fee of $49.95. Why pay this more than once?
- Managing multiple ClickBank accounts adds
unnecessarily to your administrative effort
- The combined sales of multiple products through
one account will significantly boost your Marketplace ranking
Unfortunately, the architecture of the ClickBank
system has, historically, not been well suited to selling multiple
products from a single account, especially for merchants who use
affiliates to promote their products. The problem is that, although you
can define 50 products within ClickBank's account control panel, you
can only specify a single landing page URL - the destination page that
your affiliates will refer their prospects to.
The result is that all referrals must arrive at
your site via a common page. This forces you either to present all your
products on a shared sales page or to create an intermediate page, from
which your visitors must click through to see the product of their
choice. Neither option is ideal as they both create obstacles that will
distract your prospects and seriously reduce your conversion rate.
For optimum sales effectiveness, affiliate
referrals should go directly to the sales page for the product of
interest. This is known as deep linking and is widely acknowledged as
the best way to convert affiliate referrals into buyers. But
ClickBank's lack of support for this technique is a major barrier that
inhibits effective use of its growing affiliate network.
To tackle this problem, a number of pioneering
merchants have developed their own techniques to work around
ClickBank's shortcomings. Some of these innovations have even evolved
into successful commercial software products. Most implementations rely
on intercepting the inbound referral and automatically redirecting it
to the relevant product page, as indicated in URL parameters passed by
the referring affiliate. There are several variations on this theme,
but they share a common gambit - using scripts, installed on the
merchant's web server, to intercept and redirect requests.
However, the need for smoke and mirrors to fix
ClickBank's limitations may soon be a relic of the past. In October
2003, ClickBank announced plans for major improvements to its hoplink
system - improvements that will all but eliminate the need for
workarounds or enhancement products.
The new architecture - known as the enhanced
hoplink system - employs a more flexible referral URL format, in which
affiliates are able to specify the numeric code of the product they are
referring their prospects to. Using this code, ClickBank's server will
look up the corresponding sales page URL and send referrals directly to
it, handling cookie-tracking and other admin chores in the normal
manner.
The main attraction of the enhanced hoplink system
is its simplicity of implementation and maintenance. Whereas add-on
products require at least a moderate understanding of script
installation and configuration, the hoplink system is maintained
entirely via the ClickBank account control panel. This means that a
merchant selling multiple products (even across multiple web domains)
can expose them for affiliate deep linking, simply by configuring the
relevant sales page URLs in his account.
At the time of writing, ClickBank has published
the format of the enhanced hoplink URL, but has not completed the
database and control panel changes that will allow the configuration of
multiple landing pages. So, although we can visualize the new
architecture and dream of the benefits it will deliver, we remain in
eager anticipation of its release.
Copyright © Tim Coulter. All rights reserved.
Tim Coulter is a consultant and software developer
who helps netpreneurs to harness marketing technologies.
He is also the author of "ClickBank - The
Definitive Guide" The Ultimate ClickBank Tutorial & Reference
Manual.
http://www.clickbankrevealed.com/
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