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ClickBank is one of the easiest ways to get started in affiliate marketing, or any kind of on-line marketing for that matter. It costs nothing to sign up to become an affiliate, and you have your affiliate ID within minutes of signing up. Once you have your affiliate ID, or "Nickname" as ClickBank prefer to call it, you are free to promote and profit from one or more of thousands of products available in the ClickBank marketplace.
ClickBank provide a tool for creating an affiliate link, or "Hoplink" for any product that you select. In its latest incarnation, the hoplink is encrypted to prevent other ClickBank affiliates from removing your ID and inserting their own, which is was a problem with previous versions.
Having got your Nickname, selected a product from the extensive ClickBank marketplace, and created your Hoplink, you go about promoting it. This can be done in any way you choose. Many people use Google AdWords to promote their Hoplink as it requires no hosting, website or autoresponders, making it cheap to start up and easy to set up and run. Other ways of promoting your Hoplinks are via emails to your mailing list, if you have one, article marketing, website ads, blogs and Social Networking sites etc.
Sometimes it takes a while to find the ideal way of promoting your Hoplinks and you might not see any sales for some time. But when that first sale comes, it gives you a great feeling. It really feels as if you are on your way to starting an additional income stream. But don't get complacent - that first sale might have simply been a lucky hit rather than the result of your promotional campaigns.
Accounting Policy
It is at this point that many ClickBank affiliates fall foul of ClickBank's Accounting Policy. There are a number of criteria that you must meet before you receive any payment from ClickBank. This Policy includes measures to combat fraud, and to stop people from simply using their own Nickname to buy ClickBank products.
The following is a list of the criteria that you must meet before you will receive any payment from ClickBank.
- Commissions earned must reach the payment threshold. This is nominally set to $100, but it can be adjusted. However, the transaction processing fees that ClickBank charge can make it unwise to reduce this threshold too low.
- Payments must have been made using at least 5 different credit card numbers to demonstrate that sales are being made to different people, and not to a single person, such as a friend or family member.
- More than one payment method must have been used for purchases. In this case, "payment method" includes Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. Note that different PayPal accounts do not qualify as different credit cards in the previous criterion.
This means that to receive any payment, you must have made at least 5 sales for which the total commissions exceed the payment threshold. However, it can get even more frustrating. For example, let's say that you made 11 sales, and the total commission was well above the $100 threshold. ClickBank could still withhold payment because 4 sales were with credit cards, and 7 were via Paypal. This example fails the "5 credit cards" rule.
You can see all that money in your ClickBank account, but you cannot touch it. It is at times like this that many ClickBank affiliates give up. Perhaps they have spent money paying for AdWords ads, but have not seen any return. They don't want to, or are unable to, pay for more AdWords. So, frustrated and disillusioned, they give up. The account is abandoned, still holding the money.
Dormant Account Policy
Several months later, they decide to give it another go and log onto ClickBank. But what has happened? Where has the money gone? There was over $100 in there. Now there is considerably less, or even nothing.
They have fallen foul of ClickBank's Dormant Account Policy. This policy states that for an account that is in credit, but remains inactive for a specified amount of time, administration charges will be deducted from the balance. The longer the account remains dormant, the higher the charges are.
That is the final straw! Now completely disillusioned, the affiliate gives up and deems ClickBank to be a scam. The account is abandoned again and any remaining credit is eaten up by the account charges. The account joins the thousands of other abandoned accounts.
More than 90% of ClickBank accounts are sitting there, inactive.
The Solution
The good news is that there is an easy method that you can use to meet the various criteria of the Accounting Policy. A free report giving full details of the method is available at the link shown in the resource box below.
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