ClickBank allows website owners to accept credit and debit card payments online and then deliver the products to their customers instantly.



Since August 2005, ClickBank has integrated with PayPal so that people who either do not have a credit or debit card or choose not to use their cards online, can now pay using funds from their PayPal account instead.

This has lead to an increase in sales for merchants who use ClickBank as their payment processor. This is obviously a welcome feature by web site owners, including myself and affiliates.

Website owners who want to use ClickBank as a payment processor are required to pay a one off joining fee of $49.

With an instant affiliate program built in to ClickBank it makes the $49 fee very acceptable but the affiliate program has always lacked features that one would expect to come as standard.

The main problem is that web site owners have no way of knowing when someone becomes an affiliate of their product. This is a real shame because a strong relationship between affiliate and web site owners is very important. Being able to communicate with affiliates can help both the affiliate and web site owner.

Because of the short comings of ClickBank’s built in affiliate program it has lead to many new software programs and scripts to the market to address this issue.

It is these third party ‘add ons’ that can take ClickBank’s built in affiliate program and turn it in to the affiliate program that should already be offered as standard.

Your affiliate program should offer you the following:

• The ability to store the details of your affiliate program in a database

• The ability to be able to contact your affiliates by email

• Notify you each time anew affiliate joins your program

• A control panel that your affiliates can log in to and check their commissions, sales, traffic and generate their affiliate URL’s for all of your products

• It should offer you statistics of how your affiliates are performing

• It should also automatically pay you and your affiliates your commissions

• And offer you the ability to offer your affiliates resources to help them promote your products.

Unfortunately ClickBank falls very short of these features apart from actually paying you and your affiliates automatically. If you are relying on ClickBank’s built in features then you are losing money.

Until ClickBank improve their features or you use the services of a third party add on, then your affiliate programs full potential will never be discovered.

There are many very good third party add on products for ClickBank available and you should study each one’s features and benefits before purchasing one to use. If you do a search for “ClickBank affiliate scripts" you will see the best one’s available.

Sometimes it’s only the price that differs between these products but make sure the one you buy isn’t just based on price alone. It should also offer you the minimum features as outlined above.

Author: Michael Sherriff

http://auctionaffiliatesecrets.com

http://auctionaffiliatesecrets.co.uk

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