Almost everywhere on the Internet we can find the success stories describing how some folks made a fortune selling products online. Well, of course we all realize that not all of those stories are completely true. But, it would also be wrong to say that it is not possible to make a comfortable living selling online. It is possible and there are many very successful entrepreneurs making their living online.

One of the most popular Internet businesses is called affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer is someone who promotes a product or a service offered by a third party (frequently called a merchant or a vendor) and receives a commission for his efforts. The commissions can be earned for sending a potential customer to a merchant’s web site (Pay per Lead), for each sale made (Pay per Sale), for a click on a merchant’s link or a banner (Pay per Click), or a combination of the above.

Pay per Sale is the most popular form of affiliate marketing. What can be easier? Find a good product, promote it and receive commissions. Well, unfortunately it is not that simple. There should be a mechanism in place that would make sure that an affiliate marketer is properly credited for his efforts.

ClickBank is a company that makes it possible for affiliates to promote products and receive commissions for the sales made. ClickBank currently has an army of more than 100,000 affiliates and approximately 6,300 products listed in more than 90 categories. ClickBank only deals with digital products meaning that there is no shipping involved – buyer gets the product either by email or though a direct download from a merchant’s website the moment the payment is processed. ClickBank is also a payment processor. It accepts payments by a credit card, debit card, or PayPal.

So, how does ClickBank make it possible for an affiliate to be properly credited for his efforts? ClickBank is using hop links to track the affiliate efforts. In order to start promoting products offered through ClickBank, an affiliate has to register with ClickBank and receive a unique ClickBank affiliate id. The ClickBank sign up form can be found on https://login.clickbank.net/signup/ page. The affiliate id is used to build a special hyperlink that has the following format: http://affiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net/.

When the above link is clicked, the surfer is redirected to the ClickBank server that first sets the affiliate cookie on the surfer’s computer and then redirects the surfer to the merchant’s web site. If the surfer then makes a purchase, the cookie is used to identify and credit the affiliate for the sale.

As you can see, it is not very difficult to become a ClickBank affiliate and start promoting products and services offered thought ClickBank. But one has to remember that not every product or service listed is worth promoting. There are several tools available on the Internet that one can use to check the performance history of the ClickBank products and see if a product/service will convert. I will cover those tools in my next article.

1. I’ve had bad experiences with Click Bank. In the small print, it says that if your account is dormant for a certain time, they take your money away. This happened to me. I decided to avoid it.
   The other alternative is to have so many click bank products the account won’t ever be dormant.

   Posted by Jenny | February 14, 2008, 12:15 am