Making Money On Clickbank in 2017
Well we have come to the end of yet another year and it has definitely been a fast year for me but eventful. Making Money on Clickbank in 2017 will carry on pretty much the same way it has in 2016 except for a trend I have noticed starting to take place which is why I decided to write this post today.
How to Make Money with Clickbank in 2017
Learn how to Promote Clickbank Products without a website – Click above image
I have noticed over the course of 2016 and mostly the 2nd half of the year that quite a few vendors on Clickbank especially ones using a Full Clickbank Profit System with quite new products have been reducing the overall sales percentage that they pay their affiliates. I am talking of offers in the Make Money Online Niche and Business Investing Niche that I have taken on and started promoting when they were paying out 50% to the affiliates only to look at my sales figures the following day and they are only paying out around 25% and sometimes 30%.
The problem with the vendors of Clickbank doing this is that as an affiliate I put a lot of money into Lead Capture Pages and PPC advertising whether with Google Adwords or Bing PPC and you finally get a campaign on track that is profitable and the vendor without any warning goes and changes the average sale amount per referral.
I think that in 2017, Clickbank really need to look at adopting a system where when you start promoting a product that all your details are handed over to the vendor so that if they decide to change how much they would like to pay out they can give you 7 days warning (just a number I put out there) could be more or less that they are changing the rate they are going to pay out to the Clickbank Affiliates.
The thing for me that both Clickbank and the vendors of Clickbank have both seemed to forget is that the affiliates have helped build this amazing network and given vendors a chance to sell valuable products that they were skilled enough to come up with but lacked the marketing and promotion to get these products out to their audiences on a mass scale. Without Clickbank Affiliates both Clickbank and vendors will fail long term especially big ticket items that have had $100’s of thousands of dollars thrown at them between the software programmers and the Copywriting, the professional videos, hosting, the list goes on. With the ever competitive market of affiliate programs out there like PayDotCom and JVZOO and the pretty much instant Paypal payments there are more places than ever for affiliates to go to.
Harvey Segal has a great guide on Clickbank and you should definitely download it for FREE here. You can even sign up to receive $37 Paypal payments everytime your refer someone that takes part in this part of the ebook. Don’t believe me? Below is proof of me getting $37 payments directly to my paypal account. The Clickbank Make Money PDF below
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Serial Refunders on Clickbank
Now this one is becoming quite a problem. Serial Refunders are across any network and it is part of doing business but the thing is that serial refunders now know how easy it is to get a refund and that they are pretty much 99% guaranteed to get that refund off Clickbank.
When I talk about serial refunders I am talking about people that buy multiple products across the Clickbank range, don’t even try them out and a couple days later demand a refund for the multiple products. Now as a Clickbank Affiliate I personally only ever promote Clickbank Products that I find hold a lot of value to my subscribers and traffic. You can not build a brand based on pushing crappy products to people and expect to stay in business very long.
I had another interesting case with what I would call a serial refunder where they waited the whole 60 days that Clickbank would of given them a refund and instead what I believe they did was then do a chargeback on their credit card. Unfortunately Clickbank won’t hand over those details to an affiliate but I did a little research of my own by looking at the Country Code and State that the refund occurred and when I did a little digging I remembered this product was promoted as an upsell to a Paypal product that I sell personally. And what do you think I found there? This same person who had bought my product on the same day had issued a chargeback to my Paypal account which I got charged a $20 fee on. So not only did I lose the initial sale but now I was also $20 out of pocket.
I decided to do a little more digging on this through my Data Analytics software and found the IP Address. I typed that IP address into Google and one of the first things that I found in the search results was a I.P address banned from Home Business Marketing Products, I clicked and had a look and sure enough same I.P address, same customer name as who had bought through my Paypal Product. I won’t name and shame here but I will just say it was from Texas and even the suburb matched up. There was no mistake about it, this person was a known serial refunder. To make matters worse the Paypal email address she had used was her mothers. I discovered this after typing in the details into Facebook and it came up with her mother and her daughter (the one who had actually purchased the product from me) was listed as a daughter and friend. So she has obviously been banned from using her own account and has just opened a new one up and linked it to her mothers email address and banking details.
What can be done about Serial Refunders on Clickbank?
Well there isn’t a lot that can be done. Clickbank have in the defence done as much as they can do from a legal perspective. Everyone argues that Clickbank shouldn’t favour the customer and let them have this 60 day window to refund and even beyond but without it the customer would simply buy it through either Paypal or the bank credit card and do a chargeback at a later date saying they never purchased the said product.
Below is a video showing exactly how to get a refund on Clickbank Products by Tom Buck
There is one thing I am finding it hard to understand though is with Clickbank now showing some products Refund Expiration date as Non-Refundable and yet I still have a refund on one of those products. I understand refunds are all part of doing business but this is kind of confusing especially people new to the Clickbank affiliate program to have it list the refund expiration date and non- refundable and then issue a refund.
Overall though I would say that my experience with Clickbank has been a fairly positive one in 2016 and I am sure that will continue over into 2017. If we can just work on the main vendor problem where they can change the sales % without consulting affiliates I think we can make a better program for boths vendors and affiliates.