This article is not about Clickbank, but rather, affiliates that pitch products on Clickbank.

I hate to say this, but, believe it or not, there are a whole catalog of tactics that Clickbank vendors (not Clickbank) use to cut affiliates out of a commission. Why would they do this? For some strange reason, there are those who believe that they will ultimately make more money by cutting affiliates out of a deal in some sneaky way.

What are some of the more common ways this is done?

How You Lose The Sale

There are a handful of ways you can lose credit for hard earned traffic sent through your affiliate link when pitching a Clickbank product. And this is not a good thing because driving traffic is tough and time consuming and tkes constant effort. For this reason, you want your click to count and here are the main ways that it may not:

• Landing Page Contains An Optin Form – This is a MASSIVE leak. Optin forms on sales pages are a major red flag for affiliates. If you are working hard to drive traffic to a site and it contains an optin form, there is a great chance that your efforts have been completely wasted. Sure, you will cookie the computer of the visitor, but if they sign up as opposed to buying immediately, then your affiliate link is no longer part of the equation. Be careful. Many times these appear as a delayed popup. You have to hang around to see what’s really going on.
• Vendor Changes Sales To Squeeze Page At A Later Date – In extreme cases, you may be pitching a Clickbank product and on the initial autoresponder series setup, everything may appear "clean" and "leak free". But in more cases than I care to recall, I have seen vendors change sales pages to squeeze pages at a later date after the initial launch has cooled. This essentially sterilizes any and all traffic you drive to that site from that day forth.
• Exit Popups – Yet another way to steal the sale. You send traffic to a landing page, the visitor ops to bounce and get hit with an exit popup that sweetens the deal. More often than not, its a shaved price or again, a dreaded optin freebie.
• Affiliate Link Removed From Subsequent Emails – Some products only offer an optin with the promise of adding your affiliate link to follow up emails. In some cases, your affiliate link will appear in the first email, only to be removed when the product owner makes the hard pitch. Guess what happens in this case. You lose.

I could go on and on here, but instead of whining about ways you can lose credit as an affiliate, lets focus on ways you can protect your diligent efforts.

How To Get Credit For Clickbank Sales

There are a few things that you can do to increase the likelyhood of actually getting credit for your hard work and they are as follows:

• Avoid Products With Optin Forms, Popups, Exit Popups, and Squeeze Pages – All of these are designed specifically to build the list of the vendor and nine times out of ten, you’ll never see a dime.
• Build Your Own List And Promote From There – Computer cookies, just like real cookies have an expiration date, therefore, computer cookies, just like real cookies, are best served fresh. Never serve old, stale cookies.
• Test, Test, Test Your Links – If you send a visitor to a landing page, run through the purchase process yourself and make sure you show up as the actual affiliate at the bottom of the Clickbank purchase page [affiliate=you]. If for some strange reason, you agree to send visitors to a vendor controlled sales funnel, sign up and check each and every link in the funnel and make sure that in each case [affiliate=you].

Again, I could go on and on, but in all honestly, you shouldn’t even be promoting other peoples products. You should be promoting your own. That’s right, you should be building, promoting, and selling YOUR OWN PRODUCTS and signing up your own affiliates. But that’s an article for another day.

Mark Thomas

Mark is the Administrator of TheBitBot.Com News Articles For Ezines and Chief Editor of the TBB SEO Newsletter. Writes. Scripts. Hacks. Cracks. Re-Writes. Mods. Practices SEO of ALL shades. Has Some “VERY SMART” Friends Boldly Experiments. Publishes. Moderates. Trains. Explains. Pursues Three Important Careers Simultaneously. If you are interested in submitting a guest post with us then simply [ click here ] and sign up for a free account. Then simply submit your guest post there.