SuperTips Blog

Let me save you hours, days and months of grief as well as mountains of money. You don’t want to spend a fortune trying every trick in the book to get traffic to your site, only to find that the sales don’t come.

You can send millions of visitors to your site, even highly targeted ones from the search engines, but it’s all a waste of your time and money if your site does not convert them to customers.

The single most important thing you must do, if you want to be successful, is maximize the conversion rate on your site.

You do this by the content (and design) of your webpage.

Notice I said ‘content’. If your content is poor people will click away. If your content grabs them and keeps them reading, you have an excellent chance of selling your product or having them sign up for your newsletter (where you can keep selling to them).

I believe that without great copy, you are destined to fail. You need to master the art of copywriting. Don’t panic, it’s not really all that hard.

There are many books available on the topic (including a short list here) but let me give you my own unique tip. And it will work for whatever you want to sell.

Take a look at  ClickBank for Newbies

It’s a short, free book and you don’t need to sign up.

You’ll find the tip in the FAQ section.

If you lost the use of your PC could you run your business from another PC ?

Don’t guess the answer – try it out.

Pop down to the CyberCafe and see if you can collect your email, update your website, check your affiliate program statistics.

Did you have all the necessary passwords available to you ?

Are you struggling to input data without the use of those special function keys and shortcut keystrokes on your own PC ?

Now is the time to put right any missing instructions – not when disaster really strikes.

And while you are at the Cybercafe, check out how your website looks on (possibly) a different size screen or browser.

It’s also possible that a web page that looked perfect to you cannot be seen by anyone else.

How come ?

Because it has an erroneous link to a file on your hard drive, like this

a href=”c:\website\page1.htm”

I’ve actually seen this happen.

Plenty more tips in my free book 101 SuperTips

If you are using Notepad sling it in the bin.

Imagine a tool that is one thousand times better, with so many features that I still use only a fraction of them after several years.

Introducing NoteTab.

Some of the main features include

• The ability to open and edit many documents at once

 

• Text drag-and-drop editing

 

• Clipbook tool for reusing common extracts of text

 

• Favourites list to quickly open files or directories

 

• A Paste Board file to save text clips automatically

 

• Can edit huge files

 

• Strip HTML tags from your files

 

• Complete document statistics

 

• Powerful search and replace tools

 

• Macros to speed up your work

I have NoteTab permanently open on my desktop and practically run everything from it.

I can click on an URL in a text file and it fires off my browser.

And I don’t use a design tool such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create my web pages. I simply use NoteTab.

All this and more – and it’s Free !

Visit the NoteTab site here

Plenty more tips in my free book 101 SuperTips

Occasionally affiliates want to promote a product they have seen advertised but cannot find it at the ClickBank Marketplace where they want to check out its statistics and in particular the commission rate.

The possible reasons for not showing are

- the vendor chooses not to post the product at the Marketplace
because he does not want to use affiliates or – more likely -
he wants affiliates to sign up through his own management
system (such as easyClickMate)

- the product slipped out of the Marketplace as it failed to record a sale in thirty days (it is reinstated on the next sale)

- the product is one of several in the vendor’s account, only the main one is listed in the marketplace.

If you still want to promote the product you should contact the vendor.

If you want in-depth information and statistics on the MarketPlace products
try the sites here

If you go to the ClickBank Marketplace

you will see information about each entry.

There’s a common misconception that $refd stands for the refund rate.  **

It’s not. It stands for %referred.

All the terms are explained here

So where do we find or calculate the refund rate ?

The answer is – you can’t.

The reasons are

* the  vendor account does not necessarily represent one item (up to 500 items are allowed)

* the commission rate may have changed

* the price may have changed

If you see 3rd-party tools claiming to show the refund rate they cannot be accurate.

** This term was finally dropped by ClickBank in Aug 2010

Typical affiliate question: I normally receive $20.10 for an affiliate sale but sometimes it’s $19.98 or $19.54. Why is this ?

The answer is that the customer is located in an EU country where VAT needs to be collected. This affects the calculation of commission – you can check with the calculator here 

Another circumstance where commission varies is when a vendor has more than one item in his account. Although your customer did not purchase from the usual landing page his affiliate cookie was set which meant that when he found another product you earned the commission.

You can check this by looking at the Transaction report in your ClickBank account and see different Item numbers for the same Vendor.

If you want to make sure that a customer purchases through your affiliate link and not another’s the best way is to offer a bonus after the sale.

People have been confused  over whether ClickBank allows this. You won’t find in their TOS but back in November 2006 they said that their  security team would use the following policy  ’from here on out unless we experience any additional problems’

The Policy

Affiliates may offer bonuses that are not cash or cash
equivalents if they adhere to the following:

1) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that the
bonus offer is not the responsibility of ClickBank or of the
seller of the primary product.

2) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that
ClickBank will not honor any refund requests that are based
on non-delivery, quality, or functionality of the bonus
materials.

3) Affiliate must provide their own direct contact
information (email address, etc.) and state clearly that any
issues regarding bonus delivery, bonus functionality, or
bonus quality must be addressed with the affiliate, not with
ClickBank or the seller.

How to do it

You will need to tell your prospective customer on your landing page that they must ensure they are purchasing through your link and that the order form should say [affiliate=yourid] at the bottom.

After the sale they will need to contact you with some form of proof, such as the ClickBank receipt, so that you can forward on the bonus.

Too much hassle ?

How about an automated solution which does everything for you so that you don’t need to lift a finger ?

Here is the tool I recommend.

You are a ClickBank affiliate – and you see a product that you would like to promote.

However – you reckon that you could make a better job of selling it than the vendor’s sales page.

So you would like to use your own sales page and link directly to the ClickBank order form.

Can it be done ?

Yes – here are two methods but note: Before you do this you MUST request permission from the vendor.

1. Affiliate Link

Here is an affiliate link which takes the visitor directly to the order form instead of the sales page.

http://ITEM.AFFILIATE_VENDOR.pay.clickbank.net

(there is an underscore between AFFILIATE and VENDOR)

Disadvantages:

• The normal hoplink takes priority over this link: therefore you will not get commission if your visitor has previously gone through another affiliate’s hoplink
• The link does not set a cookie: therefore you will not get commission if your visitor later returns to the site without using that link
• This is an unofficial link. It is not listed at the ClickBank site, so it could be withdrawn at any time (though the last time was back in  August 2002).

2. Scripts

Here are two scripts which include, among many other features, the ability to provide the direct order link without the disadvantages mentioned above

Affiliate Cloner

Affiliate Shield