ClickBank is one of the easiest ways to get started in on-line marketing. Anyone can sign up for a free affiliate account and start promoting any of the thousands of products in the ClickBank marketplace within minutes. There is no need to create or acquire any products; no need to create any websites, worry about accepting credit card payments, or fulfilling orders. ClickBank, and the Vendors who sell their digital products through ClickBank, handle all that for you. As an affiliate marketer, all you have to do is drive traffic to the ClickBank sales page using your own affiliate link, or "hoplink".
Inactive Accounts
So why do so many people give up with ClickBank? Only eight percent of registered ClickBank members remain active. When you consider that (at the time of writing) there are 1.25 million members, that amounts to a lot of inactive ClickBank accounts.
One of the biggest reasons that these accounts become inactive is ClickBank's Accounting Policy, and the Customer Distribution Requirement in particular. This dictates a number of criteria that you must meet before they will send you any commissions that you have earned. Until you have met all of these criteria, you will not receive a penny.
Customer Distribution Requirement Criteria
These are the criteria you must meet before ClickBank will send you your first pay check.
• Minimum Payment Threshold. ClickBank will not send out payments
until you have passed this threshold. Initially it is set to $100. To overcome this, you
can set the threshold to a lower figure - even as low as $10. However, ClickBank levy a
transaction charge of $2.50 for each payment made, so reducing your threshold to $10 could
prove costly.
• 2 Payment Methods. When you make a sale of ClickBank products, they
must have been made using at least 2 different payment methods, which can be Visa,
Mastercard or PayPal. If you sold 20 products making total commissions of $460, you still
won't get paid if all those purchases were made using PayPal.
• 5 Different Credit Card Numbers. Similarly, purchases must have been
made using at least 5 different credit card numbers. Note that different PayPal accounts
do NOT count towards this - there must be 5 actual credit card payments.
Typically, an inexperienced affiliate marketer might make one or two sales from his first campaign, but if the momentum cannot be maintained, he might have difficulty getting enough sales to fulfill the requirements of the Accounting Policy.
Frustrated at not being able to receive his commissions, the affiliate gives up. Maybe he just spent his last few cents on AdWords and cannot afford to continue. Whatever the reason for giving up, the result is that the money remains inaccessible in the ClickBank account.
Dormant Account Policy
This is when the Dormant Account Policy kicks in. An account is considered to be Dormant if it has a positive balance but has no earnings for more than 90 days. When an account is Dormant, it is subject to administration charges as follows:
• $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings
• $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings
• $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings
A pay period is usually two weeks.
So when the marketer returns to his account several months later, to give it another try, he finds that all his previously earned commission has gone and he has to start again from the beginning. Again more frustration and disillusionment, which causes him to give up completely.
The Solution
The solution is to find a product in the Clickbank marketplace which is cheap enough for anyone to buy without thinking about its cost. That way, a lot of sales can be made, which overcomes the 5 credit card and 2 payment method criteria. Similarly, a lot of sales will take you past the payment threshold and then all of the criteria will have been met, and ClickBank will release the commissions to you.
You only have to meet these criteria once - it's not a monthly thing.
The product also needs to be something which people want. How about a product which helps beginning ClickBank affiliates meet the accounting policy criteria. There is such a product. Check out the link below to get free details.
Phil Rogers is an affiliate marketing enthusiast. He has encountered and overcome many of the problems associated with getting started. To get your free report describing how to overcome ClickBank's Accounting Policy, click the link below. You don't even have to sign up to get it! [cbintuition.com site can't be reached].
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