Sell
Multiple Products Through a Single ClickBank Account
by: Tim Coulter
A ClickBank merchant account allows you to define and sell up to
50 separate products. If you have more than one product in your
range, it makes sense to sell them
from a shared ClickBank account. Here are three good reasons
why:
* Every active ClickBank account incurs a setup fee of $49.95.
Why pay this more than once?
* Managing multiple ClickBank accounts adds unnecessarily to
your administrative effort
* The combined sales of multiple products through one account
will significantly boost your Marketplace ranking
Unfortunately, the architecture of the ClickBank system has,
historically, not been well suited to selling multiple products
from a single account, especially for merchants who use
affiliates to promote their products. The problem is that,
although you can define 50 products within ClickBank's account
control panel, you can only specify a single landing page URL -
the destination page that your affiliates will refer their
prospects to.
The result is that all referrals must arrive at your site via a
common page. This forces you either to present all your products
on a shared sales page or to create an intermediate page, from
which your visitors must click through to see the product of
their choice. Neither option is ideal as they both create
obstacles that will distract your prospects and seriously reduce
your conversion rate.
For optimum sales effectiveness, affiliate referrals should go
directly to the sales page for the product of interest. This is
known as deep linking and is widely acknowledged as the best way
to convert affiliate referrals into buyers. But ClickBank's lack
of support for this technique is a major barrier that inhibits
effective use of its growing affiliate network.
To tackle this problem, a number of pioneering merchants have
developed their own techniques to work around ClickBank's
shortcomings. Some of these innovations have even evolved into
successful commercial software products. Most implementations
rely on intercepting the inbound referral and automatically
redirecting it to the relevant product page, as indicated in URL
parameters passed by the referring affiliate. There are several
variations on this theme, but they share a common gambit - using
scripts, installed on the merchant's web server, to intercept
and redirect requests.
However, the need for smoke and mirrors to fix ClickBank's
limitations may soon be a relic of the past. In October 2003,
ClickBank announced plans for major improvements to its hoplink
system - improvements that will all but eliminate the need for
workarounds or enhancement products.
The new architecture - known as the enhanced hoplink system -
employs a more flexible referral URL format, in which affiliates
are able to specify the numeric code of the product they are
referring their prospects to. Using this code, ClickBank's
server will look up the corresponding sales page URL and send
referrals directly to it, handling cookie-tracking and other
admin chores in the normal manner. Sell Multiple Products
Through a Single ClickBank Account
The main attraction of the enhanced hoplink system is its
simplicity of implementation and maintenance. Whereas add-on
products require at least a moderate understanding of script
installation and configuration, the hoplink system is maintained
entirely via the ClickBank account control panel. This means
that a merchant selling multiple products (even across multiple
web domains) can expose them for affiliate deep linking, simply
by configuring the relevant sales page URLs in his account.
At the time of writing, ClickBank has published the format of
the enhanced hoplink URL, but has not completed the database and
control panel changes that will allow the configuration of
multiple landing pages. So, although we can visualize the new
architecture and dream of the benefits it will deliver, we
remain in eager anticipation of its release.
Copyright © Tim Coulter. All rights reserved.
Tim Coulter is a consultant and software developer who helps
netpreneurs to harness marketing technologies. He is also the
author of "ClickBank - The Definitive Guide" The Ultimate
ClickBank Tutorial & Reference Manual.
http://www.clickbankrevealed.com/
.Sell
Multiple Products Through a Single ClickBank Account
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