Clickbank products can be a lot of fun to promote if you find a good one. There are a few problems, however. The first is mostly a problem of internet marketing and health niches, which is that many of the products have questionable claims by FTC standards, but Clickbank is trying to improve that situation. Another problem is that some merchants’ pages are quite leaky from an affiliate perspective. You need to check the pages out before you start promoting any Clickbank product – any affiliate product, really.

1. Opt-in forms and mailing lists.

A good merchant who tries to get visitors to sign up on his or her mailing list is a wonderful thing for an affiliate. It can also be a terrible thing. Some merchants use that list to place one of their own cookies on the customer if they buy due to clicking through a newsletter link, rather than crediting the affiliate who brought the person to the list. Most recent affiliate gets the sale when it goes through Clickbank, so this is an easy and tempting switch for someone to make.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable some ways, as the merchant made some extra effort to make the sale by providing more information to his or her list, but at the same time, without the affiliate, that customer wouldn’t have been on the list in the first place. You don’t want to lose customers to the merchant’s list.

Check for this by signing up for their list through your own affiliate link. You’ll find out what they’re saying to their list, and you can see if your affiliate link continues to be good during it. Some merchants even program their list to include your link in mailings, but so long as there’s no other affiliate link used, you should get the credit for any sales. It’s a good practice as an affiliate to go through as much of the merchant’s sales funnel as you can. You need to know what you’re promoting.

2. Merchant sells other products on the sales page.

Some merchants aren’t all that focused on selling their own product. They want to sell other products too, and do so right on the sales page. It doesn’t bother me if they do that later on, that’s their business, but if it interferes with the sales of their own product that you’re trying to generate, it’s a problem.

This problem may also include ad units such as AdSense on the page. Some merchants feel that they aren’t getting enough sales of their products, and so they slap up some AdSense or other ad units to improve their earnings on their pages. The problem is that this can decrease the sales of their own product tremendously, which decreases your commissions.

Sometimes they even have links which don’t help them to earn anything. While these may be useful

Take a look and see if the sales page is focused on the product you’d like to promote or not. Links to other websites, whether they earn for the merchant or not, are leaks for your earnings. You may do better with products that don’t have so many leaks.

3. Merchant takes payments through other processors as well as Clickbank.

It’s a nice idea for the merchant, not so good for you when they take payments through other processors. The problem, quite simply, is that you won’t get a commission through any system that doesn’t have you as an affiliate. Those sales are lost to you.

What Can You Do to Avoid Affiliate Page Leaks?

You do have options to avoid these kinds of leaks. You can ask the merchant to set up a special landing page without all these leaks, for example. It shouldn’t be that hard, and they can continue to use their leaky page for people who come through non-affiliate sources. If you have a proven track record as a promoter, you have some leverage to encourage this.

Now, just because you’ve checked the product you’re promoting and found a page without any leaks doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. You should recheck periodically, as pages do change over time. Sign up for the newsletter again to make sure your links are still going through during that process. Look over the page. Generally keep an eye on things, especially if your conversion rates suddenly drop.

You can also start your own mailing list by signing people up on your own site, and then referring them to products. This is a generally good practice in any case, as it gives you the chance to make still more sales.

You can link directly to the Clickbank checkout page if you like. It’s recommended that you check to see if the merchant minds if you do this at all, and definitely keep your sales page honest about the product. You’ll have a furious vendor as well as customers of that vendor who bought through your link if you aren’t providing utterly accurate information while linking to the checkout page.

The format for linking to the checkout page is:

http://prodnumber.affiliate_vendor.pay.clickbank.net

You can get the product number and vendor name by looking at the checkout link on the sales page. Prodnumber is often 1, but some vendors have multiple products, so be sure you have the right number. Affiliate is your Clickbank ID, and vendor is the vendor’s Clickbank ID. Make sure to test the link before using it live on your site so that you can see if it’s working. This method is somewhat unofficial, but some affiliates like it not only to bypass leaky pages, but poorly written sales pages for products they think are otherwise good. Just keep an eye on it, and make sure your link continues to work.

It’s official. Amazon should be reinstating California affiliates over the next few days as Governor Brown has signed the bill giving Amazon a break on collecting sales tax in California until September 2012. Amazon is to create 10,00 jobs in California, which makes it sound to me like we have some hope of affiliate marketing with Amazon lasting beyond that point, whether or not the Federal government acts.

I’m happy but antsy. I really want to see what happens next year, which is going to make me quite cautious about how I promote Amazon over the next year. I don’t want to be stuck in the scramble to change things over again. I mean, sure, there’s Skimlinks, but I prefer the regular Amazon program overall.

Things have certainly gotten interesting between Amazon.com and California. They’ve come to a new agreement that Amazon doesn’t need to collect sales taxes this year, but starting in September 2012, they will. As of this writing, it hasn’t been signed by the Governor, so it’s a matter of waiting to see what happens now for California affiliate marketers.

It’s been said that Amazon will let California affiliates back into the program if this is signed, although I haven’t had any official word on that from Amazon. That said, I don’t know that it will last beyond September 2012, as Amazon could take other steps to get out of needed to collect the taxes in the free year they now have. We’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

With that in mind, I’m going to be quite hesitant to create or promote new Amazon affiliate sites. I have some, which have suffered tremendously from the lack of Amazon links, and I had hoped to build more, but I won’t until I know things will last beyond a year. I’m really not into the short term stuff.

This deal also depends on whether there is action from Congress on the matter of sales tax on online purchases. This is what Amazon has been pushing for, as it has the potential to simplify the collection of such taxes.

Even with all that, I’m much annoyed with the people who keep insisting that it is only the lack of sales tax charged that makes people shop on Amazon. That’s the line we keep hearing, and it’s just not true.

I firmly believe most people shop on Amazon because the basic price is lower even before sales tax. They also go there because local stores can rarely compete with the selection. Add in the reviews and other information available about the products, and of course people love shopping online. Having to pay sales tax on online purchases won’t change that.

Even though I won’t be aggressively promoting Amazon until I know what’s in the works for next September, I still want this bill signed. It will put a stop to what otherwise will be a nasty fight.

Clickbank released some new rules recently for vendors (and affiliates) to be more in line with FTC requirements. They’ve made minor changes to their rules before, with minor effects, but these may be more serious. Whether you’re a vendor on Clickbank, an affiliate with them or you just want to see an example of how careful one should be in promoting products, you should check out their new rules. These apply especially to those promoting products about making money online, but it matters in other niches too, especially in areas such as health. While the guidelines page title says vendor, it’s important to note that affiliates are expected to follow these rules as well:

Screenshot from the Clickbank site:

Here are some of the big points:

• Specific advertising claims must be from real examples and actual experiences, and must be something you can substantiate. No making up stories.
• You can’t infer that the product is significantly easier to use than it really is.
• Affiliates are not to pose as neutral third parties comparing products just to make a commission when one is sold.
• Vendors must include a script to all sales videos for Clickbank to consider during the approval process.
• No false scarcity. If you say there are only 300 copies available, Clickbank will monitor sales and halt them at that number.
• No more claiming a sale price if you haven’t sold the product at that price before.
• No more than 3 upsells and two exit offers in the sales flow, with clear “no thanks” links.
• No corporate logos on sales pages without documented permission to use said logos.
• Prices, including rebill prices, must be clearly presented.

All in all, it’s what I would call pretty good stuff. Current vendors have until August 31, 2011 to get in line with these new terms. I think the start of September may be very interesting. If Clickbank enforces these strictly, I think there will be a lot of devastated vendors and affiliates scrambling to cope as noncompliant products get taken down. Just now, when you go through the e-marketing and e-business section, most of the top products don’t look particularly compliant.

Enforcement is going to be interesting. The basic way Clickbank has handled things in the past, you set up your sales page and send them your product for review, they check it and if it all looks good, you’re in the marketplace. The only problem is that it’s very easy to change both the page and the product after approval.

Policing sites for such changes would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. Makes things more expensive for Clickbank, I would imagine.

The other option is to rely on complaints, which I suspect won’t be good enough for the FTC. That there’s a chronic problem with exaggerated claims and full on false statements in the make money online industry is well known.

I’ve seen some people bemoan the loss of the “wild west” atmosphere of online marketing. Some feel that the right to free speech includes the right to claim whatever you want when you sell something.

That hasn’t been true for a long time. The only reason people are so used to it on the internet is because the internet is so much harder to regulate. That doesn’t make it right when people tell desperate buyers that they can make thousands of dollars in just a few mouse clicks. Being able to back up the claims you make about your product has been the law for a very long time.

Honestly, I don’t expect these changes to make a big difference. I’d like them to, but there are more payment processors out there, and plenty are willing to take on products places such as Clickbank may not want anymore.

This is, naturally, all about protecting Clickbank as a business. They want to have something they can point to saying that a vendor not obeying FTC rules was breaking their Terms of Service. I don’t know if that will be enough, but with the FTC stepping up enforcement and credit card companies looking harder at who they’re allowing to process payments, Clickbank has to do something to protect themselves. I don’t think it will remove their liability, but it might help.

I have no doubt in my mind that the vendors used to making big money off heavily hyped products and misleading claims know how they’re going to handle these changes. I expect a change in tactics, not so much a change in their business as a whole. I firmly believe that “buyer beware” will continue to be a good thought to keep in mind when you seek out ways to earn money from home.

Of course, if this works out, it would be wonderful. No more “As Seen On” lists of logos that really mean the product has been advertised on sites such as Google. No more products claiming to have just 9 more copies left for months on end while claiming tremendous popularity. Maybe even more products in the Clickbank Marketplace that I can feel good about promoting. I won’t even touch most of them because I loathe the typical sales letter so.

I’m also wanting to know how this will be enforced on affiliates. Vendors aren’t the only ones who make these wild claims, and by current FTC rules, vendors are responsible for what affiliates do too. Could get interesting, especially since Clickbank vendors don’t have direct contact with affiliates unless they get the affiliates to sign up with them directly. It’s rather difficult to be responsible for affiliates when you don’t know who they are or what they’re doing. Could this start a wave of Clickbank bans of affiliates?

When you see ads and offers for data entry work at home jobs, they’re often really teaching you about how to earn money doing ad posting. All you have to do is pay for a membership or to download the course, whatever it is the site cares to call it, and you’ll have a chance to make big money, honest! Or so they say. But is this really data entry?

In my opinion, no, not at all. I would consider data entry work to be when you’re entering data specified by your employer into a database. That’s not what you do when you post ads. Usually you have to write them yourself, although sometimes there are resources to help you. Ad posting, as suggested by most of these supposed data entry opportunities, is quite simply affiliate marketing.

Let’s take a look at some of the common things they say.

List of 10,000 companies available, and none will refuse to hire you.

This usually translates to them giving you a link to Clickbank. There are a lot of merchants on Clickbank, and most have open affiliate programs, so you won’t be declined by an employer because they aren’t employing you or offering any sort of a job. You’ll be an affiliate marketer through Clickbank, not directly associated with or paid by the company which created the product you’re marketing.

Note that they aren’t maintaining the database themselves. They may have the Clickbank marketplace all nicely listed on their site, but they aren’t the ones getting merchants interested or dealing with the issues involved in having a database of that sort.

You’ll never have to sell anything.

Define sell. If you mean persuade someone to buy a product, then yes, you’re selling. How else are you going to earn affiliate commissions?

But if you mean sell as in process the payment for the product, no, you aren’t going to do that. Not handling payments is one of the great parts about being an affiliate.

You’ll never have to contact customers.

Sort of true, sort of not. If you place an ad somewhere where there’s an option to contact you rather than click through the affiliate link, some people will do that instead. Yes, you can ignore them, but it’s smarter to have an email template you can edit for their specific needs and try again for the click. They’re interested enough to contact you, that bit of extra effort could be worth your time. But you don’t have to if it’s not your thing.

Submit short forms for the companies.

In other words, fill out the forms for the ads you’re going to place. It’s common for these opportunities to suggest pay per click sites such as AdWords, but as that has become more challenging, they may also suggest posting ads on classified ad websites, forums and so forth. Not all may be welcoming of affiliate advertising.

Once again, you’ll probably be writing your own ads. Some Clickbank merchants are kind enough to write some basic material for you, but many don’t. Besides, if you used the prepared material you won’t stand out so well, and that can be a disadvantage if you ad is one of many on the page, especially if someone else is advertising the same product.

They don’t care about your typing speed.

This is one of the big hints that you aren’t looking at a real data entry job for an employer. Anyone who is going to pay you to do this work as work will care about your typing speed, as they want to get a ton of productivity out for what they pay you. A real data entry job listing will mention typing speed.

These guys don’t care because they’re talking about affiliate marketing, and you only get paid a commission if you make a sale. Typing speed is your own problem.

Earn hundreds of dollars for 15-30 minutes of work.

Or similar claims, of course. Even most affiliate marketers work longer than that to earn their commissions. There’s a learning curve, for one thing. It takes time to figure out what works for each product.

Most of these products will offer proof of earnings that will confirm it’s affiliate marketing through Clickbank once you know what to look for. Easy thing is the earnings screenshot, which is usually a screenshot of a Clickbank account.

Faking a Clickbank screenshot is ridiculously easy. This one took moments.

Trouble with that is you don’t know how those earnings came about. Clickbank has been working on that for products offered through their own marketplace, but in the past it has been common to use screenshots for sales unrelated to the method being discussed. Screenshots are also trivial to fake. They prove nothing. Videos can be faked as well.

What To Do If You Really Want to Do Data Entry or Online Typing

If you really and truly want to do data entry or a similar online typing job, it’s going to be kind of tough. These jobs aren’t entirely impossible to find, but they are difficult to find. There just aren’t that many companies out there hiring for these kinds of positions. I have a few listed on my data entry work at home jobs page, but it’s only a few because there are so few legit companies out there.

If you can cope with typing what you hear rather than what you see, consider general transcription as well. You may want to take a class on transcription just to get your skills built up, but general transcription doesn’t have the training requirements you see for medical or legal transcription in most cases, although many such positions still demand experience. You’ll be typing, it can be online and from home, and the pay rate isn’t bad if you have excellent speed.

What If You Don’t Mind the Idea of Ad Posting and Affiliate Marketing?

Done right, there’s nothing wrong with posting ads and doing affiliate marketing. It’s not the easy road to riches some imagine (how I wish it were otherwise!), but a good number of people do earn a living through affiliate marketing. It’s a part of my income I’d hate to give up, although I do affiliate marketing through my own websites, not ad posting. More fun to me.

Most important thing in this case is to find a legitimate resource to help you learn how to post ads… unless you’re up for the learning curve of puzzling it all out on your own. Even with help it gets expensive if you go the pay per click route, and the way things work with some sites now you may well have to set up your own website to link through, rather than linking directly to the product through your ad. That’s actually a good thing in the long run, but that’s another issue.

Don’t go for resources or programs that start talking it up as a data entry or home typing job. At that point they’ve already failed one important test, so why trust them to be up to date or honest about the actual work you’ll be doing, for yourself, no less. You want a resource that teaches you how to do the type of affiliate marketing you’re interested in because you want to do that kind of affiliate marketing, no data entry charade required.

The best resources are updated once in a while because rules change on the internet. That’s especially true if you do pay per click advertising such as through AdWords. You don’t want to have all your ads declined because you were given out of date advice on how to run your campaigns. Perry Marshall’s AdWords Guide has been a good choice for some time. Yes, that’s an affiliate link.

Whatever you do, don’t pick something that costs more than you can afford to spend. Keep it sensible, and when in doubt, start asking around.