eBook & Internet Publishing News
• • • • •

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services. Products/services mentioned in this review include products which we are affiliates of, and which we may earn a commission if you buy one of these products after following a link from this review.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the best ways to earn money with ClickBank is to start a membership site. Basically the idea is that instead of earning a one-off sum from selling an eBook or software download, you can make a site containing private content, which your customers pay every month to continue to access.

With ClickBank’s recurring billing feature, and using the right software tools (Easy Member Pro or Member Desk), this type of business can be quite easy to operate.

Of course, you still need to provide valuable content within your membership, and you need to create a strong pitch page (sales letter) explaining why people should join your membership site. To help with the latter, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new free product, the Membership Site Graphics Pack.

The Membership Site Graphics pack includes a collection of graphics that you can use to enhance your membership site’s pitch pages, and entice people to join. Alternatively (or additionally if you like), you are free to redistribute the Membership Site Graphics Pack - you can give it away (for example as a gift to email list subscribers from your squeeze page), or resell it.

Here’s the main items inside:

• 40 PNG Images of membership card graphics (these are ready-to-use graphics)
• 20 editable CFP files: The easiest way to edit or design new membership cards is to open one of these CFP files into the CoverFactory software. Then, make whatever changes that you want. Finallyuse "Render to File…" (on the "Render" menu), to create a PNG or JPEG image of your updated card image.
• PNG Join Buttons: (ready-to-use pay-to-join button graphics)

Here’s some examples of the graphics included in the Membership Site Graphics Pack - and remember you can use them for FREE - so get your copy today!

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services. Products/services mentioned in this review include products which we are affiliates of, and which we may earn a commission if you buy one of these products after following a link from this review.

One of the clever way for ClickBank vendors to generate more revenue is to create a membership site rather than selling individual eBooks or software downloads. This is because membership sites allow you to make regular recurring sales to your customers, rather than indivudual one-off sales: the customer does not pay once to get your eBook - instead the customers pays every single month to continue to access your private member’s website.

ClickBank includes some really cool features designed to help smooth running your membership site, including most importantly, "Recurring Billing". "Recurring Billing" simply means that your customers enter their credit card or payment details once, but they continue be billed automatically every month until they decide to cancel their membership.

That said however, even with help from ClickBank, you need to still
take care of all the other aspects of running your membership site, including writing an effective pitch page that persuades people to join your membership site, creating content for your membership site that people will pay to see, and some technical/administrative aspects such as maintaining your list of members (although the right software, used properly, can make this task easy).

Here are some tools and resources for creating and running your own membership site:

• Software:
  • Easy Member Pro: This is software that you can install (or have installed for you) on your website that automates the admin-side of running a membership site such as adding new members, removing members, etc. This probably the market-leader, perhaps the most flexible software choice, but it is still fairly technical in terms of setting it up, etc. If you are an experienced webmaster, this should probably be the first package that you should look at.
  • Member Desk: This package offers a really easy and quick way of setting up a membership site. It’s ideal for people who are not technical, or who don’t want to waste time messing with the tech-side. In short, if you are not a technical wizard, or you don’t want to devote much time to the technical side of things, then look at this package first.
• Guides:
  • Membership Site Bible: A guide to setting up a membership site. Includes audio interviews with industry experts.
  • Membership Master Video Course: A video series about setting up a membership site.
• Graphics:
  • Membership Site Graphics Pack: This is a free set of graphics that your company have put together for owners of membership sites. It includes various "Join" payment buttons, as well as lots of attractive membership cards. I will also write a separate post specifically about this package, but you can dwonload it and check out the graphics for yourself. If you want even more graphics for your sales-letters, pitch-pages, or general internet-marketing needs, please check out out low-cost paid graphics packages: Internet Marketing Graphics Pack, and our ClickBank Vendor Graphics Pack ("CB Vendor Graphics Pack").

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services.

CBRocket is a PHP Script which allows you to download the entire ClickBank marketplace to a MySQL Database on your website. Once downloaded, you can then setup a ClickBank search engine/mall as part of your site - allowing you to display all of the 12,000+ ClickBank products as part of your web-pages, all tagged with your affiliate id (so you can earn commissions on sales of any of them).

As we’ve previously mentioned, ClickBank have made some major changes recently. One of the biggest, but less obvious changes is that the marketplace is only visible on ClickBank’s site after you log-in - so it can only be seen by ClickBank vendors and affiliates. Now that ClickBank’s own marketplace pages are not visible to most of the internet - this of course opens up a gap in the search engines, and a potential opportunity for those who want to cash in on that gap…

Anyway, unlike some of our rivals, CBRocket is fully compatible with the new ClickBank website.

What’s more, CBRocket downloads the ClickBank marketplace data super-quick. Although be fair, the download time does depend on your web host. I tried it on a couple of hosts myself - on one, it took seconds, but the other did take a couple of minutes. Either way, that’s not bad for downloading more than 12,000 products all tagged with an affiliate link! Please also note,

1. You don’t have to download the marketplace data very often - only when you want to update the listings on your website.
2. When CBRocket downloads the marketplace data, it can do so into temporary tables - so downloading does not require any website down-time, and your visitors will not even be aware an update is in progress.

I’ve made a quick video of the download process, which is perhaps not that interesting to many (it mainly shows the logs of what technical process is going on during the download - which most users will simply ignore after clicking the download button), but I’m sure some people will be curious:

Once you’ve downloaded the data, what can you do - display a search engine of ClickBank data, with your template, your banners, your affiliate id, as part of your site. Here’s a live demo for you to check out.

Find out more about CBRocket, or get a copy to install on your website, at ScriptRocket.com

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Click/Counter Tracker version 4.00. This is a powerful PHP script for tracking all your advertising, marketing and sales - including tracking website visitors, ad-tracking, conversion rate testing. split-testing sales-letters and squeeze-pages, and tracking your banner advertising campaigns.

The most important new feature in the script is a special feature for tracking banner advertising campaigns. You can use this feature to track all your campaigns, and so as to test out different banner ad designs, and different venues for banner advertising. With the information the script collects, it’s as easy as pie to know which banner designs generate the highest click-thru rates, and which venues/ad-networks are the most effective for banner advertising. Using this information, you can maximize the Return On Investment (”ROI”) of your advertising campaigns.

Here’s a video showing the new banner advertising campaign features of the script:

Other features of Click/Counter Tracking include

1. Tracking clicks on your advertising links

2. Tracking visitors to your websites and web-pages

3. Measuring the conversion rates of your squeeze-pages, opt-in forms, and sales-letters

4. Split-Testing (also known as “A/B testing” - except we don’t limit you to testing only 2 items at a time!) multiple versions of squeeze-pages, opt-in forms, and sales-letters.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

In my last post, I talked about how to create banner images, in this post I will talk about demonstrate how to track banner advertising campaigns.

First of all though, why do you need to track your banner advertising campaigns?

Here are some reasons:

1. So you know which banner designs are being click on, and which are not. This allows you to test out different banner designs, so as to find the most effective one.
2. So you know which websites containing your banner generate a response, and which don’t. This allows you to test our different advertising venues, so you can tell the difference between those that are profitable to advertise on, and those that are not.
3. So you will know if you are getting the number of clicks/impressions that you paid for, when paying for advertising.

In short, what you want to do is separately track the impressions (i.e. displays of your banner image) and the click-throughs, for each of your banner advertising campaigns. You can then different images and different advertising campaigns.

The way to do this is to use our Click/Counter Tracker script. This is a PHP script that you install on your website, and which can be used for tracking all your advertising links, conversion rates, and split-testing of sales letters.

To fully track a banner advertising campaign, you need to create two trackers: one for counting impressions, and one for counting the click-throughs. The impression tracker is set with a destination URL of the banner image, the click-through tracker is set with a destination URL of your landing page. Then you simply use these URLs when activating your banner campaign. That’s it.

At the moment, on the current version of Click/Counter Tracker, version 3.02, you need to do 2 steps to setup the 2 trackers, but now this issue has been brought to my attention, we will look at reducing that to one step, which will make this kind of tracking even easier.

In the meantime, here’s a video showing the 2-step setup process, and the kind of information you can get back:

Update:

A new version of Click/Counter Tracker is now available, which I describe in more detail here.

Here’s a video showing the new version of this powerful PHP script makes tracking banner advertising campaigns even easier, while providing truly comprehensive tracking information:

Disclosure: The links to third party products in this article lead to other websites owned by our company. We may earn an affiliate commission if you buy a product after following a link to a product from any of these websites.

Advertising banners are graphical adverts that you can display on your own or other people’s websites (you usually have to pay other websites if you want them to display your banners). Some people may tell you things like “banners are dead”, and while it is true that average response rates to banners have fallen over the last few years, this is very much an exaggeration - there are still lots of opportunities for profitable banner advertising campaigns.

The first issue that you want to consider before embarking on a banner advertising campaign is what your objectives are. Some people claim that a benefit of banner advertising is “branding” - even people who don’t click your ad, will still see your banner, and may remember your brand. There probably are cases where banner branding works, but generally speaking, I am skeptical of these types of claims - I’ve must have seen thousands (possibly millions?) over the last 16 or 17 years of using the Internet, but I can’t personally remember more than a handful.

Your mileage and opinion may of course differ from mine, but generally speaking, I think for small business at least, the main goal of banner advertising campaigns should be to generate more traffic and/or sales to your website. You need to factor that in when designing your banners and creating your banner advertising campaigns, for example by:

1. By creating banners that look like they are supposed to be clicked (sometimes banners just look like graphical elements, and people don’t even realize they are supposed to be clicked).
2. By testing different types of banner design to see which gets the best response.
3. By placing your banners on sites which relate to your own intended audience.

If you have an unlimited budget, you can simply pay a graphics professional to design a banner for you. Do bear in mind that the designer should be working to your requirements, rather than just producing nice-looking images! Moreover, you will need to pay for many different banner designs, so you can test and find the ones that produce the best results in terms of traffic, sales and profits.

For the rest of us, we probably need a solution which produces good results, but without the expense. What are the options?

1. You can use a general purpose painting/graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or Corel PhotoPaint. Of course, producing good results with these programs may require quite a bit of time and skill.
2. Rather than starting from scratching in a painting/graphics program, you can use templates to get you started. This is definitely a time-saver, and allows a non-expert to produce good results quickly. Check out Easy Banner Maker which works with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
3. You can buy a program specifically intended for creating banners. You not need Adobe Photoshop or any other graphics program to use these, and you do not even need any real graphics skills. The main options are Banner Generator Pro and Easy Banner Creator. The latter, Easy Banner Creator, looks like it has a few more options than the other one, but they both look like decent programs.

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services.

One of the best features of ClickBank is the ClickBank marketplace. Basically it’s a listing of pretty much every active vendor (a few vendors do choose not to be listed) in ClickBank. Under the “old” ClickBank you could even link to the marketplace as a whole, making every vendor listing be coded with your affiliate id.

As I mentioned in my previous post, ClickBank have made some major changes to their site. One other change they have made, is now the marketplace can only be viewed (on their site) after logging in. A few other people seemed to have noticed this as well, so I contacted ClickBank (specifically Jeff Leget) to confirm that this was a deliberate change - he said it was.

However the good news is that it is still possible to display the whole marketplace tagged with your affiliate link, and without requiring you or your visitor to log-in to ClickBank. In fact, the solution is actually better than linking to the “old” ClickBank marketplace - because you can have the marketplace appear on your own website, as part of your web pages, and part of your website design, with a proper search engine. The trick is to use our script, CBRocket. We’ve updated CBRocket to version 4.00, which is fully compatible with the new ClickBank, and super fast at downloading the marketplace data too!

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank Vendor and Affiliate, and has been for more than 14 years. We earn money by selling our own products through ClickBank, as well as earning affiliate commission on other products sold by ClickBank, including ClickBank’s own products/services. We are also an AWeber affiliate, and earn commissions from sale of their services.

If you’re not already a member, you will recall that ClickBank is an online retailer that you integrate with your website. In the past there were two ways of joining ClickBank:

1. ClickBank Vendor: You can easily sell your own downloadable products from your website (such as software or eBooks). You also get access to all the affiliate features (see below). There was a one-time US $49.95 setup fee associated with activating a vendor account, as well as some deductions that apply to your earnings, including transaction fees on your own sales, and check issuing fees, etc.
2. ClickBank Affiliate: You can use special links to earn to other vendors, and earn commissions on sales that you refer. Setting up your account was free, but there were some deductions that apply to your earnings, for your own sales, such as check issuing fees, etc.

ClickBank have now revised their site, and there are now four different ways to join:

1. Vendors - ClickBank DIY - this appears to be basically the old ClickBank vendor option. Cost: one-time $49.95 setup fee, plus transaction fees, check issuing fees, etc. You need to provide your own web hosting, but this the most flexible option, and this will be the option our company will continue to use.
2. Vendors - ClickBank Powered - Cost: From $47/month (as well as transaction fees, etc.). With this option, ClickBank provides web hosting and tools to get your site up and running quickly. They also can provide training and support. In other words, it’s ideal for somebody who doesn’t have the skills or ability to setup their own ClickBank site.
3. Affiliates - ClickBank for Affiliates - Cost: Free (but check issue fees, etc.). This appears to be the old ClickBank affiliate option.
4. Affiliates - ClickBank Audience Builder - Cost: $27/month. You join ClickBank as an affiliate and earn commissions on sales of third party products, but ClickBank provide you with hosting, an autoresponder, etc. This option seems to be mainly aimed at novices who are new to affiliate marketing, and who are looking for an easy entry point.

All these options are very interesting, and I’m sure they will allow ClickBank to reach a whole new set of vendors and affiliates. That said, I do hope that ClickBank doesn’t lose focus - they need to remember that their main business is enabling the sale of digital products to end-users (the people reading the eBooks, etc.) rather than taking money directly from vendors/affiliates.

One other point worth considering, which isn’t entirely clear is whether the web hosting, autoresponder, etc., provided in “ClickBank Audience Builder” and “ClickBank Powered” will be as good as the best of breed provided by specialist vendors in these categories - for example, will ClickBank’s autoresponder be as good as that provided by AWeber?

Lastly, one concern that I would have if I was using “ClickBank Audience Builder” and “ClickBank Powered” is that all my eggs are in one basket. If I were ever to fall-out with ClickBank (hopefully not likely, as I’ve been with them for 14 years, and have a good relationship - but I like to be prepared for the worst case scenario), then since my websites are not hosted with ClickBank, I could always switch to another retailer or payment provider. However if I were using ClickBank’s hosting, I might not have that option.

Anyway it will be interesting to see how it pans out - I expect there will be some fascinating stories (including hopefully some big success stories) as people start to explore the new ClickBank capabilities!

Note: All prices in this article are current at the time of writing, but ClickBank may vary them at any time. They do not include VAT or Sales Tax which may or may not apply depending on your geographic location.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more