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Sell Multiple Products Through a Single ClickBank Account
Written 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.
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 webDomains) 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.
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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/
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