In this author’s opinion, Clickbank’s own rules are what cause the massive rate of commission theft for Clickbank affiliate products:
Once on the Clickbank site, if you do a search on the term, “Customer Distribution Requirement”, on the “Accounting Policy” page, you will see the following notice:
“In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until it contains standing sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers, including at least one Visa card, and one MasterCard. PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum.”
If taken literally, this means that if a person makes 10 or a thousand PayPal-only sales, they will not receive a paycheck from Clickbank. They must make FIVE sales with different account numbers and they must have a Visa and a MasterCard purchase.
So, what are Clickbank affiliates doing? They are getting their girl friends, boy friends, wives, husbands and grandmas to use their affiliate links when buying products through Clickbank. This is extremely important because in order to sell a product as an affiliate, a good marketer will first purchase the product so that he or she will understand its features and benefits.
This is something that puzzled me for quite a long time until I figured out why my stats indicated that my conversion rates were high, but I didn’t get the sale. Quite simply, Clickbank affiliates don’t want to wait very long to get their checks in the mail.
I have visited several free and even paid internet marketing forums where I see people exclaiming joy about their first sale as an affiliate marketer. They are naïve to think that one sale equals one commission check. If they have not put together a good business model with backend sales and are building a list of repeat customers, their sales will be few and far in between. They are absolutely floored when they see the Customer Distribution Requirement (CDR) notice next to their account telling them that they need to make more sales to get their first check.
In my own opinion, because of this reason, Clickbank products are impossible to sell to other Clickbank affiliates. To sell to the “make money online” crowd, you absolutely MUST have your own product that you are able to sell either through Clickbank, or as a standalone PayPal product. It is much easier to sell “outside” of the “make money online” market. It’s much easier to sell weightloss, acne control, fitness, and dog training to people who have never heard of Clickbank. or affiliate marketing.
But, if you are selling Clickbank products to non-Clickbank savvy folks, you still have the problem of people not wanting to click on those long, nasty-looking affiliate links. That’s why it is always important to cloak your affiliate links. But, be cautioned that you cannot have cloaked links or re-directs in your Google AdWords campaigns. Google does not allow either pop-ups or redirects. As a matter of fact, Google will not accept your website for AdSense if you are serving pop-ups. You must use “inline” scripts to get optins to your mail list if you are to associate with Google.