Why you should bite the bullet and use Clickbank

A couple of months ago I wrote two posts about E-Junkie and Clickbank. Both platforms provide a service for bloggers and internet marketers to sell digital products online, and to track and record affiliate sales. I simply presented the facts and didn’t lean too heavily in favor of one or the other.

Having used both for some time, I would now advise you that Clickbank is the one to go for.

E-Junkie has some significant advantages. At $5 a month it is cheaper than Clickbank, who charge a hefty $49.95 activation charge and take a percentage of sales. You are also paid instantly via Paypal, and I find the whole E Junkie system much easier to use. However, in two areas it lags a long way behind Clickbank, and both are significant.

1/ Marketplace

Clickbank’s market place is vast, and all the significant players on the internet trawl it regularly looking for opportunities. Clickbank give you access to a whole army of people who will sell your products, and you don’t need to do anything to attract them – they find you!

My Beginner’s Guide to Twitter has been picked up by several internet marketers over the last few weeks on the Clickbank site. I don’t know any of the people who have been promoting it, I just see their Clickbank nicknames. They have driven huge amounts of traffic to my sales pages, with PPC, by designing their own mini sites and by reviewing the product on their own pages. Some days they have sent over 1000 visitors to my sales page, resulting typically, in 5 sales. I haven’t had to do anything at all to get these people working for me – the business is truly incremental.

And when you add those incremental sales to my own activity and that of “My” affiliates, it creates an excellent income stream.

2/ Memberships and Subscriptions

E Junkie has no way to offer a subscription or membership service – it can simply carry out a one off transaction and deliver a single product. For E Books, that’s fine, but for many of us, myself included, it’s a limiting factor.

My Beginner’s Guide to Blogging requires a subscription payment, and Clickbank was able to offer me an option to take regular payments from clients, and even to give them a low start trial period, which has meant higher conversions than I would have achieved with a full up front payment.

Conclusion

I still dislike two aspects of Clickbank’s offer: I don’t like the charges, and I hate the fact that initially I had to wait to reach a “Threshold” before being paid, although now I’m paid every two weeks. But overall, the Clickbank service has delivered way more in terms of sales than I could have hoped for, and at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all trying to achieve.

As so often in business, the best service costs a little more, but it delivers much, much more.

If you’re considering launching your own products, use Clickbank. It’s that simple.

Unless your experience is different?