I started with Clickbank over one year ago and made a few sales withing the first few months of my promoting the products in their marketplace and earned around $60 in affiliate commissions. After noticing their policy regarding requirements on receiving a first paycheck, I started having second thoughts about placing their hoplinks on my websites. Here’s the policy in question…
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ClickBank will withhold the first check to be issued from your account until the payable balance contains sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers, including at least one Visa card, and one MasterCard in order to be eligible to receive a check. PayPal and e-check purchases do not count toward the minimum. It is also required that the check balance reaches the Payment Threshold amount you have chosen in your account. The default Payment Threshold is set to $100, however you can change the Payment Threshold in your account at any time.
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It seemed to be a bit unreasonable to require purchases from 5 or more different credit cards, and after reading numerous affiliate blogs with stories about Clickbank sellers using cookies and other techniques to lead buyers to purchase with Paypal or E-Check by making special offers, I began to question clickBank’s effectiveness further, so I began removing all Clickbank links from all of my websites except two which are geared towards making money online. I targeted the sites keywords to lead into the clickBank products, but after a few months of no sales I noticed my balance had begun dropping. Several months later my balance was zeroed, and I read this little bit of information in ClickBanks FAQ….
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Accounts with a positive balance but no earnings for an extended period of time are considered dormant. Dormant accounts are subject to a charge of $1 per pay period after 90 days of inactivity, $5 per pay period after 180 days of inactivity, and $15 per pay period after 365 days of inactivity.
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Unfortunately, I found this to be quite unfair considering the fact that if I have a site that has been turning their advertisers hits and my visitors were not interested in the amateur looking sites most clickBank advertisers use to peddle their worthless E-Books, my account is not “dormant”, quite possibly it’s the advertisers sales pitch page that is not reaching the customer, yet I am being penalized.
After all the time and effort that was put into earning with ClickBank, my account now sits at zero. My advertising space, time and effort was wasted on their amateur affiliate program. One thing I think most people are tired of are these worthless E-Books offering you secrets to using AdWords and ClickBank to make $10,000 per week from a fully automated system. Everyone recalls last years popular E-book “The Rich Jerk” and I’m sure everybody is aware of the newest hot E-Book “Day Job Killer” and the ever present “Ultimate Wealth Package” E-Book, but the truth is that if as many people who have wasted money on these viral marketing gimmicks, by now the internet would be full of millionaires, but in reality, it isn’t so. I bought “The Rich Jerk” and quite honestly it did not expose any new techniques that any average marketer wasn’t aware of. In fact, “The Rich Jerk” left a bad impression on me when I saw the way the author was making money was by targeting gambling keywords and leading people into casino sites for huge referral fees. The author claimed he made money by placing Poker and Casino ads on big sites that attract college students such as FaceBook and MySpace and quite honestly, I would not sleep well at night if I knew I was profiting from people losing money on gambling. I might as well go sell crack on the street corner. “Day Job Killer” is no better in it’s borderline black hat SEO techniques the author professes as his key to making such a huge income. Maybe these techniques once worked for these self-appointed “gurus”, but in reality, using those techniques is likely to get a White Hat SEO webmaster’s site thrown into the Google dungeon.
At this point, I’ve decided that ClickBank just isn’t the right program for me and the sleazy nature of the cult of high pressure marketers surrounding the whole ClickBank affiliate program has me thankful that some of us have integrity and are not out to make a buck at the expense of others.
