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May 03, 2005
Clickbank or PayPal?
It seems lately I've landed on a number of sites selling their products through Clickbank, but below the link to purchase the product at Clickbank is a PayPal button.
If you are an affiliate for a site/product that does this, then you're going to lose sales commission if the traffic you send to the site decides to use PayPal to pay for the product.
I had a couple of people write to me recently and thank me for referring a certain affiliate site to them that offered a digital product that would solve their problem. Just for the fun of it, I logged onto Clickbank and discovered I had not made a sale after these people had thanked me.
Well... now you know why...
So I wrote to the owner of the program and said, "Look, this isn't working for me. I like your product and don't mind recommending it to folks, but it would be nice to make the odd commission sale."
The owner of the program wrote back to me and said they do a lot of PPC advertising and find the conversion ratio at about 2.5% with 30% of their purchasers opting to use PayPal. Then he asked me if I had any suggestions...
The whole point of an affiliate network is you pay people to help promote your product. Naturally, if they aren't making any money doing this, then you're not going to have affiliates very long... which means you have to turn to other methods for advertising such as PPC.
So I wrote him a note:
I don't don't how many affiliates you have. Of course with Clickbank... you never know how many affiliates you have. But if they send people your way, they should be compensated for helping you sell your product.If it were me... here is what I would do.
I would enable your html pages to be parsed for SSI by adding this to your .htaccess file:
AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htmlthen on the index.html page I would add this code:
<!--#set var="category" value="$QUERY_STRING" -->
<!--#if expr="${QUERY_STRING}" -->
<!--#include file="page1.inc" -->
<!--#else -->
<!--#include file="page2.inc" -->
<!--#endif -->If there is a query string on the end of the URL then an included file, "page1.inc" (which is just the html containing the clickbank ordering information) can be inserted into the page.
If there isn't any query string then "page2.inc" will be included in your page. This html would include both options, Clickbank and PayPal.
Yes using this method you would lose some sales. People being sent to your site from an affiliate wouldn't have the option of paying by PayPal.
But, if affiliates start getting their sales commission... then they will promote the program more and you will make more sales.
I've been promoting this program for a while and have made zero sales. If other affiliates have been finding the same thing... you aren't going to have any affiliates.
I think it is important that you use a tracker when deciding to become an affiliate of any program. You need to know how many click you are sending affiliate sites. But it is also a good idea to examine each one to see if there is a way you might be losing your commission.
If you find some of the affiliate site owners doing something similar, you can send them a link to this article.
If you are setting up your own affiliate program, use this code as your own. Make sure your affiliates get paid for their work if you want to keep them.
Posted by Steve MacLellan at May 3, 2005 07:14 AM
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