Note To Readers – since this interview was carried out Chuck has upgraded from Clickbank to his own dedicated merchant account and affiliate software. The concepts however are still as important as ever for Clickbank merchants, and it also helps to illustrate my point about the added benefits of having your own merchant account as opposed to using a third party service.
World famous internet marketer, and author of the best selling book Affiliate Mistakes, Chuck McCullough knows exactly what he’s doing with affiliate programs. He knows exactly how to make his affiliates for his book fiercely loyal, and yet he uses the very limited capabilities of Clickbank.
The main problem with Clickbank is the limited tracking capabilities, which can mean that hard working affiliates can lose out on commissions.
Ethical, honest business owners like Chuck realise that if he does his very best to ensure his affiliates make money, they’ll be more motivated, and in the end make him far more cash than if he hadn’t put all this work in.
Infact, he puts so much work in I thought it only right to draw some of the fascinating innovations to your attention. These aren’t "industry standard" ideas – these are Chuck’s own innovations that he’s kindly agreed to tell us about. You’re getting a glimpse under the bonnet of a very successful business.
If you’re already running, or are thinking of running an affiliate program with Clickbank, this information will be very useful to you.
So how does he do it?
Well it’s all a matter of technology actually, and Chuck generously agreed to tell us all about how he does it.
Just one word before I hand over to Chuck. For those new to the Internet I should quickly explain what "cookies" are (you’ll hear Chuck mention them several times). A cookie is a small text file that is attached to your browser and carries information on you.
It’s cookies that enable Amazon to welcome you back with your own name, it’s cookies that enable businesses to tell whether each visitor has been to their site before or not. It’s also cookies that many, many pieces of affiliate software use to track affiliate commissions. Unfortunately, it is possible to turn cookies off, which can create all sorts of problems.
So, over to Chuck…
"I’ve spent a quite a bit of time and effort trying to improve on Clickbank’s affiliate program to ensure that my affiliates get credited for their referrals.
I have several scripts in place that I wrote myself (I have programming experience so this was no problem.)
The basics of what I’ve done is setup my index page as an actual cgi program so that I have quite a bit of control and flexibility over what happens when a visitor hits my site.
When a visitor comes in with a Clickbank referral ID, I make several changes to the page that inserts the affiliate’s Clickbank ID in.
First it is inserted into the system that generates my popup box when the visitor leaves. This works in conjunction with my autoresponder system which I purchased called Autoresponder Plus at http://www.autorespondercentral.com.
Autoresponder Plus allows me to ‘tag’ visitors with codes to determine what method brought them to me. I use this to tell me which affiliate sent each subscriber.
Then, ALL emails sent to those subscribers have a special URL in them that contains the affiliates Clickbank ID. So if a subscriber clicks any links in the followup emails to visit my site, they will visit using the Clickbank affiliate link.
This is important because Clickbank’s system works off of cookies. If a surfer has cookies disabled, or if they clear their cache periodically, visitors won’t be tied to your affiliate ID.
I see many merchants using Clickbank that simply put direct URLs back to their websites in followup emails. If the cookie is no longer present on a visitors computer, the original affiliate that referred that customer gets cut out of the loop.
With my system every link in the email is the affiliate link of the person that referred them.
The next thing that I do is insert the Clickbank ID for the referring affiliate into the actual order link. This again bypasses the need for Clickbank’s cookie system by forcing in the affiliate ID.
It looks like:
http://www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi?netinfo_affmatch/1/Affiliate_Mistakes
In this example the affiliate ID is netinfo.
This is important because when a visitor clicks through a Clickbank affiliate URL, a cookie is placed on their computer. If they like what they see and click on the generic order link that most merchants use, they are sent to an order page on Clickbank that checks for the existence of this cookie and then inserts the affiliate ID into the order page.
The problem again being that if that cookie didn’t get written in the first place the affiliate is cut out again. Keep in mind that now that IE 6 is in widespread use, this is a greater problem than most affiliates realize."
If you like the sound of what Chuck’s doing (or just want to find out more about what’s possible), then there is now a simple software package that will enable you to run a very professional affiliate scheme using only Clickbank.
To read our full recent review, as published in our newsletter, click here.
You may also be interested in that my recently published guide on how to set up an ebook sales site includes information on both gaining plenty of new affiliates and provides my own affiliate training course which I wrote and continue to use to this day.
Owners of the ebook are welcome to "steal" the complete course to help train and motivate their own affiliates.
It’s a great read at a price anyone can afford – click here to find out more.