Clickbank Check Payment Arrives
May 21st, 2008Yesterday I received a pleasant surprise in the mail when this check arrived from Clickbank. I had not logged into my account for a while to look at the actual numbers, but it seems that I managed to make enough sales to reach the default $100 minimum threshold without even realizing it.
To get a close-up view of the check, simply click on the image. Clickbank’s current check printing font is quite small, making it difficult for me to display a properly resized image that is easily legible. Fortunately, the thumbnail feature will allow you to view the image in its original full size without requiring me to display the whole thing on the home page. This is handy for keeping the overall “weight” of web pages relatively light and reducing load times.
After I received the payment, I logged into my account so that I could find out where the sales had been made. I was pleased to see that most of the sales were coming from my pages on bum marketing techniques and how to fix the computer CPU speed. This confirms that my overall strategy of combining bum marketing methods with targeted long tail SEO is actually working, even with Karlonia playing the role of the article directory. Now I just need to find a way to scale it up so that Karlonia will finally have a respectable income and I won’t have to worry about moving to a place like Malawi and subsisting on nsima just to be able to afford basic living expenses.
One of the biggest challenges with using this strategy is that in order for the traffic to actually convert into sales, the article page needs to provide information that helps the visitors solve a real problem that they are struggling with, and then suggest a product that can help them with the solution. I have found that it is not enough to just do the SEO and throw in an affiliate link or two as an afterthought. The product(s) that are linked to from the page must match up exactly with whatever the visitors are searching for as a solution to their problems. Otherwise the page will receive traffic but will not convert.
I still have many pages that are receiving a reasonable amount of traffic but are not yet monetized. Most of them are keyword-targeted articles that have been moderately successful in terms of SEO, but the topics do not match up well with any available Clickbank products. Recently I have signed up with Amazon and Barnes & Noble as possible alternatives, but their commission rates are generally much lower than those found at Clickbank. They do have a much greater selection of products, however, and even a small commission is better than nothing.
Another alternative that I have discovered recently is PayDotCom. This program uses PayPal and works much like Clickbank in terms of offering a variety of digital products with relatively high commissions for affiliates. They also have the advantage of being available to people in countries like the Philippines that are still not allowed to sign up with Clickbank. Moreover, they pay bonuses for referring affiliates who either become vendors and sell their own products or purchase the account upgrade that is offered to new affiliates. After catching up on the posting, I will browse through their marketplace and see if I can find some relevant products to include on my currently unmonetized pages.
