Tag: Clickbank
Plimus Bans Internet Marketing Products (Because of $37 Clickbank-Style Offers)
Plimus (the payment processor) has now officially banned internet marketing products:
Valued Plimus Affiliate,
We wanted to advise you we are no longer supporting Internet Marketing (IM) and Business Operations (Biz-Ops) products, for which our records show you are an affiliate. This does not affect any previous sales referrals you are due payment for. Payouts of those will proceed without issue. Since the product is no longer offered on Plimus there will be no future commissions to be earned.
Thank you for marketing one of our vendor products. We hope you will go to the Plimus Marketplace and find new products for you to promote and earn commission on. If there is something we can do to assist please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
The Plimus Team
I'm actually surprised it took this long. If you haven't heard of Plimus, here's what happened. You may have seen "blind offer" sales letters... the ones that say: you don't deserve to be on this page, make money from home, earn a residual income, run this software and make money.
"You're 6 clicks away from making a million dollars."
"Don't trust the gurus, they lie to you,
by the way I am a guru, you should trust me."
"If you want 6 times as much money just run the software 6 times."
Most of this "traffic" and "marketing" software was usually something simple like a domain name finder, email harvester, blog comment spammer, bulk page generator or something similar... not even worth $10.
The sales letter hyped up the "results" of the product showing you tons of earnings screenshots... telling you this ISN'T AdSense, this ISN'T SEO, this ISN'T product creation... buy here to find out what it is.
As you can imagine the refund rate on this was pretty high. Payment processors like Clickbank can tolerate a pretty high refund rate but this was even too much for them.
What happened: these products were banned from Clickbank they all moved to Plimus... and now they're banned from Plimus.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a small percentage of marketers "ruining it for the rest of us" ... it was bound to happen eventually, just like:
- "Biz opps" and "multilevel marketing" are banned from PayPal
- "Internet marketing" mailing lists are banned from MailChimp
- "Non-typical results" are banned according to the FTC
- "Make money online" products were originally banned from Facebook Ads
- "Work from home" videos are recently being banned from YouTube
- "Get rich quick" products are banned from Google AdWords
- "Social media" products are banned from Clickbank
- "Public domain" (non-unique) content was recently banned from Amazon Kindle
The moral of the story is: tell me exactly what your offer is and be very careful about relying on results and income claims to make your sale.
If you're selling software, I just want to see screenshots. If you're selling information, I just want to know what the information is. And most importantly (this was huge back when AdSense courses were coming out)... if your system makes $10,000 per day... why is it only $37???
What do you think about all this?
What Membership Software Do You Use?
Do you run a membership site?
What software, plugins, and payment processors do you use for it?
I just setup a real recurring membership site. No more of this password protected blog stuff. I used aMember and WordPress, with Clickbank as the payment processor.
I was really surprised how many plugins are available for this stuff now. Even a year or two ago, you had to modify code and do custom scripting... "duct taping" the scripts together. Now you just install some plugins.
Pretty freaking cool!
I used a blog because I wanted to stockpile a bunch of content up. aMember has the most support (I'm a member of Membership Academy so that helps.)
And Clickbank? If you read my Membership Sites on Crack report, you'd know why I chose Clickbank. Affiliates (60% commission on a recurring product) plus the escape plan. If I can get enough content piled into that membership site so that I have a year's worth of content in advance, you better believe I'm selling it off.
Do you run a membership site? What software do you use to run it? Membergate, aMember, Visiongate? What processor... PayPal, Authorize.net, Clickbank, PayDotCom, 1ShoppingCart? How do you like it?
Please, show off the sales letter to your membership site as well since those can be tricky...
Clickbank vs. PayDotCom
Just to give you an update on the Clickbank situation, I've decided to stay with them.
Apparently, they WILL approve list building related products on a case-by-case basis (as a commenter to the last post mentioned), which was good to hear considering The Rich Jerk, Butterfly Marketing Reports, ListMail Pro, etc. were all approved.
Heck, one of the resale rights buyers to WordPress on Crack already has my exact product and same exact sales letter already listed on Clickbank.
Here's how to get your list building related product approved on Clickbank:
1. Make sure the product ONLY mentions responsible, double opt-in, CAN-SPAM compliant list building tactics. I would definitely stay away from gray areas like buying and selling leads, tell-a-friend scripts, and co-registration.
2. Explain to Clickbank that the product does go into list building, but only for double opt-in CAN-SPAM compliant purposes. You can do this in the "extra notes" section.
That's all there is to it.
Now like I said... I'm staying with Clickbank. I will still use PayPal for my non-affiliate sales (95% of my income) because my refund rate with PayPal is about 1% and my refund rate with Clickbank is 7.5%.
Dean's comment in the previous post said it best...
After reading the many thoughful posts it does seem that straddling CB and PDC makes the most sense.
Use 'em both but steer the big money to PDC. Use CB to attract new affiliates.
Mike Filsaime made a GREAT point that his service gets 1,000 new signups per day and he is now BEATING Clickbank.com in his Alexa ranking.
Why Don't I Roll All My PayPal Buttons Over to PayDotCom?
Two reasons... one, PayDotCom adds an extra page people have to click through. They click your order button, then are sent to PayDotCom, then have to click on ANOTHER button to pay through PayPal. Clickbank also has a 2-step order page and that's always going to hurt conversion rates no matter what.
The next reason: Someone pointed out that when someone buys from you using PayDotCom, they get added to Mike Filsaime's list corrected: that information is stored on Mike's server somewhere.
A comment from the previous post:
My wariness about using PDC is that mike filasmie, who is technically the competition of many of us, would become our provider of services...
enabling him to:
know what product sell best
how many we sell
the NAMES and EMAILS of all customers...Robert, is that a reason that would keep you away? clickbank, or other paykment processors, are not a competitor to you in the way PDCs owners are...
(I'm not accusing mike filsaime of using others information, just noting that the fact he COULD makes me uncomfortable.)
Your List is Your Baby... I don't want to send all my buyers onto his mailing list so he can outsell me.
I will put some products on PayDotCom eventually, but I want to get everything on Clickbank first. At the moment, only 40 of my products are available on Clickbank.
The moral of the story: get yourself setup with the simplest checkout process possible (I like PayPal) then use "other" processors like Clickbank and PayDotCom to increase sales... use those services as funnels instead of your primary payment processors.
I'll say that again...
Use Clickbank and PayDotCom to Attract Affiliates.
Don't Depend on Them For Survival.
I have a script called Clickbank Switch that will show one button if Clickbank affiliates come your way, and another if non-affiliates stop by, but you don't even need a script for that.
You can setup separate pages like http://www.example.com/paydotcom and http://www.example.com/clickbank then put a PayDotCom button on your "paydotcom" page, and send the PayDotCom traffic that way.
When you join PayDotCom you can get your product listed on Filsaime's marketing product review site, make your link go viral using Butterfly Reports, and get listed on PayDotCom's marketplace.
I have been with Clickbank since 2000 and it makes more sense to stick with what works and makes money, than to tear everything down and STOP making money, just to spend more time building it back up.
Keep it simple!
For you skimmers out there, here is what Clickbank will and won't approve when it comes to those list building grey areas.
- What if I were to explain co-registation, would that get approved? No.
- Would a product that mentions buying double opt-in leads get approved? No.
- Would a product that talks about tell-a-friend get approved? No.
- Would a product that talks about selling e-mail leads get approved? No.
- Can I mention double opt-in? Yes!
- Can I mention single opt-in? Yes!
There you have it. The easy way to get a list building product approved on Clickbank: explain your product only deals with CAN-SPAM compliant e-mail marketing practices. Here's the verbage I used:
This product mentions RESPONSIBLE list building, email marketing through double-opt-in email lists and CAN-SPAM compliant methods.
Was I right in choosing to stay with PayPal and Clickbank? (And in the future, PayDotCom?) Please comment below and tell me if I'm a total idiot or a freaking genius.
Clickbank Allows You to Sell Physical Products
The other day I was on Clickbank requesting a price increase for my account. (So I can charge more for products.) Guess what? I discovered how you can sell physical products with Clickbank!
As you might know, Clickbank is a payment processor that you can use to handle payments. As far as I am concerned, PayPal is #1 and Clickbank #2. With PayPal you get paid instantly, but with Clickbank, you have access to 100,000+ affiliates to promote your stuff.
Clickbank handles all the affiliate payments and everything, and heck -- they even added support for recurring billing this year (membership sites) and an IPN so you can integrate it with a script.
The only problem? Clickbank only wants you to sell digital products. This is because they have a pretty buyer-centric refund policy and don't want to be like PayPal where it is a big issue to get the physical product back.
So with Clickbank you can have a membership site with affiliates, but no physical product delivery -- like Jim Edwards did with The Net Reporter. ($77 per month and in addition to access to the membership site, he mailed you a physical DVD video every month.)
Here's the loophole for selling physical products with Clickbank... I noticed the following in Clickbank's terms of service:
You may also offer shipped delivery of printed media (books, CD's, and DVD's) as a courtesy to qualified customers (e.g., US and Canada only), provided the shipped media is clearly complementary and not essential to the operation of the originally downloaded digital product.
After having a Clickbank account for 6 years, I never noticed that. What you have to do is provide your members with a hybrid delivery. (Coined by John Reese.) When someone buys this physical product from you, provide 100% of the content in downloadable form -- for instant gratification -- then ship the physical materials as bonuses, for added value.
That's what you should be doing with physical products in the first place and that's what I recommended to Steven Schwartzman when he was disappointed about the Five Minute Articles WSO. Sales picked up after he added the hybrid product delivery.
I am really resisting the push into physical products. I am looking at a gigantic map of how my upsells connect to one another (drawn in Visio). There are about 60 products in that map... not all of them are connected.
I showed that map to Steven Schwartzman and this is what he had to say:
In regards to the image...WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have nothing else to say about that except wow. It's amazing to see how many products you have when it's displayed like that. You can create a course on making those maps.
I recently recorded 4.5 hours of Camtasia PowerPoints for Software Secrets Exposed. This means now, not only do I offer the book, I also offer six 45 minute videos and six audio CDs.
The audio CDs are just the audio from the videos but it means you can burn them and listen to them in your car or whatever.
Should I have released this as a physical product?
- Maybe set the price low at $17 just for the PDF.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get just the audios at $37.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get the audios plus the videos for $47.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get the package for $97 as a set of 3 DVDs plus 6 audio CDs mailed to them.
There are some really good fulfillment services like SwiftCD where all the shipping info is grabbed from PayPal, but yet another drawback is getting my customers on my follow-up list as well for updates.
Could you please comment below and let me know if I should have released this update as a physical product? Have you yourself released a physical product?
Is it even worth the hassle dealing with the shipping problems and refunds... especially since with Clickbank, you can't get those physical items back?
