When I logged into Clickbank this morning, I read about improvements that ClickBank is making to it’s Marketplace this month. The primary goal is to make it easier for affiliates to find products to promote.
The improved Marketplace uses completely new categories and subcategories, which are more specific and descriptive. We have attempted to categorize your site based on information in your account and on your HopLink Target URL page.
All clients are limited to one category and subcategory.
Well hallelujah!
For those affiliates who were tired of finding the same product listed in every category under the sun, this is a massive improvement.
Likewise, the changes will be beneficial to Clickbank merchants who before had their products unnecessarily pushed ‘down the list’ by other merchants who placed their products in irrelevant categories.
For example, there’s actually an Affiliate Marketing category now, under ‘Ebusiness’. Here’s the full list of eBusiness categories.
E-business & E-marketing
* Affiliate Marketing
* Article Marketing
* Auctions
* Banners
* Blog Marketing
* Classified Advertising
* Consulting
* Copywriting
* Domains
* E-commerce Operations
* E-zine Strategies
* Email Marketing
* General
* Market Research
* Marketing
* Niche Marketing
* Paid Surveys
* Pay Per Click Advertising
* Promotion
* SEM & SEO
* Social Media Marketing
* Submitters
* Video Marketing
You can see the full list of categories here.
Are you as thrilled about these improvements as I am? Yes, no, why?
About Rosalind Gardner
I like the fact that they’re making changes, and for the most part, the changes look good. But there are some flaws.
For example, there’s a “Software” category under “Computers/Internet”, and also a “Software & Services” top level category. So if, for example, you sell SEO software, should you put it in Computers/Internet>Software”, “Software & Services>Internet Tools”, or perhaps “E-business & E-marketing>SEM & SEO”?
No matter which you choose, you’ll miss people who go looking in one of the other categories. I wonder whether it’d be better to choose the category with better-selling products, knowing that you’ll be lower in the list; or the category that’s easier to dominate, but which might get less traffic…maybe!
Creating taxonomies isn’t easy!
I think the change will be good for all involved. The buyers… easier to find things.
The honest marketers… it will keep the marketers putting their products in every category a little more honest.
I think the change will help us all.
Thanks Rosalind…
Joe marsh
‘Google First page Forumla’
All I can say is it’s about time and thank goodness. Appreciate the heads up Ros, I haven’t even looked for anything on there lately. This will definitely help the vendors and the customers.
Generally a good idea but, like so many other sites, why don’t they realise that Worldwide is a valid travel category?
Yes, I like the latest add-ons, particularly the blog updates / design on their official site. Although I’d love to see CB add 2-tier tracking and more serious products
It’s about time. Timing couldn’t couldn’t be better for me.
Good article about the changes. I think the changes will be good – provided it doesn’t get messy against – ClickBank need to make sure stuff that if a vendor radically revises their site/product, it gets moved to the correct category, not stuck in the old and now incorrect category. It would also help if they made definitions for what each category is supposed to say – you might say it’s obvious, but there are a lot of products that could find in a dozen categories, and you want to make sure everybody works consistently to the same categorization scheme.
One important change, is a lot of scripts which read the old marketplace don’t work with the new one – I’ve just spent the last few days updating our company’s PHP marketplace script, CBRocket, (URL in my link) for this.
One reason this was necessary is that while ClickBank do offer a data-feed for scripts (which avoids the problem), it’s in the form of a ZIP, which a lot people can’t *automatically* read from PHP scripts. If you have any influence with ClickBank, please encourage them to offer the new marketplace data-feed in both and ZIPped and unzipped forms!