Hi Stella - I don’t know which country you are located in, but you might wish to try opening an an account with PayDotCom if Clickbank won’t let you join their network. Ros

Now, I know you mentioned that all we really need to do is copy & paste, but I always seem to make things much more difficult than that. I probably wouldn’t have written this letter, except that in a recent letter that person mentioned he/she was denied by google due to pop-ups, which you mentioned is their policy, and because your site has pop-ups. Would you refer me to the portion of your book that addresses that? Noboby, nobody can possibly be slower at this than I am.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
Larry

Hi Larry,

Cheers,
Ros

Hi James - I honestly don’t know why they do that. Ros

I see a lot of people who seem to think any email practice they personally disagree with is a violation of CAN-SPAM, and that’s simply not necessarily true.

Hi Chris - Clickbank is specific about how those addresses are not to be used and I think that’s backed up pretty well by the following section of the The CAN-SPAM Act:

Cheers,
Ros

Hello Syed – I wish I had that much ‘pull’ with Clickbank! Have you looked at StormPay and PayDotCom? Ros

Hi Ben – Actually, Clickbank requires that you contact the merchant first when making a refund request. However, if you look above, you will see that I agree that in this case Clickbank is considered the vendor — and why. Ros

Having worked at a free newspaper 15+ years, we consider our free readers our customers, yet we do not have contact info on all of our readers. We also consider our online readers our customers. (build your list… sell to the list… don’t you teach that? You clearly practice that. ) Thus, if I have a reader of my published material who purchases from you, I should have the right to contact that reader. It seems that part of the relationship with ClickBank _IS_ clearly to share that readership/purchaser contact info and the affiliate has a right to contact that person.

Should we determine if a client comes directly from an AdWord campaign or a genuine “content driven source”? When does content become too small to be not considered a valuable referral?

I presume that your statement simply means that YOU ALSO reserve the right to contact someone buying your goods. I presume that someone working as a sales person as an independent contractor for click bank would have the right to contact the clickbank customers in a responsible way. (Image a sales person (may are independent contractors) who brings a buyer into a “non-big box” computer store and an in-house person helps them gather their specific items and make payment. Would it be a good idea for the store owner to say, “OK sales person, never contact this client again, they are now our customer. Thanks for the assist, don’t let the door hit you in the a**.”

Great question!
/kt

Hi Kim - If a subscriber on your list buys a merchant’s product, they are still on your list – so of course you have the right to contact them. I didn’t / wouldn’t suggest otherwise. – Ros

David wrote:

“They have checked my links repeatedly, assured me that both themselves (ClickBank) and the Merchant are genuine traders, can see no reason whey I am making no sales, are very sorry, and wonder can they help me in some other way. If Sales had dropped or were periodic, I would suspect trade conditions but a sudden complete cut-off makes me thing that I am being denied commissions which statistically I must have made.”

“I suspect they are a fraud (if they were genuine they would find the fault). I would very much appreciate any help you could offer on this unfortunate situation which means that I can trade NO ClickBank products.”

In testing some of the affiliate links on my own website, I would click the purchase button and find, horror of horrors, that “affiliate=none”.

I did some research and found that others were complaining that they were losing commissions and were having the same problem.

If I used Mozilla Firefox, my affiliate id would show up. In IE7, it didn’t. I suspect upgrading to IE7 enhances security and privacy (including the blocking of cookies that might give you credit for commissions).

I also found out that Spybot Search and Destroy was reporting Clickbank as a threat.

Here is what Clickbank has to say about this:

“Hoplink tracking
2007-02-06 –
We have received reports of affiliates’ hoplinks not being tracked on sales, and affiliates not receiving credit for sales they have promoted. We are continuing to investigate these reports, but our findings to-date point to customers that have Spybot Search & Destroy, with ?Immunize? enabled on their computers.

While we are making every effort to understand and address these reports, in looking at our sales statistics, we find that affiliate-driven sales as a percentage of total sales has been increasing from the beginning of 2006, and that rate of increase has remained steady.

We are also researching alternative methods to improve tracking of affiliate identification.”

I went to the trouble of tweaking my machine to overcome this problem. However, why should your customers spend hours trying to do the same just so you can get a commission? Most users won’t even be aware that there is a problem.

Regards,

Stephen

Hey Stephen - Obviously they wouldn’t go to that trouble. I however installed IE7 when it first came out, checked to make sure my links were being tracked and saw absolutely no problem. Moreover, there has been no variation in my usual earnings. How else to explain that some are having a problem and others are not? I don’t know. Perhaps those folks are setting parameters for increased security? – Ros

Thank you.

Hi Franck – My pleasure.

I would just like to correct my earlier comment:

‘That is why you and I put this notice on our websites: “2CheckOut.com Inc. (Ohio, USA) is an authorized retailer for goods and services provided by Such-and-Such Company Inc.” ‘

Of course, that is NOT the notice you would put with your Clickbank products. DUH!

However, 2Checkout.com is similar to clickbank.com in that they both take the position that they are the retailer of your products.

This results in the same tax administration advantages.

Regards,
Stephen