What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is a neat system that helps many internet marketers sell their information products.

It works by acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers so that someone wishing to purchase a downloadable product such as an ebook, can buy it via Clickbank and Clickbank will then process the payment automatically and, once the payment has been made, it directs the buyer automatically to the webpage where they can download the book from.

That's all fairly basic stuff online.

Where it gets clever is that it also allows other people to sell an author's products via affiliate links. As a publisher/author I can instruct Clickbank to pay affiliates a percentage of the sale price of my book. Typically this is 40% or more although I generally pay out 50%.

Clickbank then makes it really easy for someone to become my affiliate - they just need to get themselves a clickbank ID, visit the publisher's affiliate info page, enter their ID and get an affiliate link back.

Armed with this link, the affiliate can then promote the product as much or as little as he/she wants and the publisher doesn't even need to know who they are!

When it comes to processing payments, Clickbank automatically splits the commission element and adds up your total sales every fortnight and sends you the money. This money can be a combination of your own product sales and your affiliate sales. In fact you don't need to have your own product to use Clickbank at all and it is free to join as an affiliate although you do have to pay a one-off fee and commission charges as a publisher.

One other feature of Clickbank which is very important is that it processes refunds safely and efficiently which allows book publishers to offer their customers a money-back guarantee. In general, the stronger your guarantee, the more you will sell so this works for both publishers and purchasers alike.

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