Sell Multiple Products Through a Single ClickBank Account

A ClickBank merchant account allows you to define and sell up to 50 separate products. If you have more than one product in your range, it makes sense to sell them from a shared ClickBank account. Here are three good reasons why:

• Every active ClickBank account incurs a setup fee of $49.95. Why pay this more than once?
• Managing multiple ClickBank accounts adds unnecessarily to your administrative effort
• The combined sales of multiple products through one account will significantly boost your Marketplace ranking

Unfortunately, the architecture of the ClickBank system has, historically, not been well suited to selling multiple products from a single account, especially for merchants who use affiliates to promote their products. The problem is that, although you can define 50 products within ClickBank's account control panel, you can only specify a single landing page URL - the destination page that your affiliates will refer their prospects to.

The result is that all referrals must arrive at your site via a common page. This forces you either to present all your products on a shared sales page or to create an intermediate page, from which your visitors must click through to see the product of their choice. Neither option is ideal as they both create obstacles that will distract your prospects and seriously reduce your conversion rate.

For optimum sales effectiveness, affiliate referrals should go directly to the sales page for the product of interest. This is known as deep linking and is widely acknowledged as the best way to convert affiliate referrals into buyers. But ClickBank's lack of support for this technique is a major barrier that inhibits effective use of its growing affiliate network.

To tackle this problem, a number of pioneering merchants have developed their own techniques to work around ClickBank's shortcomings. Some of these innovations have even evolved into successful commercial software products. Most implementations rely on intercepting the inbound referral and automatically redirecting it to the relevant product page, as indicated in URL parameters passed by the referring affiliate. There are several variations on this theme, but they share a common gambit - using scripts, installed on the merchant's web server, to intercept and redirect requests.

However, the need for smoke and mirrors to fix ClickBank's limitations may soon be a relic of the past. In October 2003, ClickBank announced plans for major improvements to its hoplink system - improvements that will all but eliminate the need for workarounds or enhancement products.

The new architecture - known as the enhanced hoplink system - employs a more flexible referral URL format, in which affiliates are able to specify the numeric code of the product they are referring their prospects to. Using this code, ClickBank's server will look up the corresponding sales page URL and send referrals directly to it, handling cookie-tracking and other admin chores in the normal manner.

The main attraction of the enhanced hoplink system is its simplicity of implementation and maintenance. Whereas add-on products require at least a moderate understanding of script installation and configuration, the hoplink system is maintained entirely via the ClickBank account control panel. This means that a merchant selling multiple products (even across multiple web domains) can expose them for affiliate deep linking, simply by configuring the relevant sales page URLs in his account.

At the time of writing, ClickBank has published the format of the enhanced hoplink URL, but has not completed the database and control panel changes that will allow the configuration of multiple landing pages. So, although we can visualize the new architecture and dream of the benefits it will deliver, we remain in eager anticipation of its release.

Copyright © Tim Coulter. All rights reserved.

Tim Coulter is a consultant and software developer who helps netpreneurs to harness marketing technologies.

He is also the author of the ultimate ClickBank tutorial & reference manual
ClickBank - The Definitive Guide

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Success with ClickBank

Choosing the right price for your digital products is one of the most critical, yet difficult, aspects of your business strategy.

Most merchants understand that over-valuing a product kills sales. It is also fairly well understood that under-pricing cuts the unit revenue without any guarantee of a significant gain in sales volume. But few people are aware of a third (but equally important) pricing observation; that compromise pricing can be as harmful as either of the other two blunders.

To understand why this is the case, we need to examine the principles that lie behind effective pricing strategy. In general, merchants adopt one of two key philosophies when they price a product. They either set the price at a low level (which produces a low margin but high sales volume), or they choose a high price level (which trades off volume in order to gain margin).

These two approaches are known respectively as "penetration pricing" and "pricing for profit." The former strategy is typically used by new competitors in a market, or by existing retailers that need to quickly establish a position of dominance after a product launch. The latter technique is favored by established businesses with mature products, where the objective is to earn the maximum profit yield from an existing dominant market position.

It is clear that, whether the strategy is to price low or high, going too far in either direction can be self-defeating. But mid-way pricing is equally ineffective, as it compromises both strategies; it unnecessarily discounts the product without doing so sufficiently to generate a significant improvement in volume.

As a publisher of digital merchandise, you are at a distinct advantage over traditional merchants, since there are no marginal costs associated with your business. Regardless of how low you choose to price your product, you are still guaranteed to show a gross profit on every sale. In contrast, a merchant of physical goods has real fulfillment costs (product manufacturing, damaged and unsold inventory, storage, shipping and handling) that impose a fixed lower price limit below which each sale represents a loss. This advantage affords you great flexibility in your pricing, but even if you use this flexibility to pursue a penetration pricing strategy, you should still be aware of the risk of counter-productive price-cutting.

Some ClickBank merchants use an experimental approach to pricing. Their aim is to establish the most profitable price through trial an error. Although this is understandable, even logical, it can be a customer-relations nightmare. You should think carefully before over-pricing a product and subsequently being forced to reduce the price in order to stimulate demand. Nobody likes to return to a website and see that a product they already purchased is now being offered at a lower price.

The opposite approach is to steadily increase prices from a low level, and is usually less of a cause for concern. Some merchants launch their products with a deliberately low introductory price - a benefit that they emphasize in their sales pitch. The time-limited, or volume-limited, nature of this technique can be a powerful incentive to buy, and it also allows the merchant a trial period in which to observe sales behavior before setting a definitive price to meet his longer-term strategic objectives.

Copyright © Tim Coulter. All rights reserved.

Tim Coulter is a consultant and software developer who helps netpreneurs to harness marketing technologies.

He is also the author of the ultimate ClickBank tutorial & reference manual
ClickBank - The Definitive Guide

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