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Thursday, April 10, 2008

Free ClickBank Ads for All




ClickBank is a great resource for finding products to promote and profit from. But it's really designed for putting afiliates (those who will promote the products) in touch with products that they can promote. As a result it's intended for those who aggressively market products singly. But ClickBank is also a great source of income, with typical affiliate payments per product sold ranging from $20 to $100! What if you want to tap into this bounty without having to go through each product and write sales scripts for them.

For anyone with the time and patience, ClickBank produce an XML feed every evening (called the ClickBank products feed) and this contains information about all the products in the marketplace. You could download this feed, parse it into a database and then produce a ads based on the result.

One problem with this is that ClickBank's descriptions are indended, in general, to show how good a product is for an affiliate to promote. They are not promotional tools in and of themelves. For any product you producted to be effective you would have to update the title and the descriptions to be better at selling the product.

This is a lot of work, especially when you would need to create Ads or RSS feeds on top of the database. Now that's a lot of programming work.

Fortunately, several sites have already done the hard work for you. The best of these provide AdSense-lik contextual ads (for example see Celtnet's AdSense-like ClickBank Ads). Such ads look exactly like ClickBank's ads and you can typically change the style, chose which section of ClickBank to promote and chose the style so that it fits in with your site's overall context.

One problem of such ads is that they cannot be displayed alongside Google's AdSense ads because this conravenes Google's TOS (Terms of Service). [For more information on this issue see: Lami Reviews' Information on ClickBank Ads].

The only way you can mix AdSense ads with ClickBank ads at the moment is to integrate an RSS feed of ClickBank products, such that available at: ClickBank RSS Ads into your website. As RSS feeds count as news aggregation (no matter what's displayed) this falls within Google's TOS so this is OK and well within the rules. It's even quite easy to do this as all you need to do is to add the RSS feed to one of the many RSS to JavaScript converters on the web and then copy the JavaScript code into your own website (just do a web search for 'RSS to Javascript' and you'll get a whole range of results back).

One very recent innovation is the use of Images in AdSense-like ads, but based around ClickBank code. Curently these are only provided by the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace (in their ClickBank Image-based ads product where the ads are free for anyone to use and deploy) but it probably won't be long before other vendors also begin to produce similar ad formats. After all the use of images in Ads seems to be the way that Google, themselves are going.

Why are such ads worth considering? Well, generally the barrier to putting these ads on your site is very low. Also, if you have enough traffic and enough ad clicks hey can be very lucrative. However, these ads are what's termed PPA (pay per action — you only get paid when someone buys something, whereas Google ads are PPC (pay per click). But ads based on ClickBank products give you all the usual affiliate earnings potential of promoting ClickBank products by standard meansh. This is basically $20 to $100 per purchase made through these ads. Not something to be sniffed at.

For more information, see the review at How to Use ClickBank to Monetize your Site.

So, should you be considering these ads for your site, blog or web page? I will leave that qustion up to you. Try them out, do your due diligence and find out what works best for your site.

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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Improved ClickBank Contextual Ads for your Site



Anyone following this blog and other postings I've been making both here and on my website will know that I've been working for about 3 months on creating ClickBank based ads that are free for everyone to use. Well, following a few comments about my ads and some snide remarks I've been busy completely re-designing them.

If this is news to you, then let me explain. ClickBank is the web's largest collection of electronic products ready for immediate download. Each product is backed by ClickBank's 56-day money-back guarantee. If you sign-up to ClickBank and become an affiliate you will make between $20 and $100 on every product sold through your affiliate ID. Unfortunately, however, ClickBank is designed for putting authors (those who write the products) in contact with affiliates (those who market the products). As a result ClickBank products are geared towards gaining affiliates rather than selling products.

This was the problem I had, so I decided to do something about it. ClickBank makes a data feed available of all their products. I grab this every weekend and load it into a database. I then create images for each product website and then change the affiliate-based product titles and descriptions to descriptions that will sell the product. All this being done by hand. The result is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace where you can view and search for any product in the ClickBank marketplace based on my new descriptions.

Once this was done I realized that I had a very powerful tool on my hands. A little work and I could offer websites ads, just like Google AdSense ads but based on ClickBank products. This let to my creation of the ClickBank Ads generation page. Here you can get contextual ads, just like Google's, RSS feeds, image-based ads and ClickBank based search scripts all free for everyone to use. The big thing here were the Clickbank contextual ads. The code worked well, but the ads were a little amateurish when they first came out. I was busy refining the selection options so you could display he ads exactly how you wanted and with any option of ClickBank search products you wanted. But the ads themselves were a bit flaky.

That was my downfall initially. So, I've spent the past two days completely writing the Ad code. They are now much more professional and you can get them to look almost exactly like AdSense ad units if you wish. To prove this I've put up a demonstration web page at Celtnet Breads Page. Just have a look at the ads on the page. No, they're not Google AdSense ads, they're CentnetCBAds based on ClickBank products. On the lower left you'll also see how I've made ad units out of an RSS fee of ClickBank products (the code to do this will be available soon, but you can create your own ClickBank products RSS feed for free now.

As you can see the ad units I'm providing are now very professional in appearance and you get a huge range of sizes and possible appearance so you can either blend them completely to your website or you can make them totally stand out. What's more you get all these ad units for free. All you need to do is to sign-up to get a free ClickBank affiliate ID at ClickBank. Then you just go to my ClickBank Ads generation page and start creating the ads for your site.

What do I get out of it? You may ask. Well, you get the ads completely free. But for the work I've put into creating these ads I randomly assign my own ClickBank id to 8% of the ads shown on your site. If someone buys something from one of these ads I get the money. But the other 92% of all IDs go to you! Any money I make goes to my 'Help Stefan' charity campaign rather than to me so it helps the children of Liberian refugees in Senegal get an education. As a result you can monetize your website with ClickBank ads completely free whilst also knowing that you're aiding a worthwhile cause.

In my hands, on high-traffic web pages I make twice as much on those pages from ClickBank sales as I do from the whole of the rest of my site with AdSense. Now that can't be bad. So, why not check out my ClickBank Ads today and grab yourself a piece of the action?!

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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Celtnet ClickBank Ads Expanded



I know that this blog has been quiet for a while now. Partly that's because I've been working had on the ClickBank part of my site. And now it's an awesome hand-crafted site with search tools, hand-annotated product descriptions, product images, search tools (which you can use on your own sites) as well as ad generation tools so you can get contextual AdSense-like Ads based on ClickBank products. The newest tool being an ad generator that embeds images along with the contextual ads. This is a real killer ad system that dramatically increases click-throughs and is available nowhere else... I now have over 1400 ad units actively being used and 250 RSS feeds in use, and that's only after 10 weeks of the system being live! Why not grab your copy of these ads today...

I've also been away visiting my wife in Senegal and presenting the Liberian community in Dakar with the money I've made from various parts of my Celtnet site as part of my Help Stefan Charity Campaign. Enough money having been gained to give two of the Liberian refugee children an education for 2008. But for this year I'm setting myself a much more challenging target: and that is to make a minimum of $10 000 for the first half of 2008 (and even more in the second half).

As a result of this I've been significantly beefing-up my ClickBank Marketplace. The site is updated every weekend now with the very latest ClickBank marketplace feed. As a result, the products and rankings in the system are guaranteed of being up-to-date. Even better, all products are instantly associated with an image of the product website and within a few days the products gain a human-edited product description. As a result the default product description from ClickBank, which is invariably affiliate-centric (saying how good the product is for Affiliates to promote). The new descriptions are all intended to describe the product and to sell it. As a result the ClickBank Marketplace search functionality is much better than ClickBank's own, especially if you're looking for a product to promote. This is why I've made the search code that drives the Celtnet ClickBank Search System available to anyone, so you can put it on your own site. You populate with your own ClickBank nickname so any sales made are credited to you.

But the real 'big thing' here are the AdSense-like contextual ads that you can create on this site. The ClickBank AdSense-like ads page allows you to generate AdSense-like contextual ads for ClickBank products. Just like adsense you can define the size and appearance of the ads. You can also define the section of ClickBank products you want your ads from, as well as defining your own keywords to return and products you need. Once you've defined your ads, a simple click of a button will produce the ad for you. You get to see an example of the ad you've created as well as getting a single line of code that you just copy and paste into your own website (exactly the same way that Google's AdSense works).

But why should you use these ads? Well, the product information is written by hand and it seeks to sell the product. The code you get links directly to the database I've created so each time the ClickBank product feed is updated your products are automatically updated as well. The script is also completely dynamic so that on each page refresh you get a completely new set of ad, again just like AdSense. Unlike AdSense, however, you only get paid when someone buys a product through you link (you define your ClickBank nickname when you create your ads sets.

The newest 'killer app' in my suite of tools is a system for creating ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images... Here you define your ad block size and the colour scheme, but instead of getting plain text ads you also get an embedded image of the product website. It's been shown that images draw the eyes and that images also increase click-thorughs several fold. So these really could be the killer ad system for your website. Like all my other tools, it's completely free to employ and deploy and the script is dynamic so he ads change and rotate on each refresh.

To learn more about these ad systems, please go to my ClickBank Ads Generator page. There you will also learn about how you can generate ClickBank RSS feed ads so that you can mix ClickBank ads with AdSense ads or use ClickBank ads in blogs and other aggregators.

Whilst I've been away, I've been running some experiments in terms of replacing regular AdSense ads with my own ClickBank ads and mixing AdSense ads with ClickBank product RSS feeds. The results of these experiments (so far anyway) are detailed in my January 23rd eZine and it makes for very interesting reading.

But what's in it for me? I hear the cynical asking. Well, in fact, there's not that much in this for me at all. Your ClickBank 'nickname' (basically your ClickBank affiliate ID, which you can get here, free) is entered into my products so any sales made are credited to your account, rather than mine. However, what I do is that I randomly assign 8% (and not 15% or 20% like all my competitors) of all products delivered with my ClickBank ID. Any sales made with this ID are credited to my account and any proceeds go directly to fund the 'Help Stefan Charity Campaign' described above. So, not only are you getting some of the best ClickBank ad tools currently around you're also helping to support a worthwhile charity. And whilst that support continues to come in it gives me an incentive to keep updating and improving the tools that I provide for you.

Together we can become richer, so why not have a look at my tools today to see how they can improve your bottom line. Unlike other marketers and other systems you don't have to sign-up to anything to use my tools, I don't care how big or small your website is an you can use as many different ad unit sizes as you like on your pages. I believe that tools like the ones I'm providing should be made available as widely as possible and should be provided to everyone, regardless of who they are and where their site is. But, if you do find the tools useful a link back to http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php would be appreciated!

To your continued marketing success...

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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Big ClickBank Secret



If you visit this week's release of my Celtnet WebInfo eZine then you'll see that it's dedicated to a single product that I've produced. If you're a web marketer or even if you just run a website or a Blog then this is probably the most important annuncement that you'll hear this year (maybe even next year).

ClickBank is a source of literally thousands of electronic products for sale. All are available for instant download and are backed by ClickBank's 8-week money-back guarantee. As most products sell for $30 and affiliate payments average at 55% this could be a lucrative source of income for anyone with a website. However, the barrier to anyone actually being able to make an income from ClickBank is absolutely huge. Clickbank itself operates as a means of putting vendors and potential affiliates together in one place. As such the information provided by ClickBank is affiliate-centric rather than sales centric. This is a real problem as you simply can't take ClickBank's data feed and produce useful product information from it. The only way to do this is to place all ClickBank's information in a database and then to supplement this with product information either produced by screen scrapes or by actually visiting every vendor site and writing the descriptions by hand.

In my ClickBank Marketplace this is precisely what I did. The products there have images crafted by hand and descriptions crafted by hand. This is a long and hard job, but once the information is in the database it's simply a matter of updating. Now I had what was probably the best ClickBank search system on the web. Which was great, for me. But what if I could provide that functionality for everyone?

This led me to produce my Free ClickBank Search Code page which allows anyone with a ClickBank nickname (which you can get free free by following this link to deploy the search form on their website or blog. Anyone making a search is re-directed to my marketplace site, but all links and products shown get your ClickBank nickname in them. This means that you get the affiliate commission for any sale made.

This was good and it was a step towards achieving what I wanted. But it wasn't everything I wanted to achieve. Possibly the best marketing system out there at the moment is Google's AdSense network which provides contextual ads to a website. What if I could deliver something similar for Clickbank? After all AdSense pays tens of cents and ClickBank could potentially pay tens of dollars. A fair amount of work led to the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator page Basically it's a form where you enter your ClickBank nickname then you select an ad size and style, pick a ClickBank category for your ads (or use your own keywords) then chose the colour for your ads. Once this is done all that you need to do is to click a button and you get to see the ad you've created as well as getting the code you need to plug into your website for the ad to be displayed. All this is done automatically for you and as you provide your ClickBank nickname any sales made from the products displayed are, once again, credited to your ClickBank account. Even better as ClickBank products retain for an average of $30 any you typically get 60% of this as Affiliate Commissions this can be a lot more lucrative than Google's AdSense. The ads are created dynaically so a new set of ads will be displayed on each page refresh and they are automatically updated as my ClickBank database is updated. I'd just created an ad-generation system that anyone with a website could deploy and take the income from. The barrier to anyone making an income from the internet has just been very dramatically lowered.

This was wonderful, but what if you had free hosting or were on a Blog that did not allow such ads to be displayed, or if you didn't want to queer the pitch with Google by displaying any other contextual ad system on your web pages. Well, there was a solution: ClickBank RSS feed generator. Like the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator what you get is a form that allows you to input your ClickBank nickname and to chose a category or sub-category of ClickBank for your feed (you can also use your own keywords). Pressing the button generates the feed and you get your personal feed URL at the bottom of the page. This is unique to the feed you just created and it allows the feed to be generated on the fly (you can create multiple feeds on different topics). Just copy the URL and paste it into your favorite aggregator in the back-end of your website or Blog. This allows you to add ClickBank ads to places where you normally couldn't so just about anyone can monetize their entire on-line presence with ClickBank.

Between these products you have the complete solution to monetizing your website with ClickBank and as you can chose the topic of your ads (you can even use your own keywords) you can customize the ads to your site and even generate multiple ads and multiple RSS feeds to suit different areas of your website. Basically this is the complete ClickBank ads system and it's all completely free to you.

Now, here's where I should tell you what's in this for me. Obviously I make all the sales from anyone coming to my website directly. But I also make 8% of all sales referred by anyone else. This is becuase I have code that automatically and randomly assigns 8% of all products shown to my ClickBank nickname. This still means that you make 92% of all sales. Remember that all the work to provide this system has been done by me and the work is done by my code and on my website. I'm only asking this small percentage (all other systems, which you have to pay to join ask for 15% or even 20%) because the money goes to supporting my 'Help Stefan Campaign' charity. I've been forced to do this as the response to this campaign has been so poor. Maybe by offering free incomes to all webmasters I can kick-start the campaign.

Remember, all you have to do is to visit my website, grab the code and deploy it on your own website. You can get further information from my ClickBank Ads page. Then visit the pages above to get the appropriate code and systems for you. The rest is entirely up to you and I hope that you will use my code for your own internet success.

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