I'm being paid by Clickbank for a product that has a recurring income. It's not a lot of money, but it consistently shows up when it's supposed to.
The reason why a lot of newbies are directed towards Clickbank first is because it's one of those affiliate networks that pay on time, and you don't have to have a website to join up with it. The other is Amazon Associates.
Other affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare, ShareASale and many other CPA networks all require you to have a website to join. However, it is always free to join any affiliate program whether private or via a network.
There's a new affiliate network that came out recently called RAPbank. It pays directly into your PayPal account for every sale that you make. You don't have to wait a week or a month to get paid like some affiliate networks.
Clickbank only sells digital products that can be downloaded. This is good for Clickbank because they don't have to pay shipping costs like Amazon.com. This allows the vendor to charge higher prices and Clickbank can take a higher transaction fee per sale.
Suppose a vendor sells an ebook for $77. He offers the affiliate 60% commission per sale. Clickbank will always take their fee of (7.5% + $1) per sale first before they divvy out the commission.
So from the $77, Clickbank will first take out there $6.78 fee. What's left over is $70.22. You as the affiliate get a commission of 60% or $42.13. The vendor gets the rest. Don't worry about the vendor losing money. With all the affiliates marketing for him, he doesn't have to spend a dime on advertising. He just sits back and collects his portion of the money.
I don't know what the payment rules are now, but Clickbank will send you a check every two weeks after you've accumulated $50. I think the first three payments you have to receive a check.
Then after that, you can go into your account and change the payment scheme to direct debit or international money wire. You can also bring down the minimum accumulation to $10, and you can choose to be paid every week if you wish. This is what I've done.
One of Clickbank's major drawbacks is their affiliate referral link or hoplink. It is the most recognizable, the most exposed and the most hijacked affiliate link out there. So it would be wise to cloak your hoplink with a link cloaker. Or go on to Go Daddy and buy a .info domain name and forward and mask your affiliate link.
Of course, if someone wanted to bypass you hoplink bad enough, they could still purchase from their own affiliate hoplink and earn a commission from the product. I think that rule needs to be changed, and that would solve a lot of problems.
That's the reason why some people complain about innaccurate tracking and receiving fewer commissions than they're supposed to.
Another way you can lose commissions is if you write a review about a product and place your affiliate link to be clicked. The person clicks through to the vendor's site and decides, "I want a second opinion. I'm going to look at another review."
So he reads another review about the same product and it convinces him to buy the product. So the buyer clicks through the new reviewer's affiliate link whose tracking cookie knocks your tracking cookie off, and the other guy gets commission for the sale.
Other than loose tracking, Clickbank has been very reliable about paying on time.
Of course, if you're looking for more instant payments RAPbank might be the way to go.
The only draw back to Rapbank is that sometimes you are given 100% commission while the vendor makes money on any upsells on the backend, but if a person chooses to refund the product, they're coming to you to take care of the refund instead of the vendor. And you have to refund it yourself via PayPal.
So you've got options out there. Clickbank is still very good for earning affiliate commissions despite its hiccups.
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