Truth About Clickbank Vendor Claims

Clickbank Affiliate Marketing - The Truth About Clickbank Vendor Claims

by Kelley Kilanski

If you are an affiliate marketer using Clickbank, then you know the claims that vendors make in order to get you to advertise and sell their products. Beware! After six months of testing the claims, I have found that most of the claims are little more than exaggerations that could end up costing you money.

I have been an affiliate marketer for almost a year now. No, I do not make loads of money, the truth is, I am relatively surprised that I have even been marginally successful. With all of my hard work, I may make $200 a month - not a whole lot when you look at what Clickbank vendors claim.

There are two main things that vendors claim that I have found to be little more than extreme exaggeration. The first is the conversion rate and the second is always exaggerated claims about the product. I have been testing out some of these claims for the past six months, which included not only spending money on advertising, but also buying products to see if the claims that were made in the sales pitch were true. Here is what I found:

The conversion rates claimed by the 100-200 products I advertised were not even close to the actual conversion rates. Several of the products claimed a 2-5% conversion rate, but the conversion rate for all but two turned out to be half a percent to 1 percent. This is not good for affiliate marketers using search engine marketing because the cost of advertising will eventually out pace that of sales. Say you are selling a product that you make $20 per sale on. At a 1 percent conversion rate, you would need to bid only 20 cents on your keywords to break even. However, anymore, it is hard to get a good position in the search engines bidding that low. In fact, in one of the search engines, that low of a bid might even render your keyword inactive.

Also concerning the conversion rates, is the rate of returns. Conversion rates do not take into account the number of returns that the product gets. Granted, Clickbank will discontinue a product if it gets too many returns, but how much do you have to lose before this happens. If returns are figured into the conversion rate, you may be looking at less than a half of a percent conversion rate.

The other claim that many vendors make concerns the product themselves, especially those work-at-home products, or AdWords products. Some of them are okay, but after purchasing 10 products myself, I haven't found a single one that fulfilled the claim on the sales letter page. I only kept two of these products because while they did not actually do what they said they did, they did provide enough information that I didn't know and lead me to discover other things about marketing.

For new affiliate marketers, beware. Don't believe the claims until you have tried them out yourself. If a product does not do what it claims, do not waste your money and stop advertising it and write a review letting other affiliate marketers and potential customers know that the claims are exaggerated.

If you have a product that you advertised or bought and the product did or did not live up to the vendor claims, submit your review at Product Review - Opinedmind.com.

For more articles on affiliate marketing tips and resources, go to Affiliate Marketing - Opinedmind.com

The author of this article runs Opinedmind.com, a consumer and affiliate marketers website offering opinions, articles and reviews on various issues related to making money, saving money and managing money.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kelley_Kilanski

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