ClickBank is wonderful for affiliates, in that it provides over 10 000 products in a wide variety of niches for you to find and promote. Yet, there are several problems with ClickBank that stem from how the ClickBank marketplace actually operates.
ClickBank itself acts as a marketplace designed to put vendors (those who produce and sell the product) in contact with potential affiliates (those who are willing to promote the product). As a result many of the product descriptions tell you how good the product is for an affiliate to promote, rather than what it is and what it does.
You also need to go through each product individually then create a hoplink (affiliate sales link) and your sales page for the product. For each product you need to perform your research and then begin selling the product. There is no way to market multiple products or to access multiple markets.
It used to be that it was a very laborious process to add a number of ClickBank products to your website, until ClickBank produced their Product Feed. ClickBank themselves review the products in their marketplace and how they are performing each and every day. These are uploaded to the CickBank system each day and are published as the ClickBank product feed. This is a very useful resource as it contains details for all the products in the ClickBank system But it's provided in XML format which is not easy for those without the technical skills to process.
To make the feed useful you have to parse it and load it into a database. Even then you only have the information that ClickBank themselves provide on their website. This includes the less than helpful product definitions. To make any real use of the feed you need to replace the descriptions with something a lot more meaningful and useful. As a result you would have to change the descriptions of all the products to something far more useful and saleable.
Now you have the database and it's loaded with the products you want to promote. But you're still not done...
Google have shown that by far the most profitable way of selling products is via contextual text-based ads (the familiar AdSense ads in fact). Which means that you need to develop the look and feel of these ads and you need to provide a system whereby you can deliver these ads to your web pages. Maybe you'd like to generate an RSS feed at the same time so that you can add ClickBank products to your blog or mix ads based on ClickBank products with other ad systems.
This is a lot of work, just to get a set of ads on your site... And this is without the need to update the system each and every week.
But there is a solution. Al the hard work has already been done for you:
