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?!

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.