A lot of people mistakenly think ClickBank is an affiliate network full of ClickBank Scams, but this is untrue. This article explains the history of ClickBank and the strong measures they’ve put in place to eliminate scammers from the marketplace.
Slowly over the years ClickBank gained an unfortunate and untrue reputation as being a marketplace of scam products. Let me briefly explain ClickBank’s history. ClickBank started as a brilliant idea in Boise, Idaho in 1998 (they actually invented digital goods affiliate marketing) and the system’s ease of use and never missing a payment caused ClickBank to explode.
They had the attitude of being a free market company and believed in letting the market decide if the product was good or bad. If a customer did not like a product, they could simply request a refund.
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ClickBank, with a huge volume of product submissions, does not have the internal bandwidth to personally verify every product. Can you imagine ClickBank having to evaluate an anti-anxiety product? They’d need to find an internal employee with an anxiety disorder and have them follow the system.
It’s an absurd expectation.
Forward to ClickBank 2011
Even though ClickBank had plenty of quality control measures in place, a group of bandits (I won’t name names) created highly sophisticated websites with incredible pitches from charming pitchmen. ClickBank and many customers and affiliates were caught off guard.
Nobody could decide if these products were hype or for real. It was impossible to go through each system as a customer or an affiliate before you found out if it was real or garbage. The way they were selling provided some indicators, but it was still hard.
Many of these bandits started out selling great products and most affiliates felt good about promoting them (I personally got a lot out of their earlier systems and Ebooks), but greed took over and they got high on the millions of dollars they were swindling in and they became bad actors.
You can now find some of their products at ClickSure.com. This network will be a flash in the pan and I’d avoid it.
You will see these small networks pop-up and they’re usually made up of rejected ClickBank scammers. They come and go all the time. As an affiliate marketer it’s wise to stick with ClickBank. They’ve been in business for 14 years for a reason.
Fast forward to ClickBank 2012
ClickBank decided to largely drop its pure free market philosophy and put some checks and balances in place. They decided to weed out any product that could be a potential scam by examining its refund rate. Any product with a refund-rate over 15% or a chargeback rate over 1% was in trouble.
They have been forcing products that exceed this rate to QUICKLY improve the quality of their product or system or they’re immediately cutting these vendors from the ClickBank Marketplace. I suspect any vendor that has built up a bad reputation is suspended forever.
They have also had a tough time with vendors submitting what appears to be good product and then switching the product after it’s been approved, but ClickBank now has measures in place to stop the bait and switches.
You can rest assured that when you make a ClickBank purchase that it is not a so called “ClickBank scam” because of the lengths this dedicated affiliate network has put into place to stop the plunders and make ClickBank the top digital goods marketplace it has always been.
ClickBank is also actively recruiting quality products and I encourage honest, prospective vendors to list with them.
It has never been a better time to be a ClickBank vendor or affiliate and I’ve heard ClickBank has a lot of exciting new tools and programs in the pipeline. Stay tuned!
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