ClickBank Hucksters
Note: After writing this I realized that I’m making a huge assumption about you, the reader – you want to be honest with your visitors and make money while providing value through your advertising and affiliate programs. If you just want to make money hard-selling them whatever you can, you won’t like this article.
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I’ve been working on an interesting article for AffiliateBlog.com about how the people who make the big bucks online get it done. I’ve hung around DNForum and Sitepoint an some of the other forums where these guys (and gals) hang out, and I’ve been Private Messaging, Instant Messaging and even speaking on the phone with some of them.
Your relationship with your customers is based on trust, regardless of your business. Trust is even more important in cyberspace or the blogosphere, because you never really know who is behind the words that are being typed and what they are up to behind that keyboard (I am in my pajamas right now sipping my second cup of coffee while my German Shepherd is nuzzling my leg).
Clickbank makes a bucket of money selling information, including ebooks, reports and software.
Many of the people I’ve spoken with make a lot of money (as in tens of thousands of dollars a month) recommending ClickBank products to people.
I think this is terrific. Where I start to squirm is when people put up a site that purports to recommend ClickBank-related products based on personal endorsement, meaning that they claim to have used the product and recommend it.
Here’s some text from a ClickBank landing page:
I have found a proven method anyone can implement to very easily earn an extra $500, $1,000 or even $5,000+ every single week, with only 15 minutes of your time, and create a significant ongoing monthly income. This method is a no-nonsense, set it and forget it system, which will virtually run on 100% autopilot. People just like you are earning enough money to quit their jobs within the first month. Stop worrying about the bills, cancel your daily commute, never leave your family for a job that is making someone else rich, and start living your life the way YOU choose!
This well guarded System has never been revealed until now!
Would you spend $40 to get this program? I can tell you without reading to the bottom of the page that it doesn’t work. How? After twenty years in the business world I can tell you that it’s not going to happen the way this guy says.
But he is pushing all of the buttons, and there are a lot of people out there making big bucks helping people flush $40 at a time down the toilet. In fact, the paragraph above is from the top program in a certain ClickBank category.
When something appears on your website you are making an endorsement of that product or service, which links you forever to that product or service. Making a recommendation based mostly or solely on reward is unethical. In fact, there is a lot of talk about increasing clickthrough by blending advertisements with content. This is just another way of abusing the relationship you have with your visitors, which is why it is against the Terms Of Service for most ad programs (including AdSense).
