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Should I Use ClickBank or 1ShoppingCart For My Product Launch?

by on August 11, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch, Referral Marketing

This short article is a response to a question by one of the readers, Peter Davies:

I have looked at Infusion and found it to be too expensive at this point in time. Do you think 1ShoppingCart is a decent enough product or if you are a first time launcher like me would you just use ClickBank?

Well, let’s see.

I personally don’t have a lot of experience with the vendor side of ClickBank. I am going to point out a few things that would work differently for you if you were launching your product with each solution. Also keep in mind that there are many other solutions available. However, both ClickBank and 1ShoppingCart are quite popular so it’s a good idea to compare them.

There are plenty of examples of successful launches done with either one. Either solution can work for you. It will depend on the launch model you chose and on the niche you are launching in.

1. Affiliate Management

I understand you don’t have access to the list of your affiliates from within ClickBank. You can overcome that issue by using some add-on software or by forcing your partners to register on your website first before you tell them how to set up their hop link.

1ShoppingCart has a rather elaborate affiliate management module that allows you to maintain a list of affiliates, set their commission percentages, send them emails, etc.

2. Creative / Template Management

If you use ClickBank, you need to find a way to deliver the email copy, banners, and text ads to your affiliates via your own website or email autoresponder.

1ShoppingCart Affiliate Center allows your affiliate to login and get access to all your campaign creative and template with their tracking links already built in.

3. Commission Tracking

Both ClickBank and 1ShoppingCart rely on cookies for commission tracking, which may not be the most reliable method. There are affiliate tracking solutions (e.g., Nanacast, Post Affiliate Pro, etc) that use both the cookie and the IP address to make sure your affiliates get the commissions they are entitled to.

4. Cookie Prospects For All Products (Not Just The One Being Promoted)

ClickBank will only cookie the prospect for the particular product being advertised by the affiliate. If the prospect decides to buy a different product offered by the same vendor that sale will not trigger the commission for the affiliate who referred that sale.

1ShoppingCart will cookie the prospect for all your products. I think it is only fair that affiliates get paid for all the sales they generate for you (including the products they have not directly promoted to their list).

5. 2-Tier Commissions

1ShoppingCart allows you to set up two levels of commissions. The second tier is for the commission you pay to the affiliates to refer other affiliates to you. The reason you may want this in place is because now you can bring in professional joint venture brokers (like yours truly) who will then, in a short time, connect you with the list you’d otherwise have no access to.

6. Solution Cost and ROI

1ShoppingCart would cost you at least $99/month for the package that has the shopping cart and the affiliate management module. There are no per-transaction fees other than those related to your merchant account.

ClickBank is “free” when you don’t use it but you end up paying a small fee for every transaction. Depending on the volume of sales you are about to generate, ClickBank can actually turn out to be a more expensive solution.

7. Affiliate Network

1ShoppingCart allows you to manage affiliates but doesn’t help new affiliates find you.

ClickBank is one of the oldest and largest affiliate networks around. If your product converts well, you’ll have new affiliates find you on ClickBank and start selling your products without you doing any work to recruit them.

8. Affiliate Payouts

Figuring out how much you owe each affiliate and sending them checks can be quite a hassle 1ShoppingCart and ClickBank address the issue differently. In 1ShoppingCart, you have the PayPal Mass Pay function to pay your affiliates with a click of a button. In ClickBank, you don’t even have to click the button because everything is handled by ClickBank on your behalf (and that is one of their biggest selling features).

9. Market Niche

1ShoppingCart seems to be more popular in the Personal Development / Self Help niche. ClickBank is the de facto standard in Internet marketing. To help your launch go smoothly, you want to give your affiliates a tool they are familiar with.

Hope this information will help you chose the right affiliate management software for your product launch.

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Product Launch: Keep Your Hands Away From That Last Cookie!

by on June 23, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch

All the big product launches we get to hear about are done via a network of joint venture partners with large lists.

It is not uncommon for the same subscriber to be on several lists and hence receive emails about the same promotion from several joint venture partners or affiliates at the same time. When a sale happens, the big question becomes, which affiliate is entitled to receive the commission on it: The first one to deliver this offer to the prospect or the last one who sealed the deal and convinced the prospect to take action?

Either approach has positive and negative aspects.

The “first cookie wins” approach allows you to give your major partners an incentive to mail early and to create the momentum for your launch. However, smaller partners who find out about the launch or start promoting it late, will have little if any incentive to participate because a lot of their own subscribers would have been cookied but the larger affiliates. This also invites “black hat” tactics like “cookie stuffing” that some of the less scrupulous affiliates may turn to in order to gain advantage over other partners.

The “last cookie wins” approach seems the most fair. After all, it’s the affiliate that gets the sale who should get paid on it, right? So it is no surprise most affiliate tracking packages work according to this scenario. Obviously, it may be a little harder for you to recruit some of the big list owners as your partners as now they’d have to work harder to make their commission from your launch.

It is also possible to use a combination of the two approaches by using the “last cookie wins” for tracking but recording the affiliate ID along with the contact details for the prospect in your autoresponder. When you send out follow up emails, you can drop in the affiliate code of the original affiliate in the purchase link. In this case it’s the affiliate who generated the lead is the one that ultimately gets paid the commission.

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Product Launch and Affiliate Tracking Software

by on June 22, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch, Referral Marketing

If you plan on launching an information product — be it a course, a membership website, a coaching program, or simply a book — through a network of joint venture partners, one of the more important considerations is the software used for affiliate tracking.

Your most important task is to make sure your affiliates are paid all the commissions they are entitled to. Alas, many software packages are much less than bulletproof when it comes to commission reporting and tracking.

Some shopping carts offer built-in affiliate systems. There are also a number of stand-alone affiliate tracking solutions that are either hosted for you or that you can host yourself.

Here is the list of the most important things to consider when choosing an affiliate solution:

1. Are the referrals tracked only via cookies or are there additional level of assurance like IP tracking?

2. How much control do you have over the way cookies behave? (How soon would they expire? Is it the first cookie or the last cookie that gets the sale?)

3. How many levels of commissions can you pay? (Many launches only pay one level of commissions, however, adding an extra level will allow you to approach joint venture brokers and off-load a lot of JV partner recruiting to them. You may want to stop at two levels as anything more than that and you will be considered a multi-level company with many regulations and restrictions around what you can and cannot do.)

4. Would you be able to set commissions to a different level for individual partners? (You may want to be able to offer some of your key partners a special deal and possibly pay them a higher percentage).

5. Is the reporting function adequate? (Many affiliate programs simply don’t give you much information or the information in the report may be delayed by 24 hours, which is almost eternity in a product launch scenario.)

6. Does it offer you an easy way to host media files (email copy, banners, text links, pre-written tweets, etc) with the affiliate’s link automatically built in?

7. Will it work with your current autoresponder / email marketing system?

8. Will it scale to handle the traffic and the load on the server?

9. Will it allow you to go into the system and manually verify the commissions by matching them to the orders from a particular affiliate? (Blindly trusting the software can be disastrous. Best practices include thorough testing preceding the launch and spot check throughout. Be aware that some affiliate tracking packages will report to you the number but may not give you enough information to know how this number was arrived at, rendering any manual verification impossible.)

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