Much has been written about the demise of search engine's AdSense of late, but the advertising behemoth still seems to go from strength to strength, despite competition from Yahoo! and Microsoft and despite many webmasters' dissatisfaction at how search engine run their program and their labyrinthine Terms of Service (TOS) conditions. Yet, there are rumblings on the net about various 'AdSense Killers'. Is Google's behemoth about to be toppled from its dominant position, and who's waiting in the wings, seeking the title of Giant murderer?
Many have pointed towards ClickBank as a possible 'Adsense murderer', but are they correct in this appraisal? On the face of it, probably not... AdSense and ClickBank work very differently. AdSense is rather much a marketing tool. it is a way of displaying advertisements on your web portal that are matched to your site's content by search engine itself. As such it is a powerful tool in that you get the ads in return for some of the real estate of your websites. Each time someone clicks on an ad that you display money is credited into your AdSense account. AdSense is therefore a PPC (pay per click) systems.
ClickBank works more like a brokerage house. Their aim is to put the vendors of electronic products in touch with affiliates who will promote those products. They handle the relationship and manage the sales. This is the major problem of ClickBank in that it's geared towards managing the affiliate-vendor relationship. it's not geared towards the selling of products. If you wish to promote a product supported by ClickBank then you have to go to the vendor's web portal and either use their affiliate tools (if they have them) or you must create sales pages and sales blurb based on the information you can find about the product.
You can then either create a sales page or you can create ads that resemble those delivered by AdSense for your own site. This is laborious, but can be done. But once you have those ads, things are still different. As an affiliate (though you are selling the vendor's product you are in fact, in effect, an affiliate of ClickBank) it doesn't matter how probably the vast majority of people click on your ad... you only earn a living when a product is sold. Admittedly, you could be making $40 or more on a single sale whilst you might only be making pennies from an AdSense click. So, if you have enough traffic ClickBank-based ads could be very financially fruitful. But you still have to create those ads yourself.
This is where a number of third parties come in. They take the ClickBank product feed, dump it into a database and create AdSense-like contextual ads based around the ClickBank product database. But there is one major problem to this approach, in that many of the product descriptions and titles in the data feed that ClickBank make available to all are styled to attract affiliates and not to directly sell the products themselves. In effect, the majority of the descriptions provided tell you how good the product is for an affiliate marketer to promote, rather than how good it's for someone to buy (and why they should buy it).
These sites have tried to address the various issues surrounding ClickBank's products feeds. One of these is the Celt net ClickBank Marketplace, which is unique in that each product is checked and the product descriptions and product titles are annotated by hand. Each product is also backed by an image either of the product itself or of the sales web presence. These are all loaded into a database which is searchable. Other systems either use the ClickBank data feeds or take screen scrapes from Affiliate pages to populate their product description databases. Whatever the methodology employed, extended descriptions make these systems more versatile for any affiliate looking for ClickBank products to promote than ClickBank's own search systems as they are sales very than affiliate centred.
But the real advantage of these sites is that many of them provide tools so that you can create your own AdSense-like contextual ads based on selecting a subset of ClickBank products, or on using searches within the sites' databases to pick-out a range of products. For the main, simple tools allow ad blocks to be built (just like you do for AdSense). Typically, these can be configured in terms of appearance, like AdSense ads and the content can be specified in terms of the section of ClickBank you wish them to appear from or based on any keywords you specify. Thus you can make the ads as specific to your site or web page as you require. Most of the better ad providers serve their ad blocks dynamically so that the ads seen change on every refresh. Each time ClickBank updates its product feed the database and therefore your ads are also updated.
The newest feature for these providers of ClickBank-based ads is the growth of image-based ads. These are AdSense-like contextual ads but they give the product/website image along with titles and text. As research has shown that image-based ads can be more effective than plain ads this could be a real boon for your site.
The only problem with serving AdSense-like ads is that these are contextual ads an thus you cannot display these alongside Google ads, as this breaks search engine's terms of service. there is, however, a way around this problem. A number of sites providing ClickBank-based ads also enable you to generate an RSS feed of ads. These can be incorporated into your web presence or even your blog. But as this is 'news aggregation' and not a contextual ad you can mix these RSS feeds with search engine ad units with no penalty.
Many of the sites will also empower you to copy a search box for your website that uses their databases and descriptions to allow your visitors to search the ClickBank products listing for any product or service that they need or want. This can be a very powerful and simple way of adding a new revenue stream to your web presence, again without breaking Google's TOS.
The most reputable of these sites offering ad units will empower you to embed your own ClickBank nickname (affiliate ID) in the many different products and services so that any sales are credited to your own ClickBank account. Typically they randomly assign their own ClickBank ID to between 15 and 20% of the products displayed so that you get 80% of sales and they get 20% of sales, which is how they earn their income.
So take advantage of these wonderful opportunities the internet provides to everyone. To see an example of how to take advantage of it go to: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks/
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