So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.

Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.

When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.

I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.

It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.

It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.

Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.

And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.

So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.

I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber.
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I decided, after downloading and fiddling with Google’s new browser this evening, that a pretty good test of its mettle would be to do some Entrecard dropping with it.

First, I should note that every site I went to rendered just fine. I’m sure that makes all the web designers in the world heave a big sigh of relief. The last thing anyone needed was another set of odd CSS hacks they needed to incorporate into their designs.

It was also fast. Although there’s no Linky-like feature in Chrome, and I had to individually middle-click each link to load it in a new tab, there was absolutely no delay or stuttering while I did so. All the new tabs loaded happily on the screen. Unlike Firefox, which has scrolling arrows when you get too many tabs, Chrome just makes the tabs smaller, so when you’ve got lots loaded, it looks like a goofy looking mountain range at the top of the screen.

The biggest thing I noticed was that, even while the last sites were still loading, there was no delay when clicking the widget. You clicked the word Drop, and the next instant the Thanks, or Awesome was there.

Just to make sure this wasn’t just caused by a superfast Entrecard server tonight, I dropped my last 50 cards in Firefox. There’s a 6-8 second period where the yellow bar goes black in Firefox when some of the tabs have not finished loading.

The other thing I noticed is that when a script on someone’s site causes major malfunctions, Firefox closes completely, while Chrome just crashes the tab and keeps everything else running normally.

Actually, it doesn’t crash the tab, it just makes it unhappy. You gotta love those Google guys. Even a crashed web page becomes cute.

Finally, the extra screen space with Chrome might have also sped up the process, since I could see more of the widgets above the fold.

Overall, I really like Chrome. I am just hoping to see lots of cool add-ons like Firefox has.

Yesterday I created a simple (very, very simple) script to allow Clickbank merchants to redirect their hoplink to different products.

This is beneficial because it allows you to run affiliate programs for up to 50 products from one account, without creating a distracting intermediary page listing all your products. Running all your programs from one account also will increase the gravity of your account, making it look more appealing to affiliates in the Clickbank marketplace.

Today I’m going to create a script to go along with yesterdays redirection code to fix another problem I have with Clickbank. It’s nice to have a lot of affiliates linking to your products, but they’re not really linking to you. They’re linking to hop.clickbank.net.

Since we’re already giving affiliates custom codes to link to our products, why not add a second redirection script so that those custom affiliate codes give us the link love instead of Clickbank?

Yesterday we created a file called hop.php, and once we were done, our affiliate hoplink codes looked a little like this:

http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

Today, we’re going to create a file called go.php which will bounce visitors to the correct hoplink from our site. The hoplink directs those visitors to hop.php back on our domain, and hop.php directs them to the correct sales page, wherever that may be. If the average visitor even had a clue how much jumping around they were doing in the background, they’d feel a little bit like Tigger. Fortunately it will generally be instantaneous and invisible to most users.
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A close friend of mine is using Clickbank to run an affiliate program for his product, but with the upcoming arrival of a second product he wants to promote via Clickbank, he ran into a problem.

Clickbank lets you promote up to 50 products, but you only get one hoplink for your entire account… that is, no matter how many products you have, the basic hoplink your affiliates will use will always land on the same page.

The three ways to deal with this limitation are:

1. Create a new Clickbank account for each product
   However, this would mean paying a $50 setup fee for each product, and would require logging into Clickbank multiple times to check sales and stats, and worrying about multiple Clickbank cheques each month.
2. Create an intermediary page with a link to each of the products he has available.
   It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to have a page like this, but requiring all prospects coming via an affiliate to go through an extra page before seeing the offer is bound to reduce conversions and cause confusion.
3. Use a script to create custom redirection to the appropriate products.
   This was the route that offered the best potential. I found a number of scripts that did exactly this, ranging from $17 to $97.

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