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.

Before recommending one of the available scripts, I decided to figure out how they worked, and I found the following information on the Clickbank site that made me quite confident that I could quite easily handle the scripting myself.

If you want to pass other parameters through the hoplink to arrive at the target URL we will pass up to 64 bytes of QUERY_STRING data through to the target URL.

For example:

http://bonnie.clyde.hop.clickbank.net/?ZZ=1&YY=123abC

Would redirect to…

http://clydes-website.com/script.php?hop=bonnie&ZZ=1&YY=123abC

Based on this info, it seems that all we need to do is create a new hoplink landing page that redirects based on a parameter added to the hoplink url.

So, rather than using only http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net, we need to use http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=XXX where XXX is a variable indicating the product page to redirect to.

So, I’m going to create a new page that will serve as a primary hoplink on called hop.php

<?php
//hop.php hoplink redirection

//define url for product #1
$url1=”http://www.yoursite.com/product1″;

//define url for product #2
$url2=”http://www.product2url.com/”;

if ($_GET['prod'] == “1″)
{
header(”Location: $url1″);
}
elseif ($_GET['prod'] == “2″)
{
header(”Location: $url2″);
}

//if there is no product variable, go to the first product
//URL, since there are affiliates who started promoting
//the first product before this script was set up and
//we don’t want them to lose sales.
//if you have no prior affiliates, you might want to
//send people elsewhere if they arrive on a hoplink
//without a variable.

else
{
header(”Location: $url1″);
}

You can grab the code from here.

Once you’ve got your page set up, you need to change your hoplink in the Clickbank publisher administration area, and create a page for affiliates showing them how to properly link to your products.

The proper hoplink for product 1 would be
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

The link for product 2 is:
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=2

Simple enough to create and manage if you’re not terrified of handling a little raw code now and then.