The main roadblock is something innocently called the CDR: Customer Distribution Requirement

ClickBank accounts cannot be used for the sole purpose of collecting rebates or otherwise extending credit to yourself or others. In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until it contains standing sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers, including at least one Visa card, and one MasterCard. PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum. 

So your sales need to meet the above criteria before you will ever get a check.  The next hurdle is your minimum check amount which you set in your account details.  The default is $100, so once you meet the CDR you must have the minimum check amount in order to get a check.  Higher is sometimes better here because there is a $2 fee per check.

I was asked recently about the check itself and how it arrives.  It comes via the regular USPS mail to your address of record in your account.  It is a plain business envelope with a return address of WWW.CLICKBANK.COM .  It could easily get mistaken for junk mail so be sure to look carefully.  Inside you will simply find a check and nothing else.  It will have your name and address as well as your ClickBank id.  Just for the record, the checks are paid from Wells Fargo Bank out of Boise, Idaho.

ClickBank also has direct deposit options:

ClickBank is pleased to offer direct deposit of your ClickBank account payment to U.S. bank accounts at no extra charge. An account must have first received three paper paychecks within any 90-day period before it is eligible to enroll in direct deposit. Direct deposits may take 1-2 business days to reach your account, although many direct deposits are received on the same day that we send them.

They also offer international Direct Deposit for their worldly affiliates.

All your payment, or lack of payment, information can be found under the Reporting tab of your ClickBank account.

There is one odd little glitch in the system however.  What if you have two products?

This is not a problem for Clickbank, you can have up to 500 products on one account. 

BUT…

You can only have one site page.

Your site page is where you advertise your product to the marketplace.  It is where you set up your commission level for your product and your product categories.  Even if you have 500 products, you can only have one site page.  (My Site in the ClickBank menu)

The Marketplace is for affiliates to find your products to promote.  ClickBank suggests if you have multiple products, then your site page should point to a hub site to promote all of your products to affiliates.  This would have to mean that all of your products are under the same general category, and the hoplinks generated would be to your hub page, not to each specific site.  This does not seem to be a very efficient solution.

So you have to do what many ClickBank publishers do, have multiple accounts.  It is really the only clean way to get each of your products listed in the Marketplace.

One last bit of info about the Marketplace, your product can be listed easily once you setup your categories.  The Marketplace is updated once a day, so your product will most likely show up within 24 hours.  But in order to stay listed in the Marketplace you have to make a sale at least once every 30 days.  If you fail to make a sale once a month, your product will be removed from the Marketplace listing.

Honestly, I see no reason to sell through ClickBank if you can not benefit from the affiliate sales.  You would be making sales from organic traffic, yet paying the additional ClickBank fees.  Sure, you would have to handle your own returns, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

There are actually very few differences between the Premier Account and the Business Account. However, there are a number of differences between both of those accounts and the personal account.

Premier Account – As with the Personal Account, you also get 24 hour customer service, fraud protection and the ability to send money, but that is where the similarity ends. If you want to do business on Ebay, which you need a PayPal account to do, then you must at least have a Premier Account. Otherwise your Ebay access is quite limited. Also, if you want to be able to accept credit card payments, you will also need to have a Premier Account. Also, with a Premier Account, you can get a PayPal ATM or Debit Card. Also, your
merchant services, which we will explain in greater detail later on, are greatly enhanced. Wait until you see all the things you can do with a Premier Account.

So, the question most users ask is simply, “Okay, what’s the difference between a Premier Account and a Business Account?” Well, the differences are subtle but they are there.

Business Account – While a Premier Account can accept most payment types, a Business Account can accept ALL payment types, which makes this a very powerful account. Plus, you can have multiple email addresses, which you can’t have under a Premier Account. This means if you have several businesses that you run, and
want to accept payments from multiple email accounts through PayPal, you can do this with a business account. On top of that, with a Business Account, you can do business under your company name, which you can’t do under a Premier Account.

A business account is just that, an account for people who are serious about doing business online and don’t want any restrictions placed on their account. The downside to a business account is that the fees are a little higher than with a Premier Account. However, because the potential to do more volume is there, if you expect to do a lot of business, the Business Account is certainly worth getting. The advanced merchant
tools for a business account really make it a no brainer.

If you are unsure of what account to start off with, you can always just start with the personal account and work your way up as you need to. You will find that as you want to do things with your personal account, just like I found, PayPal will give you their very polite, “sorry, this isn’t available for your account” and then you will ultimately decide, or not, to upgrade. Remember, there are no fees simply for having the account. There is only a fee when you sell something.

In our next installment, we’re really going to start diving deep into the PayPal site itself. There’s a lot to cover so we’re going to take this nice and slow.

See you then.

NOTE: Because the items that you will have available to you are different for each account type, we are going to do this review based on having access to everything. If you want to actually be able to access the sections we cover and can’t do so, you will have to upgrade your account in order to do so. Otherwise, this tutorial would be impossible to do. Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s dig into the PayPal site and see what we have there.

First thing you need to do is go to the main PayPal URL and log into your account. Use the email account and the password that you chose when you signed up. After you log in, you will see 5 main boxes across the top of the page. They are labeled My Account, Send Money, Request Money, Merchant Services and Auction Tools. Upon logging in, you are taken to the first of these boxes, My Account. So, let’s start there and see
what we have.

The first things you will see under these main boxes are more boxes, or sub boxes. They are labeled Overview, Add Funds, Withdraw, History, Resolution Center and Profile. Upon logging in, aside from being brought to “My Account” you are also being shown the “Overview” screen. It is very easy to get lost at this site, which is why I am taking each screen one at a time.

Looking at the overview screen, you will see that it gives you quite a bit of information. The first thing you will notice is that it tells you what type of account you have and your country. In my case, it says “Business Account Overview – United States” Yours will probably say, if you just signed up, “Personal Account Overview - <Your Country>”.

Under this information, you’ll be shown your name, the email you signed up with and finally your verified status. This shows the number of verified buyers who have purchased goods or services from you. Each buyer adds to the number you will see next to this verified status. Mine, at present, shows 125 verified buyers.

If you click on the number next to the verified status, it will give you information about your account including Seller Reputation, Account Status, Account Type, Account Creation Date and also how long
you’ve been a PayPal member. As of this writing, I have been a member for 5 years 7 months and 17 days.

Yes, they count it down to the day.

In my nest post, we’re going to pick up with our discussion on the overview page in the “My Account” section and go over some more of the things that you’re going to find on this page.
See you then.

It presents a strategy for selling any type of product using methods which will never become obsolete. Plus an ingenious twist which will send your traffic rocketing.

The Ultimate SuperTip, written by Harvey Segal (Mr SuperTips) is neatly set out, easy to follow, written without hype and not littered with annoying links.

And the cost of this book ?

It’s free !

In this short (37 page) ebook Harvey has managed to include one unique idea after another on a wide variety of topics starting with his controversial stance on search engines and moving on to

- Getting traffic to your site
- Preselling with free ebooks
- Preselling with articles
- Autoresponders and follow up campaigns
- Ad tracking
- Affiliate marketing
- ClickBank
- Viral marketing
- PDF book creation
- Ebook rebranding
- Creating niche sites
- Resale rights

You can’t go wrong with a free ebook, get yours HERE

Probably the first place we should start is with the 3 types of PayPal accounts so that you understand the differences between them and the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Personal Account – This is the most basic PayPal account. As with all the PayPal accounts, you can send money with a personal account. You also get 24 hour fraud protection, which is a nice thing. This way you don’t have to worry about others ripping you off with a bogus sale item. You also get free customer service from PayPal as well, regardless of the type of account. Where the personal account is lacking is in the following areas:

Ebay Tools – You get very limited access to running an Ebay business with a personal account. So, if you’re planning on doing so, it is suggested that you upgrade to one of the other accounts.

Merchant Services – This is probably one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from a personal account. You get very limited merchant services which virtually make it almost impossible to sell your own products through PayPal. The restrictions on monthly volume and other things make personal accounts pretty useless if you want to sell things online.

Accept Credit Or Debit Cards – This is also a feature that is quite limited with a PayPal Personal Account. If you can’t accept credit or debit card purchases, the number of people you can sell to is greatly limited.

Also, with a personal account you have absolutely no access to a PayPal ATM or Debit Card and do not get multi user access, meaning you can’t set up more than one email address in your personal account. This also makes it hard to do business if you have more than one business and have different domains and
email addresses for each one. If you want to accept payments through multiple email addresses, a personal account will not let you do this.

As you can see, unless you’re just an occasional buyer or seller, taking payments from others strictly through PayPal funding, a personal account is pretty useless, at least in my opinion. The plus side of this account is that when you have a transaction, where you sell something, there is no fee attached to it. In other words, if you sell something for $100, you get the whole $100. With the upgraded accounts, this isn’t the case.

In the next post, we’re going to pick up our review of the different accounts, continuing with the Premier Account. See you then.

My requirements for a perfect link cloaker would be as follows:

• Easy to use
• Password protected
• Easy to edit links
• Easy to install

After some searching I found one that met all these:

Super Affiliate Link Manager

Like most link managers you need to be able to set up a MySQL database on your hosting account.  The manual does a good job stepping you through this process.  Once that is complete you need to edit the config file to setup your database information and an optional password.  Password protecting your links is a good idea.  The application would be set up the same on any site so, theoretically, someone could get into your links and edit them to their advantage.  It may not be a likely scenario, but it is better to be safe.

After running a quick install.php to link up your database and set up the password the app is ready to go.

When you run the program, you are greeted with a simple login screen.  After you input your data you are in the main application.  The first thing you need to do is adjust your settings.

Most of the details here can be left as is.  You should input your website name of course.  The color controls are purely for your own benefit, adjust as you want.  Once again, the manual does a good job explaining things.

The main screen shows your links and the names you have set up for your cloaked links.  It also goes one step further and shows you the amount of hits you’ve recieved for each link.  You can sort by any of the fields to arrange your data as you see fit.

Overall the application is simple and easy to use.  You can test your links from the main screen to make sure you typed them in correctly and you can edit and even add comments.

Super Affiliate Link Manager has only one minor flaw that you should be aware of:  It does not work with Wordpress directly.  The instructions tell you to put the SALM subdirectory in your root directory.  Because Wordpress is trying to use the same type of redirects as SALM, there is a conflict between the two.  The solution is to put the SALM directory into a subdirectory such as ‘links’ or ‘recommends’.  Your cloaked links will look like the following:

http://yourdomain.com/links/affiliatesite

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/affiliatesite

This is the same as they would look if your were writing your own redirect files.  With the SALM directory in the root directory your links look like this:

http://yourdomain.com/affiliatesite

I kind of like the first option.  But, for your site, the choice is yours.

One other feature I should mention is in your link manager window there is a radio button to select  ’cloaked’.   If this is checked, when a link is followed, the URL remains your link.  So this is a true link cloaker.  There is nothing more you can do to protect your affiliate links.

Dustin Davis has developed the exact link manager I would have written myself.

To get your own PayPal account, you have to go to the following URL:
https://www.paypal.com/
After you do this, you will notice in the upper right hand corner of the screen a link that says Sign Up. Click on that now! When you get to the next page, you’ll first be greeted by a box that asks you for the country in which you live. This is required because PayPal is not accepted all over the world just yet. So if you lived in
say, Saudi Arabia, and went through the list of countries, you would find that your country is not listed. You will find that currently there are 103 countries that are listed at the PayPal site where you can get a PayPal account.

After you choose your country, you will then notice that it asks you to choose the type of account that you want. There are 3 types of PayPal accounts; Personal, Premier and Business. We will go over these types of accounts in more detail later. For now, just sign up with a Personal Account. The reason for this is because you can upgrade any account at any time. Personal is the best to start with because there are no fees attached to it for doing business. So click on where it says “Start Now” under the Personal Account column.

You will then be presented with a page where you are going to have to fill in a bit of information. Make sure you fill in everything except where it says optional for mobile telephone. Yes, your regular telephone is a required field. Also, make sure that you choose a password that is at least 8 characters long and is also not easy to guess. People are always trying to hack into PayPal accounts. You may have noticed many emails coming to you claiming to be from PayPal asking for your password for some bogus reason. This is why. PayPal hackers are everywhere. So make sure your password is hard to guess.

After you have filled in the form, click on “I Agree, Create My Account” and you will then be told that an email will be sent to you with a link to click in order to verify that your email address is valid. All transactions through PayPal are validated through your email. So make sure you give them one that doesn’t have a ton of spam filters on it otherwise you may not get your confirmation email and as a result will not be able to open up your PayPal account.

After you get your email from PayPal, click on the link inside of it and that will activate your PayPal account. From here you can start setting things up the way you like and even add additional email addresses if you like.

In my next post, we’re going to start our tour of the vast PayPal site. See you then.

You can also send money to people and buy things online using your PayPal account. This is a nice feature for those of us who don’t want to have to dig out our credit cards every time we go to a site in order to make a purchase. All we have to do is click on the little “Pay with PayPal” button and we’re taken to a screen where we can log into our PayPal account and complete the transaction. It’s really very convenient and a lot faster than with a credit card. The only thing you have to make sure of is that the site where you are making your
purchase actually accepts payments via PayPal. Most of these sites are clearly marked, so you shouldn’t have any problems.

One thing you need to be aware of with PayPal is that, like Clickbank, it is not accepted in every country. Many third world countries are not allowed access to PayPal accounts. There are a variety of reasons for
this which we will not get into in this particular article. PayPal also has many different options for opening an account, which we will be covering in future articles. It is important that you understand how each different account works so that you’ll know which account is best suited for YOUR purposes. Don’t worry, we will be explaining each account in detail so you will know the limitations and perks of each one.

And then of course there are the PayPal rules which we all have to follow. As with Clickbank, PayPal has a number of these rules, the breaking of even one can lead to the termination of your PayPal account. Don’t worry, we’ll be covering the main rules of PayPal so you don’t end up breaking any of them that will ultimately land you in a mess of trouble. PayPal is not very tolerant of rule breakers.

It is my hope that when we finish this series, you’ll be able to go to the PayPal website and feel confident in opening your new account.

Many people have this automatic fear of PayPal because of all the horror stories that they have heard. I assure you, most of these stories leave out some very important details. In most cases, these people
blatantly broke some rule and ultimately got themselves banned. As long as you know the rules and follow them, you should be fine.

ClickBank is pleased to offer Direct Deposit (ACH & XACH) into both domestic and international bank accounts to eligible clients. Benefits of direct deposit include:

• No extra charge
• Fast (1-5 business days)
• Reliable
• Payments in your local currency reducing unnecessary bank fees

Additionally, to better serve your needs the “My Account” and “My Site” pages have improved layout. Both pages now feature:

• Simpler navigation
• Better content organization and presentation
• Easy to access FAQ content

Along with these enhancements, users will now have the power to change their own address and payee name within their account. Simply login to your ClickBank account, click on the “Account Settings” tab, and click “Edit” in the account information area.

Be certain to remain logged in to your ClickBank account through each step of the address change process until you’ve received confirmation that the change(s) have been completed successfully.

For security purposes, if you change your Account email address or your password, you will not be able to change your payee name, physical address, or your payment information for 7 days. Changes to your Customer Service email address or Transactional email address will not affect your ability to update your physical address or payment information.

Login to your account and go the “Account Settings” tab to see these changes in use.

For more information about Direct Deposit and changes to the “My Account” and “My Site” pages please refer to the 2008-07-15 Release Summary.