OK, I don’t want to rant too much but I’ve reached a point where Clickbank, and MOST of the affiliated businesses, are really peeing me off.  Here’s why.

Take a look at this screenshot…

The photo above is of my mobile home screen. If you check out the mail icon you will see that I have a total of 93,217 (!) unread emails.

You may think I have serious mental health problems seeing that. Or that I am the most disorganised person on the planet.

But, in fact, neither is true.

You see, my gmail inbox is heavily organised and filtered so that I quickly see the messages I want to see, and only see the ones I am not too fussed about (predominantly sales messages) when I have time to have a glance through and read any that spring out at me.

The problem is that, with reviewing products for IID for the past five years, and many years of Internet Marketing before that, I must have bought hundreds of Clickbank products.

The marketers behind these products email me sales messages… A lot… So much so that I can’t keep up with either reading or deleting them… So many that I don’t even venture much into the folder to which they are filtered.

Of course they are going to sell to me: I am a buyer, after all; but what’s really switched me off from being engaged with 95% of the marketers out there is that the repetitive, unoriginal methods of selling leave me totally cold: secrets that aren’t secrets; messages that are so heavily personalised I actually get fed up of the sight of my own first name.

Because of this, I’ve allowed my sales messages folder get a little out of hand. The other day, though, realising this, I delved in there to have a big clear out.

Spending an entire afternoon reading sales message after sales message from Clickbank affiliates is quite some experience: a brain-numbing one… one that makes your eyes glaze over and your ears bleed.

I’ve come away from the task with zero unread emails, a very bulging online trash can, and a new-found perspective on Clickbank. I hate it. And I don’t think you should use it as a focus for your online ventures.

?If you’ve ever tried to sell products listed on Clickbank you may well agree…

It’s a simple prospect. You sign up. You make your affiliate links. You put them online. You make money. But how has that worked out so far for you?
Probably badly.

Probably because what you’ve done is as unoriginal, dull and lacking in passion as the rest of the many hundreds of people selling the same products you are.

You’re battling against the many hundreds of bores that are cluttering up my inbox. Even if you DO turn your sales messages into something unique, the products you promote through Clickbank can become so closely affiliated with those marketers that people have completely turned off from, that you’re fighting a losing battle from the start.

If people don’t buy – nobody makes any money.

Selling Clickbank products online is not like going door-to-door trying to sell dodgy Tupperware. That’s why selling online has so much appeal.

But, then again, at least selling door-to-door you can gauge how people respond to your sales message.

You very rarely find out why you don’t sell online. You can always ask someone face-to-face and people will usually tell you. When you find out this vital information you can make adjustments.

Online, we need to be constantly making tweaks and changes to our affiliate marketing efforts in order to make money. That’s hard work: welcome to the real world of this type of affiliate marketing!

But people make thousands on Clickbank, right?

Of course, you will also come across the person who starts out slow and works to perfect their business to a point they become very good at selling and make a dramatic change in their lives as an affiliate for products listed on Clickbank. They are driven and know it will happen.

The question you need to ask yourself is: are YOU this type of person? You may feel you are going to be rich one day. But to do it as an affiliate, you have to be a pretty amazing marketer, copywriter and sales person. You are SELLING a product. You get a commission when you sell the product. It is just that simple.

My view is that, for 90% of the people reading this email, Clickbank isn’t the place you should go to in order to help you make money online or learn skills that will help you to build your online business.

And it’s not just because of how tricky it is and how much competition you’ll face. The Internet has some amazing opportunities for us all: unusual ones, fulfilling ones, quirky ones, ones that we can create from scratch with nothing but our personal passions and a few clicks of the mouse.

Selling other people’s digital products is just so uninspiring these days – at least in the traditional way. Why don’t we all try to be unique for once?

Clickbank really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here are a few more reasons why…

• They aren’t data and stat-led enough. Do you know how long Clickbank was in existence for before they discovered that affiliates and publishers might care about stats and metrics? Like, a decade or so.

That’s got to be a red-flag warning to the dedicated marketer. I don’t rate what they do have on offer these days either.

• You have to earn $100 before you can see any money. A payment threshold is the amount you need to reach before Clickbank will pay you. $100 is too high to start new Clickbankers off, in my opinion.

Maybe this is a controversial message – I’m not sure. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Has Clickbank’s time passed?

Does it appeal to you?

Do you read the thousands of emails pushing the same old Clickbank products that land in your inbox each day?

I’d love to hear from you…