If you're an affiliate marketer, you're probably wondering why ClickBank doesn't notify you when you get a sale, similar to what PayDotCom does. Well, there is a very long story behind this. If you're an old timer, you probably remember the days when you got notifications as an affiliate. For you new people, this article explains what happened and why you will probably never see an affiliate sale notification from ClickBank again.
When I first started promoting ClickBank products, back in 2003, I was getting these affiliate sale notifications by the truck load. It was a great feeling. But then I started wondering about those super affiliates who were probably getting ten times as many notifications as I was. Their email boxes must have been stuffed to the brim. And then that got me thinking some more. What about those new affiliates who didn't know that these were coming and just happened to get their email boxes stuffed with similar notifications that were actually spam. You know which emails I'm talking about. It's very hard to tell the difference between the two.
Well, you guessed it. A lot of these affiliates, thinking the email from ClickBank was just more spam (thank you spammers for screwing up our lives), reported these emails to their ISP. Apparently, enough of these emails were reported that ClickBank actually had some problems with THEIR ISP. As a result, they had no choice but to discontinue sending affiliate sale emails as they couldn't risk having their hosting pulled out from under them. That would have been a major catastrophe. Anyway, that's the story. That's why you don't get affiliate sale notifications from ClickBank.
Okay, so what can you do about it? Well, what you can do is put a tracker on your affiliate links. No, it won't tell you if somebody actually clicks through to the payment page, as that goes through the vendor pay link, but it will tell you how many people have been to your affiliate link. If there are no clicks for a given day, you know that there is little possibility of a sale. Yes, there are exceptions that I won't get into here. However, if you get many clicks, a simple check of your ClickBank account at the end of each day will let you know how many sales you've gotten.
No, it's not perfect and it does require you to do a little bit of work, but it's the best we have given what we have to work with. Like I said, you can thank the spammers for these headaches. I'm curious as to how PayDotCom hasn't been hit with the same problem as I still get sales emails as an affiliate from them whenever I make a sale.
Maybe that's a question I should ask Mike Filsaime one day.
Nelly Donaldson
