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How to Set Up Digital Delivery with Clickbank Payment Link
Clickbank is another payment processor similar to Paypal that you can use to sell digital products. In fact, clickbank is really made especially for digital products (whereas Paypal can be used for anything). Clickbank has a great built in redirect script. Once a buyer pays, Clickbank simply redirects the buyer to your download page.
To set up Clickbank, first you need to get a publisher account. Affiliate accounts are free (to promote other people’s products & earn a commission), however, publisher accounts (to sell a product yourself) will cost a fee of around $29.99-49.99. So if you don’t already have a Clickbank account & you want to sign up, go to Clickbank.com & sign up for an account. You will have to submit your product, & they will review & approve it. This process usually take about a day or two.
Once you have been approved, you can upload your products. To do this, login using your login information. Then click on the “Account Settings” tab. Then click the small “my products” link just below the tabs.
Clickbank Setup
You will then be able to add new products to your account. This is a really simple step. This is all you have to do: Enter the thank you page URL, set the price, and you’re done! Yes that easy. Remember, the thank you page will be the page you create on your website thanking the customer & you should have all download links on that page.
So, to give you an example, you would create on html page on your website. You should make the “thank you” page link long & hard to guess. Something like http://www.yourdomain.com/ae39asla_ao23af_2l3j.htm On that thank you page, thank the customer & then link to each product you have uploaded on your website. Each link may look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/your_product_here.pdf. Make sure to make the direct link to the actual file hard to guess as well. By the way, most html editors will have a built-in link button to easily create links for you, but just in case it doesn’t here is the simple HTML code to create a link:
<a href=”http://www.your-product-url here.com”
target=cb>Type What you Want the Link to Say Here (such as Product 1)</a>
For ClickBank to sell your product you must direct customers to follow a payment link on your Pitch Page. The payment link will automatically take the customer directly to a ClickBank product order form. After the buyer pays, Clickbank will redirect them to the thank you page you entered (as mentioned above).
Your payment link should be targeted to a new window, and should be in the following format:
http://ITEM.PUBLISHER.pay.clickbank.net
Here it is in html:
<a href=”http://ITEM.PUBLISHER.pay.clickbank.net” target=cb>CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE</a>
Here’s how to make it work…
Replace ITEM with the item number of the link (product) for sale. As you set up products to sell in your ClickBank account, you will need to assign each of your links an item number: 1,2,3, etc. If you are setting up your first product, the item number is 1. Replace PUBLISHER with your ClickBank account nickname. Replace CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE with any promotional text or image you prefer.
That is all you have to do to set up a simple system with Clickbank. Again, it costs money up front, however, they do have built-in affiliates that could help you make more sales, so it will most likely be worth the cost.
Other Things to Consider When Using Digital Delivery:
Aside from the technical aspects of digital delivery, there are a few other things you may want to consider such as:
1. What file format will you use for your digital item? Obviously, you should consider a format that most users will be able to use without any trouble. For instance, e-Books are most commonly sold in PDF format, etc. By using a format most people are familiar with, your customers will feel more comfortable buying & downloading your products.
2. Keep your files secure. If you are selling a product & you don’t want people to be able to access the product, you should take some necessary steps to keep it secure. A simple & cost effective way to do this is to simply have your item located in a secure file on your website, create a robots.txt file &/or meta tag to prevent search engines from finding it, and by changing your URL to a more complicated one (such as
www.yoursite.com/eBook89_32DoWnloAd_32.pdf). By adding lots of numbers & characters you make it nearly impossible for someone to guess the download URL. Also, make sure to create a robots.txt file.
What is a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file is a text file you can place on your website to instruct robots on where to craw, or more importantly where not to crawl. This is important because unless you want all of the pages & files in your site to show up online in search engine results, you will want to learn how to create a robots.txt file. Also, some SEO gurus have argued that having a robots.txt file can attract spiders & increase your search engine positioning.
So how does a robots.txt file work, and how do you create one on your website? Well the robots.txt is a simple file (mostly created using notepad) that includes a set of instructions for the search engines. These instructions can tell the spiders which pages they are allowed to crawl for indexing, and which ones they should not crawl. You can also give specific instructions for specific search engines, and you can include different commands.
Below is an example of common instructions used: To allow All search engine spiders to crawl your site & to all ALL files to be indexed, use this command:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The command above means all spiders can crawl your site & they can include all files in their index. The * means “attention ALL spiders” & by leaving the Disallow field blank it means you are telling them they can crawl all files. To instruct ALL search engine spiders to stay away from certain files (for instance your /images/ folder, you would simply use the following command:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
This instructs ALL robots that visit your site to not “crawl” or include all of the files in your /images/ folder to be included. If you would like to include more folders, just keep adding more Disallow commands:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /PDF/
Create a Robots.txt File Using Notepad
To upload a create & upload a robots file to your site, open Windows Notepad. Then type the command in Notepad that you want to instruct for the Robots (use an example above).
Then save the name of the document as a “robots” and make sure it has the .txt file extension. Now, go to your website & import (or “upload”) the file. Then publish your website. After you publish your website, your robots.txt file should show up.
To check, just type in www.YOURSITE.com/robots.txt and see if it show up. If it does then this should be working & it will prevent robots from viewing your files/folders that you do not want to be seen. This is a great way to keep secret files, e-books, personal documents, PDF files, etc. from being indexed and placed on search engines.
Creating a Robots Meta Tag
Robot.txt files are a great way to prevent search engines from viewing entire files or folders, but what about keeping them out of individual web pages? The solution is to use a special HTML Meta tag that will keep your webpage from showing up on search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.).
To use an HTML Meta Tag to prevent you page from being indexed, simply type the tag below into your HTML code between the <head> tags.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />
This will allow you to keep individual pages from being included in search engine directories. This is important because you don’t want your “thank you” page to be crawled & indexed by spiders because it will have your download link on it.
Misc. Digital Download Troubleshooting:
Also it is worth mentioning that even though digital delivery is a great feature and works 99.99999% of the time, occasionally there may be a technical difficulty preventing the buyer from downloading the product. Either the buyer will not see the link on the download page (yes it happens) –or eBay®, Paypal®, Clickbank, or the hosting company you use could experience a technical difficulty or their server can be down.
In this case, the buyer will probably contact you to let you know that they didn’t receive the item. I usually simply apologize to the buyer & send the digital item via email as an attachment as soon as I get the message & answer any other questions they may have. Again, these things happen to every seller from time to time & there is nothing you can do about it. After emailing the buyer, you may want to check the link to make sure it still works, and/or see if there are any problems that need to be corrected. If the link ever expires on a free hosting site or you want to change it, just follow the same procedures mentioned earlier to re-host your file.
Again, usually if the buyer contacts you it is usually because they didn’t know that they had to click the link to download the item, or there was just technical difficulty preventing them from downloading the item. And even though these problems can’t be avoided 100%, if you have 2 or 3 methods working together, it will be best. For example, set up email responder & have the buyermredirected after purchase.
Also, it is very important to always check to make sure the digital delivery works before you actually start selling the product. Whether you use a free file hosting company, host on your own website, use emailing, or use an online company you should always do a “test run” to make sure that the download works properly. This may take a couple of minutes, but it can save you a big headache later on if you take to time to make sure it works perfectly the first time.
Thank you for viewing this online guide. If you found this useful, please let others get all the great things we have on this site! Refer them to WildTips.com! Thanks again.
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Posted under Digital Delivery, eBooks
This post was written by Ben on May 28, 2009
