Review of the New ClickBank Elite

The old ClickBank Elite is no more. Enter the new ClickBank Elite!. The new CB Elite version 1.47 has three notable features: 1. Enhanced Search and Sort functions for finding exceptional products to promote, 2. CB Ads for monetizing traffic and 3. Link Cloaking for stopping commission theft.

1. New CB Elite search and sort functions let you download a copy of the Clickbank product list database (1.5 meg zipped, 7.4 meg unzipped) and store your copy for future use. Once unzipped and loaded you can sort by categories, subcategories or all. Sort and select on any of 7 factors: gravity, popularity, $/sale, % commission, Title, description and % referred. You can specify maximum or minimum values, or range of values you want. From the main screen you can easily click off from a product to a new web page to see the landing site, check the CBTrends graphs, check the popularity ranges in all categories and subcategories or get a hoplink. Full analytical control by mouse-click from one control point. When finished just close the window and go to the next item. Very convenient.

CB Elite now incorporates popular Affiliate Project X searches for Leach, Workhorse or Rising Star, as well as new product searches.

My personal observation was that having all these CB Elite features in one place at the same time saved me about 60% to 70% of the time necessary to find and check out a product. Also, because it was fast and you did not have to go away to open another window to see another aspect, it was easier to keep focussed on the product at hand until I finished analyzing and classifying it.

CB Elite is a very good tool for empowering Affiliate Marketers to check out and compare products fast.

2. New CB Elite lets you sort out whatever grouping of products you want and set them up for Google AdWords style ads (CB Ads)! This gives you a new way to monetize the traffic at your websites. To use the CB Ads feature of ClickBank Elite you first input your hoplink. Then let's say, for example, that you have a niche site dealing with golf. You run a search on All Categories, with keyword "golf", minimum popularity 10; the search yields 1 product. O.K. You repeat with min. popularity 100; you get 10 products. You try 500, you get 49 products. O.K. That'll work! You pick your adblock style (ClickBank Elite gives you eight layouts to choose from). There are strip blocks (728x90, 600x90) tower blocks (160x600, 120x600) and 4 more square/rectangular choices. You pick 600x90, specify border color blue, print color black, background white, link color dark red, etc., choose between PHP or javascript format and hit "Create Adblock Code". Bingo! ClickBank Elite gives you a new CB Ads file with everything in it!

Upload the newly created CB Ads file to a folder on your website, set up the script markers and put them on your webpages where you want the ads to appear and upload the revised pages. Then visit the site to make sure that everything is working O.K. The ads appear, selected at random from our database of 49, changing with each page change. The visitor sees different ads everywhere, advertising different products that have to do with golf. Click on any ad and you are taken to the vendor's site using your hoplink that you input when you started. Bingo! Clickbank Elite has given you a new way to monetize site traffic.

There is no conflict between ClickBank Elite's CB Ads and your Google Adsense ads. While CB Ads look like Google Adsense ads, they are not contextual in nature so there is generally no problem using a mixture of CB Ads and Adsense ads on the same webpage.

Your link for your CB Ads is cloaked, to inhibit commission theft, which brings us to CB Elite's third feature.

3. CB Elite lets you cloak your affiliate links to each product. This can be done for any link you input to be cloaked and is done automatically for all the products offered on your CB Ads.

The CB Elite program uses the frame method so that when the visitor arrives at the vendor's website, the url in the "go to" window is still that of the site where he was when he clicked. To the visitor it appears that he is still on the same site. He is, of course, but he is seeing the distant site through a frame of that same site. It's not foolproof (nothing is) but it certainly makes it much harder and thus less likely that the one who clicked buys without paying your commission or manages to steal it leaving you with nothing for your work and trouble.

This is useful for more than just avoiding commission theft. It gets around the Google "one-ad-per-domain" rule, since the traditional hoplink does not appear (just a bunch of unintelligible code). This helps you by avoiding bidding conflicts with other affiliates using uncloaked hoplink ads to the same vendor. Also, to set up a cloaked link you copy the code that CB Elite gives you to a page to be mounted on your site. This is an index page which can be used as any other page on your website to add keywords in the Title and desciption to improve your SEO.

Using the ClickBank Elite cloaking feature saves me 70-80% of the time that it used to take me to cloak my links manually.

On the negative side, on my system the auto download for the CllickBank marketplace feed did not work. However it is easy enough to download the CB feed directly, unzip it and put it in the proper folder. Maybe the auto download feature of ClickBank Elite works on other systems that don't have three different zip programs like mine does.

Also, the only drawback I see to ClickBank Elite's CB Ads is that, although they look fine, the text was written to sell to affiliate marketers, not to ultimate consumers. Many ads come out emphasizing high conversion rates and/or 50 - 75% commission rates... hardly the thing you want to show to possible buyers. Perhaps a workaround could be done for that.

In summary, altogether ClickBank Elite is a very useful tool and it fills a distinct need vacuum. It should do very well. I recommend it.