I’m sure a few of you have already noticed that over the weekend this site has started showing Clickbank ads that look similar to AdSense ads.
I’ve been trying out Clicksor and Chitika on another site as potential replacements for AdSense and I’ve not been impressed so far, (revenue does NOT match AdSense) so thought it was time to give Clickbank ads a try which in theory could make a lot more money than AdSense.
On Saturday I manually hacked my version Talian AdSense Ready WordPress SEO Theme (best theme on the site) to run Clickbank ads instead of AdSense ads and two days on I’ve now fully converted the theme to run Clickbank in a similar way to how the Talian theme runs AdSense (add your Clickbank username and your good to go: less than one minute to setup, any idiot could do it).
I’ve not run the Clickbank version of Talian long enough to decide if it’s going to make as much or more money than AdSense, however there’s no reason why it shouldn’t perform well.
AdSense ads vs Clickbank ads
AdSense is easy to setup, Google AdSense provides decent instructions, Clickbank ads on the other hand are a pain to setup, the code I found from Clickbank didn’t even work, so had to find a 3rd party source!!! Ignoring ease of setup when you compare potential Clickbank revenue to AdSense revenue we should see an increase for the following reasons.
Google AdSense is highly unlikely to share more than 10% of the revenue it receives (vaguely recall reading it was estimated around 8%?) from it’s advertisers. Google AdSense doesn’t publish what percentage it shares with it’s publishers, but it’s going to be relatively low.
Clickbank publishers disclose their revenue share and it can be as high as 75%, IME most products fall around the 50%+ revenue share, which from an affiliates perspective is great: most affiliate programs offer below 10%, so you have to really work your butt off to make money.
Clickbank products tend to sell for over $20 each, so a Clickbank affiliate is likely to earn at least $10 (50% revenue share) a sale on average (for the products I promote individually my average is over $25 a sale). One good Clickbank sale can easily beat a good AdSense day on a low traffic site.
This means a website owner can in theory make far more from Clickbank compared to AdSense. That’s assuming they can get sales and that’s going to depend a lot on the niche and quality of Clickbank products available :-)
WordPress Clickbank Theme Features
Like with Talian AdSense Ready SEO WordPress theme, the Clickbank version has all the search engine optimization features (it’s by far the best SEO WordPress theme online today) and offers many of the AdSense features, but for Clickbank.
If you’ve used Clickbank ads already you’ll know unlike AdSense ads the keywords Clickbank uses are NOT automated, you have to add them yourself which for most users will mean one set of keywords for an entire domain (not a good idea). I’ve solved this problem as follows.
On the home page and monthly type archive pages the Clickbank keywords used to determine which ads to show is the name of the website.
On single blog posts and static blog pages, the title of the post/page is used as the Clickbank keywords.
On category and tag pages, the category/tag name is used as the Clickbank keywords.
On search results pages, the search query is used as the Clickbank keywords.
I can probably add the ability to also include a custom field for the keywords, so if you build your own meta tags or something page by page you might be able to use those (I’ll need some feedback about what people use).
I’ve so far tested the Clickbank theme on two domains and they instantly gave very good results. Don’t know about you guys, but I was getting sick to death of seeing that loose fat cartoon like ad on all my AdSense running domains (blocked those ads!) and this sort of thing should not happen with my Clickbank theme.
With AdSense you are limited to preset ad unit sizes, with Clickbank you decide the precise size on an ad unit and how many ads to show. I’ve included a good selection of ad sizes that match some of the popular AdSense ad units and some unique ones like at the bottom of a single blog posts content (like on this page) you’ll find at the bottom of the main content a 540px wide ad unit with just one Clickbank ad within it. If you look at the category pages near the bottom there’s a 540 wide ad unit with 6 Clickbank ads, two rows of 3 ads (you’d have to use two AdSense ad units to get the same result). With Clickbank you can set the number of rows and columns, so you could have 4 rows and 4 columns (4×4) equals 16 ads in one ad unit!
With AdSense you are limited to 3 content ad units and 3 text link ad units. There are no limits with Clickbank, normally with AdSense I’ll have one sidebar ad, I currently have the new Clickbank theme to have 6 sidebar Clickbank ad units available (3 with a heading and 3 without a heading): on this site I’ve added three sidebar Clickbank ad units, one with a header “Related Products” with 6 ads on the top right menu, and two ad units with no headers, one with two ads and one with one Clickbank ad. The combinations are practically limitless other than I need to limit the options to a reasonable number (will probably have around 20 ad unit sizes available: happy to take suggestions).
Hit one issue so far with the ad unit colours, I’d like to include the option to choose from two colour sets so the sidebar ad units have a mustard colour background and the content ad units have a white background. Currently can only have one colour set.
I’d also like to be able to mix and match AdSense and Clickbank ad units, but that might be hard to achieve :-) So currently it’s one theme for AdSense and one theme for Clickbank.
Clickbank Membership Site
Rather than sell this as a single product I’m thinking about selling the new Clickbank theme via Clickbank and bundling in with all the other AdSense themes in one membership site (might stop selling themes individually). Not sold products via Clickbank before, so that’s about as far as I’ve got on what the possible options are, but the good news is others will be able to promote the theme and make affiliate revenue (I’ve had more than a few emails asking for the option :-)).
For current customers I’ll at least give them a significant discount equal to whatever they’ve already paid me off what ever fee I decide on if they choose to upgrade.
I can’t make any promises on how long it will take for me to get everything setup, I made the mistake with Talian 04 AdSense theme to say a few weeks and it took months for me to find the time to finish it, so…
Quite excited about this theme, should make more money than AdSense, so I’ll be testing it on multiple sites and post the results.
Update: Clickbank shut it’s AdSense like ads program :-(, so removed Clickbank ads from the Talian 5.5 Ad Theme.
Website - SEO Gold
Forex Clickbank Ads
Hi David,
I purchased and install the Talian 05 Theme recently, after using it to set up my Forex website I found out that the clickbank ads on my site are neither related to my post nor my website keyphrase. please how do i adjust this.
Clickbank Ads on Forex Signal Systems Site
I had a look at your Forex site and the Clickbank ads are very poorly themed.
The problem is with the name format of your site.
In Talian 5 the Clickbank keywords are selected by looking at the title of a page. On the home page that’s the name of the site which.
So the Clicbank ads are looking for one keyword “forex-signal-systems” which will find no results, so the Clickbank ad will show random results.
Solution is rename the title of your site to
Forex Signal Systems
Which is also better SEO wise and looks better than having hyphens.
In the next update you’ll be able to set sitewide Clickbank keywords for sites that aren’t well themed. So you could have the single keyword Forex for example.
David
Clickbank Ads on Forex Signal Systems Site
CBProAds Clickbank Products WordPress Widget
Hi David:
This is a “weird” problem.
I have a number of sites using the Talian 05 theme, and all are look good, except one.
Here’s how I set-up the widget section on the site that’s acting weird …
Side Bar 1:
9GATLink Adverts 01
1GAT Adverts ClearBG
Side Bar 2:
9GAT Clickbank 01
Text Widget (180×150 Ad By CBProAds)
6GAT Recent Articles
TAG Cloud
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only difference I have on this site as compared to the rest of the sites using the Talian theme is the text widget for the CBProAds … everything else is the same.
This is what happens …
On the home page, only one of the side bar widgets appear. And what’s interesting/frustrating is that the Side Bar 2 widgets only appear, and they appear where the Side Bar 1 widgets are supposed to appear. Nothing is displayed in Side Bar 2.
However, when I click on the link to read the whole blog post from the excerpt, both Side Bar 1 and Side Bar 2 widgets are displayed like they’re supposed to.
I checked the other pages, for example, the About, Disclaimer, Disclosure and Privacy page, and the side bar widgets display just fine.
The problem only appears on the home page.
I removed the CBProAds text widget from the Side Bar 2 entry thinking that was the problem, however, that did not resolve the issue.
Any ideas???
Thanks,
Glenn
CBProAds Clickbank Products WordPress Widget
WordPress Plugin Breaking RSS Feed Excerpt?
Without seeing the site it’s difficult to say, but my guess would be one of the posts has an HTML error near the top of the page and the excerpt code is ‘showing’ the HTML (which it shouldn’t).
You can probably track down the post at fault by loading the pages on the home page until you find one where the sidebars break.
If it’s what I think it is I had another customer with this issue. Basically some articles added by the Massive Passive Profits Plugin are not having the excerpts processed correctly and it breaks the excerpts which Talian (many themes) uses.
I suspected it was an RSS feed plugin doing something strange as it’s not Talian breaking an RSS feed excerpt (themes don’t interact with the feed URL).
I’d need to see the site to be sure. If you don’t want to post a URL here feel free to email me. Ideally I’d have links to a few of your sites you’ve setup the same for comparison.
David
WordPress Plugin Breaking RSS Feed Excerpt?
WordPress Autoblog Error Fixed
Hi David:
Thank you very much for that tip!
After a fresh load of posts on the site in question, the side bar problem appeared to “move” from the 1st page to the 2nd page. I checked the next page (#3), and the side bars were intact and displayed correctly.
I was able to isolate the problem post on page #2, deleted it, and the side bar issue was corrected.
Thanks again for your advice on this issue!
Glenn
P.S. Glad to hear that the Talian theme v. MPP theme has been resolved!
WordPress Autoblog Error Fixed
How to Add Amazon Vertical Carousel Widget to WordPress?
Hi David,
Seriously I a newbie at this blogging thingy and trying to get the hang of it. I’ve been using your theme for about a few weeks now and still trying to make a sale from Amazon and Clickbank (hopefully that will happen soon). Anyway I just received an email from Amazon asking me why I’ve not made any sales yet since the day I joined their affiliate program. I’ve been advise to place a carousel widget which Amazon is providing to promote their goods. Somehow or rather I do agree with them as you know sometimes pictures do sell better than words. My question is:
Is there anyway I can place the Amazon vertical carousel widget in the sidebar?
There are 2 sizes to choose from, 120 X 500 or 160 X 600.
Waiting for your reply. Thank you.
Regards
Nazar Khan
Melbourne, Australia
How to Add Amazon Vertical Carousel Widget to WordPress?
AdSense vs Clickbank vs Amazon Ads Revenue
Clickbank and Amazon sales will be at a lower rate than making money from the AdSense ads. With AdSense a click means you get paid, with Clickbank/Amazon requires a click and the visitor to buy a product.
Can work out a lot more than AdSense overall for a niche with high price products (extreme would be selling new cars :-)) and you’ll make barely anything in a niche like books (inexpensive products).
Trick is to find affiliate niches with quite a lot of potential customers (no visitors = no clicks at all) and relatively high value products. Trial and error basically.
I’m not familiar with the Amazon vertical carousel widget, I’d try adding the code as a text widget in the widget menu. You might have to fiddle with any HTML related to the Amazon vertical carousel widget to match it with Talian 05 colour scheme etc… If you can’t get it to work as you want it, post the URL of the site with the Amazon vertical carousel widget (add it as a text widget) and I’ll take a look.
In the update (hoping to release this month) plan to add custom ad options, so this should be much easier. Might even add an Amazon ad version (like Clickbank/AdSense ads), not sure yet.
David
AdSense vs Clickbank vs Amazon Ads Revenue
WordPress Clickbank Theme HTML Errors
Hi David,
sorry to be so much trouble. I was checking my site with the place that tells you when you have errors in your html.I found that the script hopfeed that feeds clickbank ads, causes errors. I turned clickbank off in the config and my site passed. I had 4 errors before. If you would like to check it send me an email and i will turn clickbank back on for you.
Billy
WordPress Clickbank Theme HTML Errors
Clickbank WordPress Theme Validation Error
That’ll teach me to validate without turning every feature on :-)
Won’t cause any problems, it’s a minor validation error, but if you want to remove the validation error for checking for errors that might cause issues edit the file clickbank-functions.php
Change
to
and
to
David
Clickbank WordPress Theme Validation Error
Amazon Ads Integration
I hope you can add Amazon Ads Integration like Clickbank ads.
I think it would be great to see it at our blog.
thanks
Clickbank Ads
Hi Dave
My Clickbank ads have disappeared. They’re turned on and the widget is in place but no ads. Don’t know what I’ve done, I did have them turned off for a while and when I turned them back on I first got the Google error in their place, but now I don’t get anything.
At the Clickbank end all I have done is change my password.
I realize it will probably be something stupid but please bare with me this is my first site
Regards another Dave
Clickbank Ads
Clickbank Hopad Builder Disabled
The Clickbank Hopad Builder code will be completely disabled (by Clickbank) this month (September 2012), so the Stallion Clickbank ads will no longer function correctly.
In the next Stallion update I’ll be completely removing Clickbank ads from the theme, thinking about adding Amazon as a replacement.
I’m taking some time off developing Stallion (probably until after Christmas, not sure yet been neglecting my sites and need to spend sometime developing my sites), in the meantime disable Clickbank on your sites. Once Clickbank is disabled in Stallion it has no impact on a site.
David
Clickbank Hopad Builder Disabled