My Own ClickBank Integration Application Readying For Launch

The last couple of weeks I have had an increased interest in the possibilities of ClickBank in regards to monetizing a web site.

The biggest problem I have always had with ClickBank is basically two issues; the first being that it's so time consuming to manually check for which ads are still good and which are expired. The second is that so many of the web pages that ClickBank ads link to scam-looking web sites, even though many are perfectly acceptable, valid products.

The second concern of mine is hard to do much about without serious manual research, but the first, due to my new application I have been working on, is actually very easy. The method I have chosen, as can be demonstrated by the picture at the right, is to use keywords and phrases, combined with banned words and phrases, to select ads via a fulltext database query of the currently available ads.

Every morning I get an XML feed of ClickBank's ads, I parse them out and insert them into my database for querying. The result of the keywords and banwords generate a valid RSS feed of a preselected number of ads, at random, from the pool of ads that match the query.

What I have found thus far, after testing it on a couple web sites of mine (one being this blog) is that the number of clickthroughs is decent, but, like ClickBank always is, the number of purchases is minimal. ClickBank is all operated on a CPA basis, meaning "cost per action", which, in this case, the required action is a purchase. The upside is that the payout on purchases is pretty good, so one purchase is a lot more money than dozens of clicks via a PPC ad system such as Google AdSense.

From my experience so far, the keywords and banned words seem to work very well, as they also accept phrases, and the query is done via a boolean fulltext query with banned words and phrases queried with  "-" prepended on each word and phrase that is banned. With this you can loosely ban words or target specific ads by banning a specific phrase that matches all or part of a specific ad.

I am really hoping to be able to release this is a paid service in the coming weeks to all bloggers and web site owners. Bloggers in particular will find this incredibly easy to work with, as, most blogger service very easily implement RSS feeds, and all web site owners will find RSS feed parses easy to build, and even easier to find code around the net to help display it. I chose the RSS format specifically because of the very common specifications and wide availability of scripts and user support.