When it comes to marketing your products or becoming an affiliate marketer, getting the right platform is something that is absolutely essential. Fortunately, there are a number of different platforms which you can use to promote your – or someone else’s – products, and two of the most popular platforms include Amazon and Clickbank. Both of these platforms offer benefits and drawbacks, and understanding these will allow you to choose the platform that offers the best service for your needs.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Regardless of the platform that you choose for your affiliate marketing, the general concept of doing so will be the same. For product sellers looking to sell their products, affiliate marketing works by generating leads which in turn will hopefully result in more sales of the product. For affiliate marketers, promoting these products will result in a small commission being paid to the affiliate marketer when a customer makes a purchase as a result of their promotion of the product, generating an income passively – for affiliate marketers who get their strategy for marketing right, this can give some impressive profits for sure!
Amazon: The Pros and Cons
The most obvious affiliate marketing platform that you might want to consider getting involved with is the Amazon platform. What with Amazon being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, selling sites online, and with over 150 million members using the website on a monthly basis – far outstripping even Walmart’s online site, which sees only a ‘meagre’ 75 million users per month or so – it is easy to assume that Amazon is the best place to get involved with affiliate marketing, but is this the case? Is Amazon Affiliate a good choice of affiliate marketing platform for you to choose?
Amazon Affiliates has over 1 million members in the database and, after Adwords, it can be said that Amazon Affiliates is the second most popular online advertising platform for website owners – showing just how many people put their faith in this website when it comes to their affiliate marketing.
Benefits of Amazon Affiliate
Amazon Affiliate is, as the name would suggest, hosted by Amazon, and this makes it a great choice of affiliate marketing site to get involved with for trust and reliability purposes; furthermore, this also helps to improve the conversion rate of the platform when compared to other affiliate platforms. Furthermore, there are a huge number of products available for affiliate marketers to consider and this can potentially allow for an unlimited income stream! Signing up with Amazon Affiliates is also free.
Drawbacks of Amazon Affiliate
Amazon Affiliate is a hugely popular affiliate marketing platform and for already registered users, it can be a great choice of platform – however, new users will need to refer customers to 3 sales before their account will get fully approved and reviewed, which can be a drawback if you’ve never used the platform before. Furthermore, for new users, the commission rate can be lower than for some other affiliate platforms at just 4% ; as you progress through your career as an affiliate marketer, though, this is likely to increase as you get more referrals under your belt and prove your worth as an affiliate marketer to the team and platform.
Clickbank: The Pros and Cons
Clickbank is an alternative to Amazon Affiliates which you may wish to consider when looking at the best affiliate marketing sites. Though it might not be quite as big as Amazon – by a long shot, actually – Clickbank is still a hugely popular choice of affiliate marketing site, if it’s 6 million worldwide clients and 30,000 daily transactions are anything to go by, and it is even in the list of the top 100 internet retailers for North America. Clickbank sells both physical and digital products on its site and its reputation could make it a good choice for someone looking to get involved with Affiliate marketing.
Benefits of Clickbank
There are a number of different benefits that could make Clickbank the choice of Affiliate Marketing platform that is right for you. The site is free to sign up with and you can begin using it immediately, in comparison to Amazon Affiliates where you will need to get 3 approved sales leads before being able to fully engage with the site. Moreover, they also offer a good selection of products for affiliate marketers – although not nearly as many as Amazon Affiliate will offer – which can make the potential income through the site look good. However, the most notable benefit of choosing Clickbank is for its ridiculously generous commission rates; some products can see commissions of 50% or more on their value, making this a potentially great source of income if you can target the right products!
Drawbacks of Clickbank
There are a number of drawbacks with the Clickbank platform which might make it a less positive choice than it originally sounds. Indeed, though there are some incredible commission rates to be found on the site, you’ll need to do your research to make sure you also avoid the low-quality offers that are hosted on the platform too in order to make proper cash! Furthermore, the refund rates can be higher than for normal networks – which can mean a lot of your income may end up having to be paid back if the product is refunded – and the site only provides its users with very basic reports, too, which may make it harder for you to optimize your earning.
Final Thoughts
Both Amazon Affiliate and Clickbank offer notable pros and cons, and as an affiliate marketer, you need to know how to sort through these benefits and drawbacks to choose the platform that is right for you. Therefore, it is imperative that you do your research before deciding whether Clickbank or Amazon Affiliate marketing is the right choice for you to follow – but, it should be noted, if you get this right, there could be great profits available as a result of commission fees for your effort.
