ClickBank Affiliate Tip: Direct Link To Checkout
In today’s Affiliate Marketing Webinar, I shared a tip on how to get around bad sales copy when you want to promote a great product through ClickBank. The trick is to write your own sales copy for the product, and then link an order button directly to the checkout page.
Typically, when you are promoting a ClickBank product as an affiliate you will use what they call a “hoplink” to the merchant’s sales copy. That hoplink tracks the click-through’s and you get credit for every sale in the form of commission.
In the rare case that you want to bypass the merchant’s sales copy, you can set up a direct link to the checkout page that will still track your referrals. Here’s how you do that…
clickbank.net/sell.cgi?YOURID_MERCHANTID/ProductNumber/ProductName
You will need to put the “http://” in front of that, and also make sure the link comes out all on one line – it breaks into two lines here on this page, but you want to make sure to create the link with no spaces or breaks.
There are 4 things you need to edit in that link:
- YOURID which is your ClickBank ID
- MERCHANTID the merchant’s ClickBank ID
- ProductNumber
- ProductName
The product name and product number can be found in the merchant’s original checkout link. What I usually do is view the merchant’s sales copy page, then click View > Source in my browser. This brings up the source code for the page, and you can locate the order button and analyze their order link.
Obviously it is best to get the merchant’s permission to link directly to the checkout from your own sales copy for their product. 
You’ll also want to test your link once you create it…
Put the order link on your web page, and then click on it to make sure that it works correctly. Once you get to the ClickBank checkout page, put in your zip code and then scroll down to the bottom of the payment page to make sure that your affiliate ID shows up at the very bottom. This is how you know that the link works correctly, and and that it tracks you as the affiliate referrer.
Best,
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Hey,
I was just looking for a way to do this, and after finding your post I went searching for side-effects.
When you do direct to checkout, the cookie is not being placed on the prospect’s machine (this is actually on cb’s tos or faq somewhere). That is the reason why some people here said that the previous referrer gets the credit. The system thinks that he still is the referrer, due to lack of a new cookie…….
So, basically, you can ask people to clear cookies before going to checkout, but that’s a pain the you-know-what and IMO looks amateur-ish.. or hope that they’d never been to that offer before.
Oh, and tracking it out of the questions as well. And you really want to track! Believe me. Especially if you’re doing PPC.
Bad copy sucks and I wish there was a way to do it, but I guess this is not a solution for a serious campaign.
Cheers,
Alex
Thanks for this!!
I’m not sure why people are so concerned about losing a sale when another affiliate has already beaten you to the punch. In most all cases, this won’t happen. The customer is most likely seeing the product for the first time. If it happens once in a while, who really cares? it’s not going to make or break your campaign.
[...] Re: Advice on what to write my first copy for? Here’s a link that explains how to do the clickbank direct to thank you page route ClickBank Affiliate Tip: Direct Link To Checkout | ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog [...]
I have been looking for a clean way of doing direct linking to the order page but in the above example you dont show where to put the ?=tid information. I would like to track down to the keyword so this is important to me
thanks
Mark
[...] Wouldn’t This Be Great You can… And it is a good idea. ClickBank Affiliate Tip: Direct Link To Checkout | ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog [...]
[...] Re: Is this possible/legal/ethical? – Redesigning clickbank salesletters Here is instructions I found to do this. It was talked about previously here in another thread. ClickBank Affiliate Tip: Direct Link To Checkout | ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog [...]
Does not work anymore
I’ve made 5 sales in the last 10 days using the link structure discussed in the original post… It still works fine on my end.
Follow me @lynnterry on Twitter.
So it only doesn’t work if the prospect has recently viewed the same product through another cookie?
No, ClickBank has a last-cookie set up, so the last link they click is the one that gets the commission.
Follow me @lynnterry on Twitter.
Works for my purposes, thanks!! Took awhile to find this page.
I don’t see how it will work furthermore.
Now with the Hoplink Shield, this it’s no longer possible, at least if you make a new hoplink, cause for the older ones the system works in pararell. Or is there another way to implement this in this new situation ?
@George
Use cbengine.com to find products and get your affiliate link from the products. They don’t implement the hoplink shield automatically, so you won’t have that problem again
This is a really cool idea. Thanks for sharing it with us Lynn.
Gail J Richardson
Follow me @gailjrichardson on Twitter.
Now can I add ?tid=trackingid to the end of this url?