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
Hi George, apologies in advance for my naivety on this but are you suggesting we use cbengine to generate the vendors affiliate link and use this link to change and direct link to the sales page? If you want to link direct to the vendors sale page in future then use cb to generate hoplinks?
Thanks
southwest19@live.co.uk
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?
This method still does work. I was able to do it without using the “product name” How to do it:
1) find pay link (http://1.vendorname.pay.clickbank.net) The “1″ is product number.
2) you should have something like this:
http://clickbank.net/sell.cgi?myid_vendorid/1/
3) check like she said your affiliate id should be at bottom of checkout page.
As for tracking, I don’t see why you would want to track to checkout page. I only use tracking for Adwords keywords to my landing/sales page, once they are there it doesn’t matter to me they will buy or not buy. I’m only concerened on how I got them there initially.
As a virtual assistant and affiliate marketer myself, I have learned that some newbie marketers are losing huge amounts of money. They have the notion that it is easy to make money online when in fact, it takes a lot of hard work and patience.
If you buy a digital product on make money online niche, you will notice that there are numerous strategies to follow. With the booming of online market, it is becoming saturated each day. However, only a few can make at least one sale.
You really need to study the courses that you have purchased and IMPLEMENT what you learn.
Follow me @makemoneypinas on Twitter.
General but sound advice thanks Ronald
This method appears to be dead. I can’t get my affid to overwrite an existing affid using any of the instructions.
Follow me @jesusp on Twitter.
I have a question,ie if you do this,am I not violating the TOS of the Clickbank Vendor.I am also interested in knowing how are others promoting Clickbank products without direct linking to the Check out Page?While selling a Clickbank product,do Others create a landing page for themselves and then Direct Link to their hoplink containing the Sales Page of the Clickbank Product owner?
Hi Charles, just wondered if you managed to work an answer to the questions you have that I also share with you
Thanks
Jon
Use a CPA referral redirector plugin on a WordPress blog. Make sure to ue one that use a secret key for better security. Solves all of your problems, helps to cloak your links, redirect options, referral privacy (blank, pass through,privacy-replaced), and with a little creativity, total removal of the need for 3rd party content at all.
I think that anyone seeking to avoid bad copy by discussing direct linking has noticed that the day of becoming an affiliate for the already built websites and great copy are gone……….
Don’t fret, It’s not the death of the ebook, we’ve just gotten better at copy writing ourselves. For reaching this level you deserve the information above. Happy Marketing.
Follow me @timothywcrane on Twitter.
Disadvantages:
* The normal hoplink takes priority over this link: therefore an affiliate will not get commission if the visitor has previously gone through another affiliate’s hoplink
* The link does not set a cookie: therefore an affiliate will not get commission if the visitor later returns to the site without using that link
* This is an unofficial link. It is not listed at the ClickBank site, so it can be withdrawn at any time. So use with caution.
Source: http://www.clickbankguide.com/orderlink.htm
Thanks Lynn! It works!
I made a video at YouTube with this how-to, drawing from a video that was quite low quality, pretty much just repeating it in higher resolution. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feumYOj_XyQ
I made a blog post to accompany it at my Internet Marketing blog:
http://imthatim.com/18/how-to-link-directly-to-a-clickbank-product-order-page-from-your-own-sales-page-1
No marketing here – just sharing with other friends of Lynn’s! (Next IMTW podcast is When?)
Terry
Follow me @terrybritton on Twitter.
This is an awesome tip. However, I find that it often stands to reason that if the copy is poor, the product may not be much better. It’s not always the case, but how can you really tell?
I use this trick to create iFrame FB fan pages instead…
This is BRILLIANT! Especially because I am doing a lot of work with video…and most people still have the old long copy sales page…I can do an instant makeover on my OWN sites for their product!
Follow me @jameswedmore on Twitter.
Really allows so much more marketing flexibility, yet does not alter the underlying CB vendor-affiliate commission or relationship.
Follow me @b2bzone on Twitter.
I have tested this.
I went to an order page through another person’s affiliate id. so on the order page i have the other person’s id.
Then i constructed a link with my id directly to the order page. Still i see only the other person’s aff id. Funny though, my id is still appearing in the URL.
So, you could loose commission if you directly send prospects to the order page, incase there is a pre-existing cookie.
I just discovered your website and I may I say I really like it! Regarding this topic, wouldn’t it be better to purchase a domain and redirect straight to your affiliate product. Saves all the hassle of cookies etc etc. any thoughts?
Follow me @josephlautier on Twitter.
Thanks a lot for sharing this!
I have a quick question — will this work if a vendor passes a “seed” parameter to the checkout page e.g. if a vendor’s link to the CB checkout page looks something like this: http://1.SOMEMERCHANTID.pay.clickbank.net/?cbfid=XXXX/?APUN=YYYY&seed=ZZZZ
Even though your affiliate name will appear at the bottom of the CB checkout page, I think a customer will not be able to download the product in case of the above scenario. Any ideas?
[Some vendors pass a random value for the "seed" parameter to protect the product download page. This random value is unique for each and every sale. This is done to validate whether anybody with the download link has really purchased the product or not]
how do i pass affiliate id in direct payment url?
Follow me @nature_kp on Twitter.
Hey thanks so much for this “tutorial”. Now I can create my own salespages and link direkt to the checkout, this is very helpfull for affiliates…
Greets from Germany