Home James...

Anyone who finds their way here from June 2010 onwards may care to click once more and go to this blog's new home which you will find a lot better kept and more up to date than this one!

The Reason We Are All Here

OK, it's not the mystery of the Universe laid bare, but one principal reason for setting up the blog was to explain the slightly hidden path to obtaining a clickbank refund for those who haven't done it before.

Imagine my relief when I find someone who has already explained the procedure more succinctly and precisely than I would probably have managed. Check out PR Barlow's MoneySchemes.Net Blog in general (I haven't yet found a post I didn't like) and in particular the post on CB refunds - http://www.moneyschemes.net/clickbank-refund-how-to-get-a-clickbank-refund/

I left this comment, which I reproduce here as it hasn't been moderated into visibility at the time of writing this...

"Heck - I had a whole domain name and blog set up to tell people how to do this. Now the best thing I can do is just give a link back to this. Actually, I read of another method which I haven't tried, which is just to mail your purchase id to refunds@clickbank.com, without any explanation whatever, but I find that one implausible. I did (only) once get a vendor block the refund (97% winning sports bets which actually relied on a martingale progression) but on appeal to clickbank they relented."

Meanwhile, the battle against dross continues apace. I just succumbed to another purchase with huge claims ($25,000 in a single day!) only to find the first 32 pages out of 40 telling me how to buy an old domain name and set up a wordpress blog using fantastico! The "meat" of the stunning new greyhat technique was hardly worth waiting for either. I tweeted it thus:

"Blogging Espionage? Buy old domains, fill with backdated blog posts, sell links, posts and banner ads. That will be $37 thanks very much"

Rinse and Repeat

There is something magical about the word "Blueprint" when used for marketing purposes. It implies an engineered level of precision in delivering exactly what is being promised. Who can resist an offer to view the "exact blueprint used to make thousands of dollars in a single day". I have certainly bought into many such offers. It was only when not achieving the expected level of income (for which read "any level of income") that I started thinking about the whole concept of following in someone else's footsteps.

To start with, why are they spilling the beans on something which has been successful for them over a long period of time ...unless it has recently stopped being so successful. If a system goes off the boil, wouldn't it be tempting (while your recent stats still look reasonable) to cash in by selling on?

Secondly, why should one person's success with a particular niche or product mean that the same success can be replicated by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of new entrants, using cookie-cutter squeeze and sales pages competing for the same size pool of customers (or even smaller, if the originator has been particularly successful).

Thirdly, why should I believe any of the weasel words of their sales page anyway? The large fonts and bright colours go to the big juicy rhetorical questions "How would you like torrents of unstoppable cash pouring into your Clickbank account?" Very much thank you - is that what you are promising? Err... no, actually. If we read the very small print at the bottom of the page we will find that not only is such performance not guaranteed, if they are particularly honest they will be saying that most people will not make a penny or will actually lose money after buying the product. Read the bottom section first and carefully next time you open a sales page - you'll be amazed at what they are obliged to tell you these days (and don't think for a second that they would be doing this without a regulatory gun to their head!).

Such An Easy Decision...

You send me a mail with the header Confirmed: Your 1st Sale Online and there had better be a commission figure inside. But no, affiliate DrSuzanneG decided to promote Affiliate Silver Bullet with that headline and then cut and paste a standard sales email into the body. Bye bye Dr Suzanne, ggaf_hm list at aweber, Dr Jon and Affiliate Silver Bullet as a whole.

Seriously, that would have had to be some ace piece of copywriting to overcome the disappointment I felt at being suckered into opening that mail up. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at being tricked again isn't the way you want to maintain our relationship.

Meanwhile, I'm still in two minds about Conversions Confidential. Nice piece of sales literature - I'm sure there are things I could learn from it. But George Brown's endorsement isn't worth what it once was. After all, he tried selling me Miracle Traffic Bot and SEO Linkvine. And he doesn't answer my emails when I tell him what's garbage and what's not. On the other hand, he films his videos in exotic locations with reasonable production values, which lends credibility when compared with unshaved hoodie-wearers transmitting from run-down student bedsits.

I finally opened up CB Pirate. Who told them that a Pirate map was the best way to orientate the new user? If I have this right, then they have already set up all of my squeeze pages and sales sites and all I need to do is get some traffic to my individual links. This is one of those many instances where I bought the product but didn't have the time or the inclination to sit down and study it. Looks like I might have missed a trick. I can remember exactly what tipped the scales in their favour - they showed a Clickbank account with pennies, pounds and low hundreds in commissions, rather than the thousands of dollars of unstoppable income that most advertise. That little bit of restraint and humility on their part (even if it was faked) earned them a sale. Marketers take note... or maybe I'm not that typical a consumer!

From a Gripe to a Top Tip

What's annoying first time through has since turned into a nice little moneysaver for me. I'm talking about the second-chance popups on sales pages that you try to leave. I was aggrieved to buy a YourAdBlaster subscription at the full price ($47) only to find that as I left the page I was offered a discount of $10, too late to take advantage of it. So now I try to remember not to buy from the main page, however much I yearn for the product. Back all the way out at least once and see what additional bonuses, discounts and other goodies get thrown at you.

Of course there is always the chance that when you read "You will only be shown this page once" it may be true. But I'll take my chances. Today, it was George Brown, of Google Sniper fame, sending me the sticky offer - Conversion Confidential, or was it the other way round? I firmly intended to buy it, but from another computer, but in trying to escape from the page I found the price whittled down twice from $77 to $57. It seems that there was just one remaining at that price (!) but again I'll take my chance on still being able to obtain the offer when I check back later tonight.

Of course there is a another very effective but slightly underhand way of reducing your clickbank costs, which is to substitute your own clickbank affiliate link, thereby earning commission on your sale to yourself. It's hard to believe that clickbank members aren't already using this, which may be one reason why Internet Marketers are extremely difficult to sell to. But while I'm waiting for the dam to burst and an unstoppable flood of commissions to hit my account from my latest purchase, I'll settle for saving money any way I can....

Why I Hate Upsells...

When I've just pondered for half an hour (ok 2 minutes) before deciding that the latest IM whizz-bang system is worth my hard-earned $47, I don't want to be told on the next page that what I really really need to turbocharge my earnings is the Platinum Pro Booster version for an additional $67. Step forward Tweetomatic Profiteer - guilty as charged. Come on guys, I haven't even got the wrapping off my newest shiniest toy and you're already making me feel like a cheapskate for not upgrading. Bad psychology for me, but I guess it must work on someone.

Almost, but not quite as bad, are the prolific authors like Ewen Chia. When I have just bought something that I am assured is all I'll ever need to make my IM success a certainty, surely I could be spared the follow-up mails a day later telling me about a completely different system which is going to pull me off in a different direction.

A body can only focus on so many things at once without going cross-eyed and falling over. One day a guru is telling me that Banner advertising is the way to go, the next with equal conviction that Pay Per View is the answer to my prayers. Enough already - I'm going to take an axe to some of these forests of lies and get mediaeval on their butts.

For today I will start with a refund from CB Predator. 18 Clicks, they promised, to be up and running with a fully-fledged affiliate campaign. 18 Clicks. What they didn't mention was:

- the need to have a pre-existing domain and hosting arrangement (which came as a complete shock to the newbies who had bought the 18 clicks idea)
- the need to re-write page after page of copy based on the template they provide, again something of an ordeal to the uninitiated.
- the fact that hundreds of new entrants simultaneously targeting the same few niches with copy/paste identikit websites is likely to dilute the returns shown for the original site.

I'm sure as can be that the only people making money from CBP are the vendors and their heavy-hitting affiliates.

The vendors have done their best to pull it out of the fire, with remedial baby-step classes and webinars, but to me it seems fair to judge them against their original promises. The unsubscription is done and the refund application will swiftly follow. One down, a gazillion more to go... Now, where's my receipt for Miracle Traffic Bot?

Starting As I Mean To Continue

With a rant... Lets leave aside for a moment the main theme of the title, which is to teach people how to get their clickbank refunds with least fuss. The thing which has me incensed at the moment is the crass way people are using list marketing to devalue the currency completely (before I've even had a chance to get my slice of the pie). For the benefit of those marketers who aren't completely blinded by dollar signs, here is a list of things which are getting my goat...

• Excessive frequency. I just unsubscribed from a pair of chumps who had sent me 14 mailings over the past 24 hours. I don't interact with my wife as often as these guys want to talk to me


• Misleading headings. If you say "Instant download link inside..." you'd better not be redirecting me to another double opt-in form. You already have my email, or I wouldn't have got the message, dummy...


• False urgency. "This page won't be up for long..." Yes it will - these are digital products and you've already given away their exclusivity by telling me about them. And countdown clocks, reminder mails and "almost missed it" messages aren't going to help convince me.


• Bonus overload. If you're giving me $4,000 worth of bonuses to get me to buy a $47 product, then either you're an idiot or they aren't really worth that much. Even I can figure that one out.

Bottom line, if you want to send me a freebie, be my guest, but it had better be attached to the mail or on the first linked page. If it's worth having, I'll open your other mails and be more kindly disposed when you want to sell me something. There - that wasn't so hard was it.

I guess it behoves me to say hello and introduce myself - Mark here, most recently associated with the Botfarm, a blog for discussion of all manners of automated money-making bots. My blog there was getting increasingly hijacked by my new interest in IM, so I finally decided to split the blogs and keep both more focussed. I actually obtained the domain name for clickbankrefunds.com so I may migrate to my own hosting at some stage (or at least redirect the domain here). I am also considering a more serious Rake's Progress sort of blog about IM, charting the course of my journey ( maybe to be called The Long Hard Road to Easy Money, and to be hosted at longhardeasy.com ). But in the meantime, there's just so much to laugh at. Bye for now.