There are thousands of people worldwide who want to, or are just starting to, get into the world of Internet Marketing. It has long been recognised that for those people who want to make some money on the Internet, but don't have a product or service to sell, can't go too far wrong by starting out in Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a good starting point, because it doesn't matter that you don't have your own product or service to sell. Instead, you promote other peoples' products and earn a commission on any sales made as a result of your promotion.

Due to the nature of the Internet, digital products are very popular. These can be eBooks, reports, software programs, telephone ring-tones, images, and videos etc. Once created, these products have no duplication costs, and storage and delivery costs are negligible.

ClickBank grew up around the digital products retail market. They act as a payment processor for sales of any of the products in their Marketplace. Anyone can register a free ClickBank affiliate account, after which they may promote any of the thousands of products that are registered with ClickBank. When a purchase has been made, the affiliate who introduced the buyer to the product is paid their fair share of the money - a commission for bringing in the sale.

Commissions on ClickBank marketplace products are set by the vendor and may be anything up to 75% of the purchase price. That's what makes the ClickBank system so attractive. There are numerous products in the ClickBank marketplace that are being sold for $47 or more and pay the affiliate 75%. That's a very attractive incentive to the affiliate marketer.

So, having signed up for your ClickBank account, you start promoting one or more of the products. If you're just starting out, progress may be slow, but you eventually make a few sales. You notice that you have passed the payment threshold and eagerly await your check from ClickBank.

But it doesn't arrive.

Then you discover that there are a few other criteria that you must meet before ClickBank will pay you your hard-earned commission.

Customer Distribution Requirement
It turns out that you must meet the following criteria:

1. The sales that you make must have been made using at least 5 different credit cards.
2. Sales must have been made using more than one different payment method (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal etc).
3. Rule 1 applies only to credit cards. Different PayPal accounts do not count.

This means that you could have made hundreds of sales to customers using PayPal, and you still won't get your money until you meant the remaining criteria.

It is at this point that so many budding affiliates lose hope and give up. They have accrued some money in their ClickBank account, but they can't get their hands on it.

Dormant Account Policy
Having given up your marketing efforts, the next rules start to kick in. If your account is dormant for 90 days, ClickBank start to charge a handling fee on accounts that have a positive balance. The longer it stays dormant, the more they charge. Eventually, you could find that ALL of the money in your account has been absorbed by ClickBank.
The following scale of charges are applied:

• $1 if the account is dormant for 90 days
• $5 if the account is dormant for 180 days
• $15 if the account is dormant for 365 days

ClickBank pays out at 2-weekly intervals, and it is at those times that the charges are levied.

The charges are applied at EVERY payment time.
So if you account has been dormant for 180 days, you will be charged $5. If your account is still dormant 2 weeks later, you will be charged $5 again. And again, and again every 2 weeks until your account becomes active again, or your balance reaches $0.

Note that you can reduce your payment threshold from the standard $100, but ClickBank levy a fee of $2.50 for every check they send, so making it too low will decrease the amount of money they send. And if you haven't met the 5 credit card and 2 payment methods rule, reducing the threshold won't help.

So when you get involved in selling with ClickBank, you really need to keep up the momentum, or you will find that all your marketing efforts have been in vain.