Another Father Dave ‘How To’ video
There are lots of things you’ve got to work through before you can sell your stuff online: inventory, prices, marketing, site design, sales copy, traffic techniques, domain names, bandwidth quotas, and more, but there is one essential thing that you have to get done first, and it’s the most simple step of all – set yourself up with Clickbank account.
Choose Clickbank as your primary payment processor. That’s my advice. Whether you’re selling your own stuff or you’re looking to sell somebody else’s, do it through Clickbank! Why? Do I have shares in Clickbank? No. Because they are a simple one-stop ecommerce solution with zero monthly fees and a built in affiliate program.
When I put my first product online back in 2000, I tried to be responsible, and took all the steps that I had been told were necessary. I made sure I had the right sort of bank account. I subscribed to a payment processor. I got myself set up to receive the right variety of credit cards. As a result, I was paying three different companies significant monthly fees before I sold a thing.
And it’s not just the cost that made it a pain. A three-part system means three companies to deal with, three times the paperwork, and three times the number of things that can go wrong.
Don’t underestimate the significance of this last factor. From time to time Clickbank does go down (and it pays to have a backup solution), but I’d sooner be relying on one system rather than three, as a glitch at any one point in the process will mean your whole system fails.
Anyway, it took me two years before I was able to swallow my pride and drop the entire clunky commerce system I had created and switch to Clickbank, and I’ve never had an issue since.
Now every product I sell (whether mine or as an affiliate) goes through Clickbank. Now I have an entirely reliable system that has:
- No monthly fees, and the amount deducted from each transaction is frankly negligible.
- An affiliate program that allows me to get paid for recommending other people’s products and/or to pay others a percentage of the sale price when they sell my product.
- An ecommerce processor that sends me cheques like clockwork, every two weeks.
There is one major problem with Clickbank. They don’t allow you to sell physical products. You can only sell electronic downloads through Clickbank – music, ebooks, software, etc. If you’re trying to sell your audio sermon collection, this won’t be a problem. But if you’re trying sell your church pews, you’ll need to use Paypal – the second greatest payment processor in the world.
At any rate, there’s nothing to stop you signing up with both, and indeed you should. Both systems cost nothing to join and the sign-up process is dead easy in both cases. But in order to make it even easier, click the link below to watch a video that takes you by the hand through the sign-up process.
You’ll be amazed how easy it all is. And you’ll be even more amazed when you discover just how valuable your Clickbank affiliate link can be to you.
(video opens in a new window)
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer,
author, father of four.
www.FatherDave.org
