It just so happens that the ClickBank corporate headquarters is less than an hour drive from my house. When I met the head people at ClickBank last year in London, they invited me over to visit them since I live right in their backyard. Recently I took them up on their offer and got an in-depth look into their business and a very revealing interview.

Walking into the building where ClickBank is located you would never guess it’s where a multi-million dollar company who sends checks to thousands of online marketers every month and sells millions of virtual products all over the world is located. It’s indiscreet, and I wasn’t sure I was in the right place until I saw a door with the ClickBank logo on it.

Finally, after almost a third of my life receiving checks from ClickBank and at times relying on them to survive, put gas in my car, feed my family, and using them to achieve financial success, I was about to walk through the doors of this mysterious company I’ve never known, but who I’ve had a deeply profound relationship with.

Going into the ClickBank headquarters was a ‘full-circle’ moment for me. In fact, until then I hadn’t realized just how tremendously they have impacted my life. After all, it was that $7.00 check I received from them so many years ago that was the catalyst that put me where I am today.

Once inside I was greeted by someone who was probably just near the door at the time. They don’t have a receptionist or secretary to greet you, no waiting room, and being a 100% online company, no need for one either. Nope, just lots of computer desks and people hard at work. It’s a nice place, but nothing over the top; in fact I believe I was one of their first vendor/affiliates to ever visit them in person.

It’s a fairly large place, with some private offices, meeting rooms, etc. Everyone I had met in London came out to greet me, including the CEO, VP’s, and many other techs, assistants, etc. It was a very warm welcome, and for everyone who ever wonders what kind of people are running ClickBank I can honestly say they are genuine, professional, honest, good people.

I was impressed with how large their tech development team is, to the left is a picture of me with some of them, I’m the tall guy standing in the middle. They were all very receptive and you could tell they’re working hard every day to work out any bugs, and improve their business.

So after getting the tour and meeting several ClickBank employees, I got a chance to sit down with friend and ClickBank VP of Business Development, Dush Ramachandran. The following is my interview with him…

Miles: My first question is for those who are new to ClickBank or maybe never heard of ClickBank. If you could just give me a brief history of what ClickBank does, how it started, and the structure and purpose of the company.

Dush: Sure, absolutely. So ClickBank started in 1998. It was founded by a scientist and entrepreneur, who got his PhD in math from Princeton, and he did a lot of work in the area of cryptography for the government, working for the NSA. While he was in that role, he started to think about how the future of commerce is likely to evolve, and it struck him that more and more, as the Internet became more prevalent; people would start to buy more products on the Internet and perhaps even get delivery of these products over the Internet, and digitally download the products. So what he wanted to do was to build technology which would allow that type of e-commerce to happen in a seamless way for people who could generate income by promoting these products and for people who actually created these products to be able to sell and offer these products to customers.

So he wanted to create a marketplace that would bring these three types of people together – people who created products, people who wanted to buy these products, and people who wanted to promote these products and earn commission. So that’s how ClickBank was born, and it, for the most part, has been growing ever since.

ClickBank started in 1998 with a small number of affiliates and publishers, and it’s been growing consistently over time, and we now have more than 110,000 affiliates who are active, and more than 12,000 publishers with over 35,000 products on ClickBank. Now, when I talk about 110,000 affiliates, these are the active ones. These are people who have a sale at least every three months. If you look at the total number of people with ClickBank accounts, it’s over 1.2 million. So it’s a pretty large community.

Now, there are 35,000 products, and it is the true long-tail phenomenon where every possible niche is catered for, everything from self-improvement to Internet marketing, from lifestyle and health to religion and philosophy. All kinds of areas are covered. And just as there are people who want to understand how to make money on the Internet, there are people who want to understand how to get fit, how to lose weight, how to manage relationships, how to propose, how to pop the question, all these kinds of things. And there are very successful publishers who publish products that deal with all of these types of subjects. And there are affiliates who promote these products. And there are customers. Currently, we do over 21,000 transactions a day. And on average, we’re doing about $1 million of revenue a day.

Miles: That’s amazing! I didn’t realize ClickBank did that many sales transactions or had that many affiliates. When I previously heard about 110,000 affiliates I had thought it was everybody who’d ever signed up for an account.

Dush: No, 110,000 is the number of active affiliates, and its still growing. There’s over 1.2 million that have signed up over time. And it’s not the same 110,000 that are always selling. It always keeps turning around, right? You would have affiliate A who sells something today and probably doesn’t sell anything for two or three months, and then he’ll have a sale. A good number of people do this – so this is a very interesting statistic that you might find somewhat informative – a good number of people make a part-time living on ClickBank, either as a publisher or an affiliate or both. Out of the 1.2 million accounts that we have, about 1.2 percent of them earn a full-time income out of ClickBank.

Miles: Well, I certainly can believe that because I know I do and I know a lot of affiliates and vendors who do as well.

Dush: A lot of people do. And this is similar to eBay. eBay has some 78 million people who buy and sell on eBay and some 1.2-1.3 percent of these people, earn a full-time income on eBay. So that’s ClickBank.

Miles: Amazing. Okay, next question for you. My father had recently signed up as a vendor with ClickBank to sell his book. He actually published a book, and he thought he might do better selling it as an e-book. So he signed up with ClickBank, but then he was lost and was like, “Okay, what now? How do I get affiliates?”
ClickBank has a huge affiliate base, and new vendors get listed in the marketplace, but that seems to have little effect unless you’re in the top 10, top 20, maybe, for your category. I also noticed you released ClickBank University. Is that something he could use to tap into the affiliate base? What’s the next step that new vendors like my father can do to get affiliates?

Dush: That’s a very good question. We want to do a far better job of helping new publishers and new affiliates that come to ClickBank become more successful. So there are a number of different initiatives that we’re taking in that regard. One is ClickBank University. Absolutely, there’s a whole lot of resources that are available through ClickBank University, where if he were to sign up and say, “I’m a vendor. How do I sell my product?”. In ClickBank University, we cover topics ranging from how to write an eBook to how do you create compelling copy? How do you create a sales letter that converts well? How do you attract affiliates? How do you write auto responder copy for your e-mails so that when people write to you and say, “Hey, I saw your product; I’d like to promote it,” how do you bring them into the family, and how do you keep them motivated and how do you provide assistance – there’s a whole lot of information about that. So yes, ClickBank University would be certainly something he should check out.

But in addition to that, right on the ClickBank website, we’re providing more resources, for example there are the publisher resources, and there are affiliate resources. If you go to the resources tab, we’re starting to build more resources relating to partnerships with companies that can build your website for you. So if you’ve written an e-book, but you don’t know what the next step is, our resources can help. How do you create a place you can host your product? How do you setup downloads? How do you protect your downloads from unauthorized access? How do you protect it with digital rights management, if that’s a concern to you? So we’ve got all of that kind of information that’s being provided.

You father should probably sign up for the newsletter, where we’re providing information like tips and techniques.

How do you get out and attract the attention of affiliates?

Well, one of the things we’re also doing is launching more advertising spots. We currently have 105 advertising spots, but we’re increasing that to about a thousand.

Miles: That was actually my next question. Could you talk a little bit more about advertising spots?

Dush: There’s going to be 10 times as many advertising spots than are available, and they’re not all going to be expensive. There are going to be some depending on the category of product, there’s lots of opportunities for him to make his product known.

There are things we’re thinking about doing like featured products, where we go through the marketplace and pick out products that are of interest. Then we feature them, which gets affiliates to look at that and say, “Well, that’s kind of interesting, I didn’t know that product existed.” So it gives the vendor another opportunity to get at some affiliates and get exposure to them.

Miles: Okay. How does one go about advertising there? Are you guys going to eventually put a form there where people can sign up and get prices or terms?

Dush: Absolutely. Right now, there’s a form that’s available on the website, but even with that, sales@clickbank.com. Just send an e-mail, and you can decide where you would like to advertise. There are a number of different places. There’s the account homepage, the login account homepage. Then on the main marketplace page, there are 27 ads. And then, on each category page, there are eight ad spots. Now, we’re opening up subcategory pages as well, so that opens it up to a further eight or nine per subcategory. So that expands it to about a thousand spots all over the site.

So if a particular product is in a particular category, you can choose to advertise either in that category, on the main marketplace page or in the subcategory page, wherever.

Miles: Yeah I found it kind of hard to advertise on the log-in page because it seems it’s always full. Then I’ve been told I’d be put on a waiting list and never heard anything, but then I see other advertisers get on there.

Dush: Well, I would recommend that if you would like to advertise on any page, please do put yourself on the waiting list because what happens is a lot of people say, “Oh, a waiting list, I’m not interested.” But what happens is we have an automated system, and when you enter on the waiting list, it just goes through order of priority. The ads run for a month at a time, so a publisher or vendor who buys an ad can only buy it for one month at a time.

At the end of the month, we say, “Do you want to renew?”, and some of the publishers say, “Yeah, I want to renew,” and they keep on renewing. There are others who say, “You know what, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to try a different location or whatever it is, and they drop out.” So when they drop out, what we do is go to the first person on the waiting list and say, “This spot has opened up. It’s so much per month. Are you interested?” And most often, they say yes. Sometimes they say no. If they say no, then we go to the next one. Spots are around $400-$500 a month, roughly.

Now, if you’ve been on the waiting list, it will naturally get to that point.

Miles: Eventually.

Dush: It happens fairly quickly. It shouldn’t take more than that now that we’ve opened up more spots, it shouldn’t take more than two or three months before you get on there. And once you’re on there, then you’re on there. As long as you want to continue to keep renewing, you can be on there as long as you want.

Miles: That’s true. I heard that you may be expanding the ClickBank TID. Is this something that you guys are going to do? Can you explain the TID a little bit?

Dush: Sure. The TID was introduced to help affiliates and publishers track various campaigns. So TID is a parameter that’s passed with the hoplink. So if, for example, you generate traffic through three different campaigns – one is a Google AdWords campaign, another’s an e-mail campaign, and maybe a third one is a Yahoo! Overture campaign. Each of these hoplinks, you would have a different TID. So it’s just a parameter that you add at the back of the hoplink. So when that transaction comes through, we’re able to parse that, and we’re able to report back to you through the hop analytics that says, “You’ve got this many hops from this campaign, this many hops from this campaign,” and then relate that to sales. So you can see which campaigns convert better.

Currently, the TID is eight characters long. It is alphanumeric characters, no special characters allowed, and it’s only eight characters long. Some of our larger affiliates have asked for more characters because then they can use more combinations, and they tend to use descriptive terms in the TID, like “GoogleAdWordCampaign1” or “GoogCamp1.” If they just used random alphanumeric, eight characters is plenty because that can generate millions of combinations, but people like to use meaningful terms, and so therefore we’re hearing from people that it would be nice if we could extend it beyond eight. So we’re certainly looking at extending that beyond eight characters.

Miles: Right, because one thing that I do is I promote a downloadable product, and sometimes they don’t buy it until later, and what I would like to do is throw the date the customer downloaded the program into the TID, but that would take up at least eight characters for the date. So with more characters I could do that and find out when they downloaded the software and then how long it took them from when they downloaded it to when they actually made a purchase.

Dush: Yeah, well, we’re looking at that seriously.

Miles: Okay. How have the new installment payments been working out? Have affiliates been finding more success with this form of payment?

Dush: Absolutely. Recurring billing as a whole, and installment payment as a specific example, have been doing extraordinarily well. Just to give you an example, we launched recurring billing in May of 2007, and in May, we piloted it with one vendor, and in May, we had a billing of $18 with that one vendor. By December, which was just six months later, we had 230-odd vendors signed up, and we had over $2 million just in December alone, right, in terms of billings. So it’s a really steep ramp, and it’s being adopted very, very aggressively.

So installment payment has been very attractive for vendors who have typically promoted or typically sold bigger ticket products over $200. However, that becomes a bit of a challenge for a lot of customers who can’t pay $200 up front, so we offer payment in between two to four installments. The maximum is four for installment payment. But for recurring billing, it can be anything. It could be $99. But for installment payment, we offer minimum of two, maximum of four and frequency, monthly. So you can take a $200 item and pay for it over four months, $50 per month, and that works out very nicely.

Miles: Four easy payments of $47.97 or something.

Dush: Exactly. And that works great. So yeah, affiliates have really picked it up and got going with it. The attractive thing for affiliates with recurring billing is that not only are they able to sell more products, but their commission continues through the life of the product. So it’s like being an insurance agent where you have a stream of revenue that’s coming your way even after the selling is done. You buy the AdWord once. You get the transaction once. But it’s a gift that keeps on giving, so it’s good stuff.

Miles: I like the sound of that! I also hear the new ClickBank order form was recently released and changed, and I assume this was primarily done to increase conversions, is that correct?

Dush: We were testing it. What we did was we tested several things. One is the new order form just in itself, which had credit card and PayPal side-by-side, so it wasn’t like you had to choose between credit card and PayPal and then go to a second step. So we had credit card and PayPal side-by-side. So all of the payment options were presented together. So that made it easier. Then, we tested the impact of putting in product information, product graphics – so first was title and description of the product. Second was including the product graphic, the box picture. Then the third was including the banner and gutter colors of the publisher.

We still need to test combinations of these different things together a little more before we’re able to fully release it because we obviously don’t want to do anything that hurts conversions, and we need to test relentlessly. If you have three variables, you got to test one alone, two alone, three alone, one and two, one and three, two and three – all these different combinations, to make sure that we understand how each of these combinations affect the conversions. So that’s what we’re in the process of doing.

Miles: Sounds great. What are you doing to address adware and spyware programs or other software that steal commissions or prevents hoplinks from setting cookies?

Dush: Almost every day a new thing comes up. I don’t know if you noticed a little while ago, McAfee’s Site Advisor put a red flag on the ClickBank.net site, but not on the ClickBank.com, which is the marketplace. ClickBank.net is just the order-processing bit. That’s just the order form. They put a red flag on that, and if you have Site Advisor loaded on your computer, any time you bring up any product that is sold on ClickBank, that’s shown as a red flag, or it was.

We tried to get to them through a number of different means. We called them. We waited online with their customer service to say, “Guys, this is ridiculous. What is the problem?” They said, “Oh, well, there’s one particular site that’s promoting movies, which may be copyright protected, and so that’s suspicious.” “Okay, fine. Look, we sell 35,000 products. We do over 21,000 transactions. We do over $1 million of revenue a day. Because of one site, you can’t block 35,000 other vendors, right? And you’re basically restricting trade. That’s illegal. You can’t do that.”

Anyway, it took a while for us to resolve the issue. We explained exactly how this was going on, what the ClickBank model was, and they recognized that, “Oh, right. Okay, we can’t block all of ClickBank.com and ClickBank.net.” So they lifted the ban, so that’s back to a green flag. Everything is good. And we said, “Okay, look, how about we work with you. You tell us when you identify a site that looks suspicious that is one of our vendor’s sites, you tell us. We’ll go work with the vendor, work with the affiliate, and figure out what we need to do to clean it up. We can do that proactively.” So they agreed. So it’s all clean now.

So we’re doing that on an ongoing basis. You might have noticed that Spybot Search & Destroy was blocking ClickBank cookies. So if you had Spybot loaded on your computer, it would just completely kill ClickBank cookies, and depending on the setting you put it at, it could block all cookies. So you go onto Amazon.com, and every-time you have to enter your password because they don’t know who you are because the cookie’s been blocked.

So two things are happening. We are as aggressive as we can possibly be. The minute we discover one of these things, we jump all over it and try to figure out a way to work with the vendor to say, “Look, we’re not the bad guys. We’re your friends. Let’s work with you in trying to solve this problem, and don’t make us the bad guys.” And usually they see, once we explain it to them – and they don’t realize we’re as big as we are. When they see there’s so much of commerce going through and 99.99 percent of it is completely legitimate products, then they recognize, “Okay, that doesn’t make sense.”

So what I would say is if on the forum or any of your associates or people that you know run into any problems, don’t assume that we already know about it. Please do let us know. Just say, “Hey, are you aware of this? If not, here’s the situation.” We’ll go investigate it, and if you can give us some specifics, that’d be awesome. We’ll go investigate it. We’ll jump all over it. We’ll get it fixed. But it is our absolute intention to not let one of these things slip by. But we need the data. We need the info. And we try to be vigilant. We try to be spotting all these things as they come along. But the community outside is so much larger than we are, so you will spot it before we do sometimes. So please let us know.

Miles: Okay. I noticed a while back, you guys had cleaned up your product base and gotten rid of some riskier grey area products, and it seems you’re a little bit stricter now. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Dush: Yeah. That’s been a process since this whole management team came into place in the fall of 2005. That’s the point in time from which I’m sure you’ve seen a number of changes taking place within ClickBank. First of all, the whole ClickBank website changed. We cleaned up the products; some of the less scrupulous products have been removed. Some shady products with high refund rates and high chargeback rates have been removed. Most of these bad products have attracted a lot of unwelcome attention from the State Attorneys General and from the Federal Trade Commission, and so we have an excellent relationship with all of these regulatory bodies.

We’re in communication with them regularly. And we work with them collaboratively to fix all of these problems so we don’t get an action letter. An action letter is where they say, “You either remove this particular product or we shut the thing down.” We never get action letters. They tell us, “Hey, can you tell us a little bit more about this product,” and we say, “Okay, let’s go check it out,” and we come back and say, “Okay, these are the issues. Let’s work with you to get this thing resolved.” We’ll either have the vendor clean it up, or if they don’t clean it up, we’ll tell the vendor they have to leave.

So we’ve been doing a lot of that, and that’s helped in several areas. One instance it’s helped in is the growth of the marketplace. As more vendors find that the marketplace is cleaner and it is a more respectable, family-friendly kind of place where you can sell good products, more high-quality vendors are coming in. And what that says is when high-quality vendors come in with high-quality products, that then brings in more affiliates who say, “Okay, this is not just a bunch of crap. There’s really good products to promote.” So it’s helping in that, and that’s how the transactions are also going up – affiliate growth, publisher growth, transaction growth. All of that is happening as a result of this cleanup.

Miles: All right. I heard some rumors on forums that you guys are looking into PayPal as a means to pay affiliates in addition to check or direct deposit. Is there any truth to those rumors?

Dush: We looked at that. But what we’ve found is that disbursements through PayPal cost clients more money because PayPal takes a sizeable chunk out of it. So then we looked at what we call ACH, which is automated clearinghouse, and it is like a wire transfer direct into your account. We’re putting that in place for anybody that wants it.

So we have two versions of wire transfers – one called ACH and the other called XACH. ACH, automated clearinghouse, handles wire transfers domestically in U.S. dollars. XACH is international ACH, which handles wire transfers in many currencies. There are about eight or nine countries to which we can XACH – most of the Western European – for example, it’s U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on. So most of the countries in which you would do business. It doesn’t include countries like Bulgaria or Romania, Poland and all of those.

But in all these countries that I talked about, we can do wire transfer immediately. So the money clears into your account the instant we send it. Speed of light.

Miles: Yeah, I have ACH, and I’ve had that for some time and I really like it a lot, instant payment. I personally wouldn’t want PayPal because the more you make, the more they’re going to take.

Dush: Exactly. Back in London when we got together at the advisory board last year, if you recall, a number of people at the meeting said, “Are you going to do PayPal disbursements?” And we checked into that. We can do it, except it costs people more money.

So we said, “Well, why don’t we do more convenient, simpler easier ways to do it, which are the wire transfers.” It’s cheaper too because you don’t have the problem of a paper check getting lost. It’s more secure.

Miles: Right, faster.

Dush: Faster. And conversion is immediate. You’re not converting it ten days later, so the dollar may have dropped or gone up or whatever. So you don’t have any of that. It’s just converted on the day.

Miles: Are there any requirements for an affiliate to be able to get setup with that, like a dollar amount limit? Or is it just something that they need to talk to ClickBank about on a case-by-case type of basis?

Dush: Generally, we’re doing the conversion of all of our clients on a gradual basis. Obviously, it makes sense if the affiliate or the publisher is someone who gets payments regularly. It doesn’t make sense to send out one wire transfer for $100 every three months, or every six months to send out one for $100. It doesn’t make sense. In that case, it probably costs more to do it that way then to send a check.

But if it’s somebody that’s getting a check every two weeks or even once a month, in every other pay period or something like that, it absolutely makes sense. So case-by-case, just give us a call. We’ll take care of it.

Miles: Excellent. Okay, for a vendor whose product is submitted but not approved, what would you recommend they do? Because a lot of time it seems that new vendors receive little reasons for denial of their products. They just see, “Product disapproved,” and then they go to the forums, and they say, “Is ClickBank not accepting these types of products anymore?”

Dush: Right, right.

Miles: What can they do? Can they resubmit it? Should they just go to the ClickBank site and read the guidelines?

Dush: Well, in general, here’s what I would suggest. First of all, it’s good to be familiar with the guidelines to begin with before you go to a lot of trouble to create a product that’s disapproved. In general, the kinds of products that we don’t accept are products where the claims are extravagant and cannot be verified.

For example, it’s okay to say, “I made a million dollars promoting this product,” but it’s not okay to say, “You will make a million dollars in the next three months,” because you have no means of knowing that. You can’t say that. So that’s not verifiable. You can certainly say that this is a product that converts well, pays well, and has good commissions. You can say those things. You can’t say things like, “This is the top converting product,” because you don’t know that. So it’s verifiable claims.

Also, if the product offers terms which are different from ClickBank standard terms. For example, if you say, “We will entertain a refund within four weeks.” ClickBank’s policy is eight weeks. So if you don’t extend the refund period to eight weeks, we won’t accept the product because we can’t have different products offering different refund terms. So it’s those kinds of things.

Obviously, we cannot accept products that are promoting spam. Often, determining what spam is is on the line. It’s kind of a grey area. A lot of products promote building up lists, and that’s fine. But they also promote automated mailers, for example, where you say, “Okay, so build yourself a list. Download this product. Load your mailing list. Hit the button. Before long, checks will be rolling in.” The problem is what that promotes is spamming and because we get spam complaints about those publishers. And the problem is its ClickBank that’s identified as the originating entity of that spam, when we’re not. We didn’t do anything about it. They happened to buy the product on ClickBank and use it themselves.

So those are the kinds of products we don’t allow – so extravagant claims, unverifiable claims, pornography, and hate. Obviously, if you created a product that propagated hate against any kinds of group of people, gender, race, religion, whatever, obviously we can’t allow that. And illegal behavior like spam, anything that violates CAN-SPAM law and things of that nature, we can’t allow. So those are the things.

So once those guidelines have been met, there really should be no reason why a product should be denied. But if the product is denied, often we don’t have time to explain the reason why it was denied. We get, on average, between 300 and 500 product approval submissions a day. People don’t realize that. People think, “Well, geez, they just sent me a thing saying, ‘Your product’s not approved.’” Yes, because with 300 to 500 submissions a day, we can’t possibly write a big long letter to say, “Dear Miles, the reason your product listing was because this was not right and that was not right.” There’s too many. We’ll never get done. So it just says it was not approved.

But there’s certainly no harm in sending an e-mail back to the person who replied to say, “Can you please let me know what specifically I should change?”, and they’ll come back and say, “Okay, this is not allowed. That’s not allowed. Change this. Change that.” And if you fix those things and resubmit, you should get it done.

Miles: Well that makes a lot of sense. Moving on to the next question, is there a ClickBank API? Or is there one that’s going to be developed? Where can developers get more information on this if there is?

Dush: Excellent question. We are in the process of beta testing an API. It’s called the Instant Notification API, where when an event occurs, like a transaction, a sale, a refund, a chargeback – when any of those events occur, an instant notification goes out electronically to the publisher. Now, you can connect to this instant notification, take that information and do whatever you want with it. So that API is just being piloted right now. Pretty soon we will have a full detail of what that API offers, and developers can integrate to that. They can build applications around it. So if you want to build a little widget that sits on your desktop and says, “Bing!” every time a sale happens, you can do all those kinds of things.

So it’s right now in beta testing. If there are any specific developers that would like to be included in the beta test there are qualifications that they have to meet, but if there are people that would like to be included in the beta test, we’d certainly like to know about it.

Miles: Okay. Yeah, I’ve been thinking of how it’d be nice to have a little application for my iPhone that I can use to look up and see how much money I’m making.

Dush: Sure. Absolutely. In fact, on your iPhone or your BlackBerry or any kind of handheld device.

Miles: Text message?

Dush: Text message. All those kinds of things are possible with the API.

Miles: Great.

Dush: And that’s right now in beta testing. The development is done. It’s under beta testing. So we should expect to release it fairly quickly.

Miles: All right. What other future developments can we expect to see from ClickBank in 2008?

Dush: You know, there are a whole lot of areas. For example, we’re looking at multi-lingual, multi-currency, where the first step is we’re introducing a Spanish order form for publishers that have Spanish products. So if there are any publishers that have products that sell well in English, if they’d like to have that product translated into Spanish, we’d certainly be able to take that on, have a Spanish marketplace. We’re extending that out to Spanish, to German and French.

So initially, we will be accepting only U.S. Dollars, but there will be a currency converter on the order form, just like we talked about in London, where if you’re sitting in the U.K., for example, and you see a product that you like, and the price says $29.95 U.S. Dollars, you want to know how much that is in pounds, you pick a little drop down and pick U.K. Pounds, and then the price will change. It’ll convert, and it’ll show you what the price will be in U.K. Pounds. When the transaction happens, the transaction is still settled in U.S. Dollars in the first phase, but at least the customer knows how much it’ll cost in his home currency, so that’s kind of an important thing.

The next step is we’re going for full multi-currency acceptance, acceptance of British Pound, the Euro and other currencies as we go along. So multi-lingual, multi-currency is sort of the first step.

Then we’re going to be launching sort of a different view of the marketplace. So if you were an affiliate that wanted to promote German products and you lived in Germany, and you say, “Hey, you know, I’m comfortable with German, I want to see all the products that are available in the German language.” So you can go poke a flag, and it will change the marketplace view. You’ll only see German products. You can see all products or products only in this language or that language or only in this language, whatever. Yeah, there are all kinds of things that we’re working on.

Miles: Great. Can we expect any more ClickBank events?

Dush: Yeah, absolutely. We are certainly planning to do more of the same advisory board type meetings like we did last year. We did two last year, one in London, one in Chicago. We’re going to do at least those two this year as well, and we will probably extend that to a larger group. In addition to those face-to-face meetings, we would probably extend that to a larger group through some sort of a webinar basis going forward. But certainly, those two types of meetings, we’ll continue to do.

We’re also going to be participating in some of the affiliate marketing conferences, some of these other Internet marketing conferences and so on. So we’re going to raise our profile a little bit.

Miles: Yeah. I look forward to hearing a little bit more about that, and thank you so much for sharing everything you have.

Dush: I’m glad to help.

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Several years ago I met Chris Gibson while marketing online. At the time we were both marketing the same product and we worked together quite a bit. We eventually ended up going our separate ways and I hadn’t heard from him in years. Then one day as I was looking online for vendors to promote I came across a website with his picture on it. He had actually created several products and was selling them online. It seems we have both come a long way over the past several years. Chris told me about several new products he was selling online, as well as how he is growing his business this year up to 50 employees! Chris agreed to let me interview him for my website.

Miles: Hey Chris! Thanks for doing this interview. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Chris: My name is Chris Gibson, I live in Franklin, Pennsylvania. I was born in 1964. I began marketing online in 2001. My primary business is now ebook publishing and marketing, along with paperback book publishing as well, including various web services.

Miles: So tell us how you got started Internet marketing?

Chris: I started Internet marketing by accident. I was a Vice President for a company and was asked to investigate the potential of online sales of their goods and services. I developed a strategy for them that worked well and then was sought out by other companies to do the same thing. That prompted me to write a book on email advertising that was very popular.

Miles: Tell us a little more about that book.

Chris: The book was my first product. There was such a demand on me to help all kinds of Internet marketers - both individuals and companies - that I felt a book was necessary. I always liked to write and teach or train people on things over the years so it was a natural extension for me.

Miles: I know you have authored several books since then, can you share some with us?

Chris: Yes – the best one on marketing is The Insiders Secrets to Profits Online and of course there are the holistic skin care and health books we sell – all can be found and purchased by visiting our corporate online bookstore, all are best sellers.

Miles: Very good. I know you sell your books online primarily, how do you find your customers?

Chris: We use search engines of course and have developed our own unique maximization strategies that work wonderfully well, beyond that we use list, print, and in person sales of our books…Our books are very popular and have a great word of mouth following.

Miles: Well it seems that you have quite the business going, what has been your best month in gross revenues?

Chris: Proprietary but we exceed $50,000 regularly.

Miles: Do you have any employees or outsource any of your work?

Chris: We have 4 employees, and will have 50+ by mid 2006 for our new printing and distribution center. We outsource the printing and call center.

Miles: Sounds like a bit of work, how many hours did you put into your business when you were starting it?

Chris: I’m a worker – I won’t lie – about 90 hours.

Miles: And now?

Chris: 45 or so, it varies; I am the president of the corporation so…

Miles: When you decide to create a new product, how does that process develop? How do you decide what may be a good product to create?

Chris: I would say a lot of different components go into the successful launch of any product - whether it is a book or consumable product. You do research to see if there is a need and the demand to satisfy, then you attack that need with your solution. Believe me, when we put a product out - it is no accident it does well. Then we give the best customer service to our clients as possible.

Miles: Tell us a little more about your customer service. How do you separate yourself from the competition?

Chris: We do a lot of things our competition does not. We have our self help authors answer questions, provide direct access via phone, email, and fax, and offer live help online where it applies. We do not force sell and rarely up sell our customers, we treat them like gold. If we have a good solid product to cross market to our customers we will.

Miles: What’s been one of your biggest online marketing mistakes?

Chris: Easy – Depending on one merchant process for all our sales. It’s like having one person in charge of ALL your sales revenue. We have our own merchant account now in addition to other ways we receive our sales…it has tripled our revenue.

Miles: That’s a good lesson because you do put yourself at great risk when you rely on only one single company to handle all your revenue. So what keeps motivating you to go on, besides the money obviously?

Chris: Two things, the ability to be self directed in my life, and to provide a source of income (a living) to our very dedicated employees and hundreds of affiliates.

Miles: What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone just starting an online business?

Chris: Be driven and focused on succeeding, stay in touch with your original reason you began your business in the first place to stay motivated, and understand that YOU are probably your biggest obstacle to success… get out of your own way.

Miles: Great Advice! Any books favorite books you would like to share with our readers?

Chris: Think and Grow Rich, for general understanding of how life and business work together, all the Rich Dad / Poor Dad books – for clear understanding of how to become and stay rich – it works!, and 3rd, The Martha Rules by Martha Stewart – an excellent easy to read and understand guide to building an empire from only and idea.

Miles: Very good. So what’s next for you? Do you have any big rewards planned for yourself as a result of all your hard work?

Chris: I will be going to Switzerland this summer. I can’t wait. I have some famous musician friends in Ireland I will hang out on their tour in April.

Miles: Sounds great Chris! Well enjoy yourself and thank you for sharing a bit about yourself and your business with our readers!

Chris: No problem, thank you!

I hope you enjoyed reading this interview with Chris Gibson. More interviews are always on the way. Read through them all at the Interviews Page.

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