Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and when you market Clickbank products you have the assurance that you will get paid without any hassle. In case you are new to affiliate marketing and are not familiar with Clickbank, I'll explain a little about it.

Clickbank is the Internet's leading retailer of digital products. By signing up as a Clickbank affiliate, you get access to thousands of digital products. The products include hundreds of ebooks on all sorts of topics, anti-virus software, video instruction courses. In fact, if a product can be downloaded, Clickbank will have it.

You don't have to worry about keeping track of individual programs or making sure you get paid, Clickbank does all that for you by acting as middle-man between the affiliate and the product vendor. All you need to do is choose programs through Clickbank and promote them. Clickbank pays affiliate commissions regularly every two weeks.

When choosing programs to promote, you will obviously be drawn to programs that have a high conversion rate - ie a high percentage of the people who click through to the program actually purchase it. There is, however, a further thing you should be checking when choosing Clickbank products to promote and that is the refund rate.

Clickbank has a no quibble refund policy. This policy means that prospective customers will be more likely to buy a product because they can feel safe in making a purchase since, if the product does not live up to the advertising, they can obtain a full refund without any problem. Obviously, if a product is not satisfactory to customers, it will have a high refund rate.

You can check the Clickbank refund rate of a product, by making a simple calculation. When you are selecting products, one of the pieces of information available is $/sale. This is the simple formula for calculating the refund rate of any product:

(Commission - $/Sale)/Commission = Average Refund Rate

Example:

Product Price - $49.95

Commission - 75% ($37.46)

$/Sale - $27.29

Average Refund Rate = (37.46 - 27.29) / 37.46 = 0.27 = 27%

A refund rate of under 15% indicates a high level of customer satisfaction. That however, is not the whole story because conversion rates also have to be taken into account. Although a product with a refund rate of under 15% can reasonably be expected to be a satisfactory product, you can still earn commissions on products with a higher refund rate if they also have a higher conversion rate. So always bear in mind both conversion rate and refund rate when selecting products.

About the Author

You will find the best home based business ideas to help you make money at home at Elaine Currie's Work At Home Directory http://www.HuntingVenus.com For articles about online writing visit http://www.elainecurrie.com/writingtips