Product Name: Clickbank University
Product Owners: Matt Hulett, Adam Horwitz, Justin Atlan
Advertised Price: $47 per month
Upsells: $297/year, $97
Rating: 90/100
What Is It?
Clickbank University is a training center and community on how to create your own info products to sell online. You can also learn how to market other people’s products via affiliate marketing.
Review Updated Nov 15 for Clickbank 3.0
Short Review
The quality of training is very high, and the community is somewhat active. The price is quite high but not unreasonable for what you get. I think this could be a good product for someone looking to market information via their own info product listed on Clickbank, but not for someone looking to make money in affiliate marketing.
Before You Buy
Usually I have to deal with con artists trying to squeeze every penny out of me on sales pages, so Clickbank’s straightforward sales page was a pleasant surprise. They are clear about what you will be doing inside the members area, and what your money will pay for.
The only thing that put me off was the emphasis on financial independence and leading that “ideal lifestyle” of working from home. While I agree that this is possible via the methods they teach, I felt it was a bit over the top and reminiscent of other scammy products that I review.
They have a legit training center and don’t need to play that type of game.
What I Liked
The main training center focuses on product creation, which is different from most other “make money” systems that I review. Product creation can be a very lucrative online business if you create a high quality product(s) and can drive traffic to your site.
You can make even more money if you have a good email sequence for email marketing, and even MORE money if you have good incentives for affiliates to start doing the selling for you.
I didn’t watch all the videos available to me, but the ones I saw were very candid, high quality, and provided real insight into how online marketing works. I saw a few about how to think of a product to sell, how to drive traffic to your website, and the basics of how affiliate marketing works on Clickbank.
There is a ton of info to read, so if you join Clickbank University, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy. Beginners will definitely benefit from training, as well as low-intermediate to intermediate level online marketers. I think if you have experience and have just not found luck with your previous campaigns, you might find the info pretty standard, and might only benefit from later training modules (which I was unable to view)
One last thing I liked was that their Facebook page was pretty active as far as their posting goes. It’s always good to see that product owners are active in social media because it shows they are investing time in the business, rather than sitting back and waiting for paychecks as you struggle with the training.
Website Builder
Originally I was against the Website Builder because I assumed it was just another CMS like WordPress. Too bad they really didn’t make it clear in the main sales video. I skipped all the upsell junk because I really hate the upsell process that most companies force us through. However, after looking at their video here for affiliates (start at 2:55), what the website build actually does is explained in much more detail.
This is a way to help you create a website for your own productT that essentially integrates with Clickbank to make selling this product easier. I think this is a cool idea, and for folks looking to create their own digital product, this would be a worthwhile investment. But remember, you’re now paying $47/month for CBU members area ($564), PLUS $297. Your yearly cost of business operation just jumped to $861. Also, remember that this might lock your site into their builder, so if you decide to change to outside hosting at some point, I’m not sure how that process goes.
If you are serious about creating and selling your own digital products online, you need to prepare yourself for such an investment. It’s still a million times cheaper than a brick and mortar business, but not as cheap as being an affiliate.
What I Didn’t Like
Is Locked Modules Really for My Benefit?
First and foremost, the most annoying thing about Clickbank Uni is that most of the training is locked. Not only is it locked
for the $1 trial, but even after you start shelling out
$97 $47 per month (reasonably priced now), they still continue to lock it, and you can only open the modules they deem useful, at a time they decide. UPDATE: They have now unlocked “more” content to new members, but continue to force you to move at their pace, rather than theirs…for your “protection”
Sure you can unlock everything and do it at your own pace, but it’ll cost you an entire year of “tuition” in one go. So if you are an ambitious individual, you’d better be a rich individual as well, because you’ll need $800 to get access to the material.
It was difficult to do a real analysis of all of the training they offer because the $1 trial really only gives you access to introductory videos. If what I saw is representative of what they plan to deliver later on, then the training is very much worth the $97 per month fee.
Training Topics
They seem to be very focused on the business model of product creation, squeeze pages, sales pages, and building email lists. I’m not a fan of this because many times you end up having to pay for traffic from no-so-great sources, or focus on getting affiliates to market for you (if you are just starting out, this will probably add to your challenges).
Though more labor intensive, I have had much more luck with free traffic from Google using keyword research and blogging. I may be wrong, but I didn’t see anything about that in their training.
UPDATE: I have been informed by their affiliate manager that they do not recommend paid traffic methods to new members, and have many free traffic generation methods. I’m not sure what these are other than blogging and social. I will admit, that I am not familiar with how to hire affiliates, and that I do not know the ins and outs of generating traffic to a squeeze page. My own traffic generation methods rely heavily on content creation through blogging and social media presence. My campaigns do not rely on squeeze pages.
Updated Price
Clickbank has since updated their monthly price to $47/month, which is a lot more reasonable than what they were charing before. However, signing up for CBU also means you get stuffed into a typical sales funnel where the second you buy something, you are asked to buy something else. You can see from the affiliate information below that there will be a series of upsells and downsells after signing up.
Come on guys, let a brotha’ breathe a bit before you dig your hands deeper into our wallets
It seems odd that they would be charging for a website builder now, since WordPress is 100% free and the most widely used builder out there. I do not know what the current builder is, but if it’s unique to Clickbank, it will mean you cannot move your website to another host if you decide to leave. I will update on this soon, along with what the new yearly price is.
Lack of Support
When I first landed on CB University, I heard crickets chirping. There were not very many comments, and those few comments that were there, were not answered. Some that were answered, were done so by other members. From 4 pages of comments on one of their training modules I created this graph to demonstrate the sorry state of support inside the members area.
*Some edits to the order of comments were made to fit everything in this image
However, as I browsed the site more, I saw that there are in fact some “experts” that answer the questions of the members.
Who gets answers, and how often the staff chime in to help out is very hit and miss. Some modules had staff replying to every comment, while other modules had none. I would say that more often than not questions were not answered, and there seemed to be a lot of confused non-English speakers asking things that were not appropriate to the specific page they were looking at.
UPDATE: They now have weekly live Q&A classes for members.
No Pulse On Community
Part of the appeal of paying for a monthly membership being part of an active community that you can exchange ideas with. In the sales video, we were told that Clickbank University had a pulse, and was a thriving community of people just like us.
But after investigating the training, community, and Facebook page I actually saw very little activity. There were rarely more than 10 comments on a training video (including moderators), the most active part of the forum was the “self introduction” top (12 comments), and the Facebook page had nothing.
Granted, this is a pretty new product, but I would think that Clickbank would have the experience and the means to popular their own community. UPDATE: It’s been a few months since I wrote this review, and they had a major affiliate launch a few weeks ago. I assume there is more activity from members and support at this point.
UPDATE 2: Their affiliate manager wrote me an email to ask me to remove criticisms from my review, including my comments about support issues and community activity. However, when I responded with some follow up questions, they did not respond. It’s been 20 days since I contacted them with questions without a response.
Update 3 (2015): I attended an “educational” webinar from Clickbank last week (March 2, 2015) just to see what they were teaching and if the quality had improved. I was sorely disappointed in what I saw. The webinar was simply a promotional tool to sign up to Clickbank, and nothing was really taught at all.
In fact, they spent about the first 10 minutes of the webinar telling us how it’s limited seating and if we leave we can’t get back in. It really stank of the ‘false scarcity’ that gurus love to use.
The most ridiculous part is that is was about setting goals for 2015, but the date they launched it was in March. Um guys, you’re two full months too late. I had received other notifications of webinars in the past, so I don’t know if they are just recycling the same webinar every couple of weeks, or what.
The whole thing was really disorganized and uninformative. Horwitz and Atlan bumbled through a powerpoint (showing us their notes, removing some of the movie magic), and spit out a bunch of typical junk about “don’t be a slave to the man”, and “live a life of financial freedom”. Some of these tactics were poor attempts as marketing mind control by telling us to say things to ourselves like “I need to take control of my life!”.
Really, really low quality stuff guys. I can’t say if this is reflective of the webinars inside the CBU community, but this one was a real turn-off.
Final Review
Clickbank University is a good product that’s worth the money. I think that for someone looking to create and promote their own digital info product through Clickbank, this is probably going to be your best investment. If you are an “expert” in something and want to make money off of your knowledge, now’s the time to start!
However, I don’t like their marketing strategy of “upsells”, and I strongly disagree with their decision to lock modules for new members.
I also completely understand that not everyone wants to create their own product! Personally, I prefer to be an affiliate. I don’t have to deal with a lot of the same stresses that product creators do. I make a full time income as an affiliate of other companies, and have no intention of creating my own product in the future. If this sounds like you, keep reading. If you have no idea if you want to be an affiliate or a product creator, start out as an affiliate, learn the ropes, then make your decision. It’s a whole lot easier in my opinion.
No comments