August 22, 2008
Clickbank Shuts Down My Account
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Please read the update here!
Well, almost. My affiliate account is scheduled for deactivation. When? I don’t have an idea! 
It so happened that I wrote a disparaging review for a junk product in a niche. The product is so bad that there are hundreds of complaints against it on consumer boards and forums. So I used that information as a basis for my product review.
A staff of the product company saw the review and asked Clickbank to deactivate my account because it violates their terms.
You know ClickBank well: they shoot first and ask questions later. Out of the blue, I got an email from ClickBank one day which said: 'Hello, because of the following complaint, your account is scheduled for deactivation!'
I don’t understand this. Even if I have violated the affiliate terms of the product vendor (if you call honest reviews to be a violation of terms, that is), the most they could do is to terminate my affiliate relationship with them. They have no right to ask Clickbank to deactivate my CB account.
Am I right? Or wrong?
More than that, it seems that CB doesn't care a damn for its affiliates, the force that makes them millions of dollars. They don’t make their affiliates signup, they don't scrutinize anything, and their affiliate policy is almost as nonchalant as their refund policy.
Anyways, thankfully I had a second Clickbank account (a vendor account). My job was to quickly change the old hop ID of all affiliate links to the new.
Since I use an ad tracker script to store my affiliate links, I basically downloaded that SQL database, replaced the old hop ID with the new one (using a search and replace software), and re-uploaded the database back.
Lessons:
1. Never direct link to an affiliate link. If an ad tracker script is out of your budget, at least use a redirect file to redirect the visitor to your affiliate link, and keep the redirect file on YOUR server. That way, if an unfortunate incident like mine happens, you can change your affiliate links on the fly. Otherwise you will lose sales.
Here is an example:
If your affiliate link is:
http://xxxxx.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net
Just open a Notepad file, put the following code into it, and save it with a .html extension (make sure you choose 'All Files' in the 'Save as Type' dialog box)!
—————————————-
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="1;URL=http://xxxxx.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
————————————
Other things that can happen: the vendor might change his affiliate software and ask all affiliates to change their old affiliate links to the new. Those who fail to do so would lose cash.
2. Use an ad tracker script like Adtrackz or Affiliate Commando Pro to track your stats
3. Never trust Clickbank, and have multiple Clickbank accounts!
4. Be prepared for the worst! 
5. Have multiple streams of income! 
Anyway, to continue the story, I replied back to the ClickBank staff with all the links to the complaints against the software. So far I haven’t got a reply either from ClickBank or the merchant.
Have you ever been slighted and belittled by Clickbank? Post your story below:
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Comments on Clickbank Shuts Down My Account
Arindam Chakraborty.com » An Update Regarding My Clickbank Account @ 9:12 pm
[...] newsletter and get HOT internet marketing tips every week! NO junk!This is an update on my post regarding my Clickbank account. Soon after I made that post, I was contacted by Clickbank's Vice President (Sales and Business [...]
Clickbank Question: Affiliate Link Redirect @ 8:22 pm
[...] by adding a meta refresh code before your page’s </head> tag. Here is the code I use: Arindam Chakraborty.com Clickbank Shuts Down My Account Hope it helps [...]
Deb@Drug Addiction Rehab @ 4:20 am
Interesting. Is it ok with clickbank to set up a 2nd account? I wasn’t sure if what the rules were as there don’t seem to be any mentions either way in their faq.
Deb
Arindam @ 10:10 am
Yes. You can have 100s of accounts with CB. If you tell them you are already a Clickbank vendor, they would offer you discounts on your successive accounts!