CBProAds Review – Outdated Strategy?

ClickBank is one of the best affiliate networks that pay great commission rates for sure. And CBProAds can help you promote multiple products from ClickBank for free. Virtually no setup is required and the links you're provided will be usable immediately after you sign up. This doesn't necessarily mean all good, but you know what, at least it gives new affiliate marketers a chance to kick-start. So today my CBProAds review will look into the platform and see how you can make use of it.

What Is CBProAds?

Established in 2006 (the site cbproads.com was first registered in April 2007), CBProAds has been providing some useful affiliate marketing toolkits to promote ClickBank products. You need to sign up with ClickBank first if you haven't already, which is free. And all you have to do "to set up" your CBProAds tools is literally, insert your ClickBank account ID upon signing up. The toolkits you'll be given are;

• Affiliate Storefront - an online store site with ClickBank's digital products pre-loaded in various niches.
• Affiliate Niche Storefront - 18 x ClickBank products pre-loaded online store sites, but each site is made niche-specific, e.g. muscle-building, dating, affiliate marketing, forex, etc.
• WordPress Plugins - they allow you to embed the pre-loaded store on your own WordPress site. Two plugins; one to sell products in various niches and the other one to sell niche-specific products.
• Ad Generators - various ad formats (e.g. banner ad, contextual text ad, slideshow ad, carousel, widgets, etc.)
• Ad Rotator (Pro account only) - Same as Ad Generators but you can specify multiple products to sell and CBProAds will automatically rotate the product to display.

Free Account vs Pro Account

The main difference between the free option and the Pro option is the commission rate that you may earn from ClickBank - with the Pro account, all the commissions you may make will be yours. But with the free account, any commissions you may make will be split 50/50 between CBProAds and yourself. Effectively, CBPA is going to charge you 50% of whatever you earn in the future instead of charging you a fixed fee.

So to rephrase it... The Pro account will cost you a one-time fee of $34.95. And you can use all the marketing tools to advertise the ClickBank products on your website or social media. Every time someone buys a product via your ad, you'll receive your affiliate commission from ClickBank - just as normal. All the money you earn will be yours.

If you choose not to pay the one-time fee, you'll still get access to most of the marketing tools. But each time you make your affiliate commission 50% of it will be taken away by CBProAds.

It means that the Pro account will be more beneficial as you sell more products - for example if you pay for the Pro account but earn $100 commission from ClickBank, your net profit will be $65.05 (100 - 34.95). But if you stay with the free account, your ClickBank commission will always be halved; make $100 and you'll only actually receive $50, make $1,000 and you'll only receive $500.

The good thing is, the free account is not a time-limited trial - you can stay as a free member for as long as you like, so you can try it out and when you're confident you're going to make constant income from ClickBank, you can consider upgrading it to the Pro account by paying $34.95.

Handy Tools...

Okay, so my positive opinion of CBProAds first. If you are brand new to affiliate marketing, CBPA will definitely give you an 'opportunity'. Building a website, choosing niche products and laying out on your page, adding call-to-action buttons...you would have to learn all the tricky bits which would be time-consuming. CBProAds' tools are all-done-for-you, ready for you to start affiliate marketing today. 

The flip side of it is, it's inflexible. No need to do anything means you'll learn very little about how to customize your webpages in general. You won't get an opportunity to learn how a sales funnel works, how you create your own webpages and take control of them. These tools are convenient for beginners but not a sustainable solution.

...But They're Just Tools

And ultimately, tools are just tools. The CBPA homepage emphasizes the high commission rates that ClickBank offers but it doesn't mean you'll be making money automatically simply by "using" these tools. The question is how to drive traffic - who to advertise it to. CBPA itself doesn't teach any of it, so you need to work it out yourself.

How You Can Drive Traffic

But how can you drive traffic to your CBProfitAds' product pages? I can tell you there are free methods and paid methods but none of them will work perfectly unless you add some extra work.

Some free ways to promote your CBPA page include;

• Share a link on social media, which you may have guessed already, is a stab in the dark. You'll be too ambitious if you think someone will click the link you share and make a purchase so easy. Unless you have a lot of devoted followers - if you do, you're probably not reading this!
• Promote your CBPA page on YouTube. This will involve a video-making technique as well as an SEO technique. If you could talk on YouTube, you could promote ClickBank products and send your viewers directly to your affiliate pages anyway. You wouldn't need CBProfitAds.

Whereas paid methods include;

• Facebook ads, Google ads. They at least require a copywriting technique and analysis technique to keep the cost under control.
• Use solo ads. Solo ad traffics are hit & miss, and you'd have to know good solo ad sellers.

Frankly, sending paid traffic to your CBProfitAdspage is a waste of money because people rarely make a purchase on the spot. Paid ads are effective for lead generation (i.e. when you send the traffic to a sales funnel that includes an opt-in form). Not for a simple e-commerce page.

The Site Has Not Been Maintained

The first thing you may notice when you visit the CBProAds site is the outdated look of it. You'll also notice that the majority of the ClickBank products listed there are almost a decade-old, hardly any of the recent products appear in the list.

What I'm even more skeptical about CBProAds is that no information about the owner/creator. If you trace the introduction video on the homepage to YouTube, you'll see it was created by "iCore Web Technologies." But no further information about this company can be found, so it may have either dissolved some time ago or never existed.

WordPress Plugin

CBPA's WordPress plugins will allow you to create an instant online store page. There are two plugins - one for random ClickBank products in general and the other one for niche-specific. You download the zip file from your CBPA dashboard, install it on your WordPress, select your niche, and all you have left to do is copy & paste a short code anywhere in your page editor, e.g.

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling]
[clickbank-storefront-featured]
[clickbank-storefront-popular]

Each short code will automatically display 12 x ClickBank products, each one of which is nicely boxed, with an image and a short description. I've tested these 3 codes and they look great, except that I couldn't really tell the difference between "bestselling", "featured", and "popular". Also, the majority of the listed products are at least 7-8 years old and I couldn't find any of the recent products that I was particularly looking for.

I can at least say, the plugins work - compatible with the latest version of WordPress at the time of writing this (V 5.6).

"Please Buy Something...Anything" Approach

I'm guessing perhaps CBProfitAds is one of the longest-running sites that offer done-for-you ClickBank online stores. I have seen very similar services in the past few years but none of them really has proven to work. Why? Because they sell a variety of things but they don't sell everything. 

If you think about it from a consumer's point of view, you'll understand it. Imagine you are an Amazon affiliate and share a link to a particular Amazon page with your audience - social followers, for example. Your audience may not be interested in the products you're trying to sell, but they may search to find a similar product and buy it instead, or buy something else that they were going to buy anyway, while they're on the Amazon page. And if they do, you'll receive an affiliate commission for that. 

But imagine the page you're sharing is a ClickBank store. Many ClickBank products are innovative solutions to problems that people may have, such as weight-loss, relationship guides, debt clearance, herbal remedies, etc. Each product is unique and has its own unique target audience, i.e. a group of potential buyers. Whereas with your CBPA store site, you are presenting a collection of different products and asking your audience to go through it all, find something that they think suits them, and spend money on it...

Essentially, your CBPA store is saying to your audience, "Do you want to lose weight? Then take a look at this one. Or do you want to build muscles? Then look at this one. Or how about skincare, are you interested? Then look at this one. Or....." You see that's the most useless selling technique? People have no reason to spare time just for you to see if there's something they want to buy.