ClickBank Marketplace to fix Screwy Listings

ClickBank have recently announced some major improvements to the ClickBank Marketplace in an effort to make it easier for vendors to rank higher and affiliates find relevant products to promote.

It appears in part that these changes have been driven by feedback from vendors that complained of competing products ranking higher than theirs, even though these competing products had nothing to do with their chosen category. Since vendors are limited to one category this proved frustrating and vendors felt they were missing valuable opportunities to be noticed by the affiliates they were desperately trying to reach.

Feedback has also come from affiliates saying they found the Marketplace difficult to use and had trouble finding good products to promote, leading to a lot of affiliates abandoning the search tool altogether.

The new and improved Marketplace due for release in January 2010 plans to include the following enhancements:

• New categories and subcategories – This will address vendors’ concerns about competing with unrelated products and allow them to target their niche more accurately.
• More relevant search results – The enhanced search tool will make it easier for affiliates to find great products for their niche. The search tool will even review the vendor's landing page, improving the relevancy of the search results.
• More sort and filter options - For the first time, affiliates will be able to filter sites on specific product attributes, such as software, German-language, or upsell-enabled. Also, users of the Marketplace will be able to sort or filter sites using any of the ClickBank stats. This will make it much easier to find relevant and profitable affiliate programs to promote.

The changes will help bring vendors and affiliates closer together, helping more vendors get noticed in their target niche and affiliates to find great products to promote.

For vendors, the category change will mean they will receive notification in mid-December of their new category. Vendors can apply to ClickBank to change to a different category, or have their product removed altogether.

With more categories and better search relevancy, affiliates can look forward to finding new and interesting products to promote, (not to mention being better able to sniff out the high-performing affiliate programs!) and vendors can anticipate improved awareness in the marketplace and increased sales.

It's great to see ClickBank responding to feedback from users. Here’s to more of the same in future!