Any entrepreneur will tell you: persistence is one of the most important qualities required to succeed in business.
Mine was tested the last two days, here’s what happened.
I’ve launched this ClickBank affiliate campaign on Facebook I talked about in my previous post and it’s been doing very well. I’ve put in some more work to set up a better funnel with a landing page, retargeting, a list, expanding to other countries etc.
And it was operating at a very nice 100% ROI for two days, so I started to scale up the traffic.
But then, later on Wednesday, I was suddenly unable to login to my ClickBank account…
No warning, no email, no explanation other than “this username/password combination is not correct”.
This is the point where people give up. And to be fair, a year ago I might have too.
But not this time. I contacted ClickBank immediately. Their phone support seems to be only for customers though, not affiliates and I was forced to submit a ticket through their support desk. Again, my persistence is being tested, I bet a lot of people that hadn’t given up yet at this point would at this stage.
Submitting a ticket: another opportunity to put some valuable lessons I’ve learned into practice. My first instinct is to go mental and “demand to know what’s going on, because this is completely UNACCEPTABLE AND CLICKBANK IS JUST FULL OF F*&(^*^(!!!!11!!!”. But I know better than that, I read Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, and that’s definitely not how to… So instead, I remained calm and submitted a friendly ticket, asking for information on what was going on.
And now the long wait begins…
The next morning my ticket was answered, although not in a way that gave me much hope for a positive outcome:
Thank you for your inquiry! Your account was closed due to a negative account balance, and a lack of activity for an extended period of time. We understand your frustration with this issue. Please note that simple inactivity does not cause an account to close. Only accounts with a negative account balance for over 6 full months are subject to this policy.
Because ClickBank does not receive any sales to cover the negative balance after 6 months, ClickBank closes the account as a courtesy to the inactive client and does not charge such clients for the negative balance they have generated. This helps ClickBank keep its accounting up to date by finally reconciling long-standing negative balances into our over-all calculations.
ClickBank takes several measures to ensure that our clients are aware of such policies. Upon opening an account with ClickBank, each potential client must read and agree to our Client Contract before they can fully create their account. The Client Contract is also available on the Legal & Policies page of our site (which can be accessed from any page of our site and also from any page in your account) at all times so that it can be read at any time by any client interested in the specific details of our policies.
Please note that in order to continue promoting ClickBank products, you will need to open a new ClickBank account.
But wait, making a ClickBank account is super easy, I don’t have to stop my campaign, I can just make a new account!
And so I did, let the traffic resume! Even if they’re not going to reopen my account and give me back the commissions I’m owed, I might still recuperate the loss with future profits, as the campaign is still profitable.
In the meantime I replied to the ticket, yet again keeping my cool and staying polite, but asking firmly for a payout of owed commissions. And guess what? This morning, the following reply landed in my inbox:
Thank you for your inquiry. I have contacted our Risk team and they have reopened your account. You should now be able to access your account.
Awesome! Patience, persistence and keeping my cool has paid off and I’m able to keep this campaign up and running…
Yep, that’s all it took, two accounts now, but back to promoting on the main one now (right):
