Let’s say you’ve stumbled upon a ClickBank product that you’d like to promote. You’ve been referred to the page, and you went there by following a redirected, cloaked URL. Without using special techniques to download the web pages that perform the redirect, how can you find out the vendor ID for the product so that you can promote it?
Let’s take the famous SEOElite as an example. The vendor ID is bryxen1, but pretend you don’t know that for the time being. How can you find out what the vendor ID might be, just from the vendor’s website?
Well, first, you need to note that there is a hyperlink at the bottom of the page, with the text “Get SEO Elite Now!” From the status bar, you can see that this will take you to another site in the SEO Elite website. Click on it.
You come to a page that has an order button. The text on the button reads “Click Here To Download SEO Elite Instantly!” This is obviously the button that you click on when ready to order the product.
Step 1 is to locate the order button on the vendor’s website.
You now need to view the source code of the web page, and search for the code that applies to the button. For this site, it’s simply a matter of searching for the text that appears on the order button. For other sites, the order button may be an image, and in that case you could locate text around the image. You can see the following hyperlink that appears in the order link:
http://www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi?bryxen1/1/SEOElite
The first parameter is the vendor ID that you need to promote the product! The other parameters are, I believe, the product ID (as a single vendor may sell up to 50 products) and the product name.
Step 2 is to look for the vendor ID in the URL that points to the order page.
It could be that searching for www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi is all you need to do. As ClickBank has changed over the years, I don’t know whether all sales page links look like this. However, you should be able to see the URL fairly easily using this approach.
Note that it’s possible that the vendor may cloak this URL, but it’s not very likely that they will do so. Only somebody with expert knowledge of ClickBank will use this technique to discover a ClickBank vendor ID.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
