In the last couple of days Clickbank has changed the appearance of its website. This time it’s not just a change of colour scheme. This time they’ve rearranged how you enter their site to emphasise their new approach and services.

The more ‘corporate’ design of the homepage now features examples of people who have sold their expertise via Clickbank. This reflects the new direction that Clickbank are taking, with more focus on helping people with an expertise but little online marketing experience build an information business, rather than just helping them sell an ebook. With this new approach they are now offering website creation, hosting and email marketing facilities in addition to their traditional services.

What does this mean for those of us already using Clickbank? Well as I see it the new setup is designed to help more people sell information online. This means eventually there will be more competition in many niches. That may be a challenge, but there could also be an opportunity here. An influx of newbies means an opportunity to offer training, and although Clickbank is offering its own resources there are bound to be some who would be looking for alternatives.

So those are just a couple of the long term consequences. But what of the immediate repercussions?

I’m in the last stages of completing a product that includes some information related to using Clickbank. It includes how to open a Clickbank account, obtain a hoplink and find products in the Clickbank Marketplace. Now all of these have changed slightly. For example, following the redesign it seems you cannot access the marketplace without having a Clickbank account.

So now I have to rewrite some parts of a manual and redo a couple of videos. Only a minor inconvenience, but it’s not the only change that’s happened during the gestation of this product. SEO Quake changed their home page the day after I recorded a video about their software. Within 24 hours my video looked out of date!

And these are not the only recent changes. In the last couple of years we’ve had to deal with Google’s Panda and Penguin, and the steps for opening a Youtube account have changed too.

The fact is it’s still early days for the internet and it’s a very competitive place. We’re still experimenting with the best way to do things and discovering new ways to interact online. If you’re not the sort of person who can deal with change or who expects to learn something once and not have to update your education regularly then maybe being online is not for you.

Change is part of what makes the internet what it is. If you can’t take that in your stride maybe it’s best to look elsewhere to build your business.