Is Clickbank a Scam?

I know all about the controversy about Clickbank not accepting Paypal payments as verification of your financial identity, but I'm wondering about the honesty of the recording of sales made through affiliate advertising.

My site has had 19,500 visitors to the home page alone, and I know adverts have been clicked on a few thousand times and yet there is no record of me having made a single sale.  This seems very odd and I would have thought the statistical odds would have produced at the very least one sale.

I have been very careful to target my ads to my readers interests, so it's not as if that would be a particular problem, and as I said these ads are being visited.  I have also been very careful to exclude sellers who are only harvesting follow up email addresses.  Of course what I cannot do is stop my viewers from recording the web addresses for later viewing, but it seems to me they are just as likely to revisit through my website.  I would love to hear from successful Clickbank affiliates so I know money can be made this way :-) 

Which brings me on to Google Adsense and a site I saw saying how much money can be made from them.  Remarkably the guy had no Google ads, only ads from companies paying him for the ad space!  Now that is the way to make money, it's just a pity he has to lie to his viewers about how he makes his site pay.  I left a comment, but I will be incredibly surprised if it gets allowed.  It was along the lines of it would take hundreds of thousands of hits, on thousands of websites, to make Adsense a significant revenue producer at a penny per click.

My site is doing OK in the search engine page ranking and can be found under a number of search phrases on either the first or second page, but I have run out of ideas of how to publicise its existence.  Social media is often quoted, with Facebook and Twitter highlighted.  But it seems to me it's the same old chicken and egg syndrome as to how I find "friends".  Once upon a time it was so easy, but nowadays requesting friends is just as likely to get you banned.  So I'm a bit baffled to how people can still get thousands.  Obviously well known people always will, but how do us normal folk achieve it? 

What is SEO now?

With all the recent changes made by Google I wonder what search engine optimisation really means anymore?  No doubt the huge business structure that grew out of the early clamour to please the search-engine bots will try to convince us to buy their expertise and products, but do we really need them now content is King, or supposed to be?

To be perfectly honest I am more confused than ever.  I have run around like a blue-arsed fly trying to make sure my sites are in order and that the links I have built up are not over optimised, and so considered as spam.  It would be nice to report that all this effort has suddenly propelled my site, Learn to Play World of Warcraft (https://learn-to-play-wow.blogspot.com/), zooming up the page rank and sees me at the top of Google search results, but it has not :-(  In fact it seems some of my apparently spammy links are the best for traffic hits, and that the long tail is just a story.

I still cannot understand why my site name does not show up on search results.  The actual name and not the web address.  I know there is a lot of competition, but many of the search results shown are poor content sites, or sites that have not had any new content added for years.  This whole business has got me baffled and thinking it is just for insiders, and is just another big con.

What do you guys think?  Are you currently successful?  If so, what are your secrets?