If you are interested in how to make money with ClickBank then this post is for you.
We will do this by learning how to build niche sites to promote ClickBank products and get commissions from ClickBank.
This is what is called affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and earn a commission from the sale of the product or service.
All you do is find the right products and promote them to potential buyers and you get a cut from the sales.
Table of Contents
What is ClickBank?
ClickBank is an online marketplace that connects people who create digital products and affiliates. The affiliates promote the products for a commission.
Is ClickBank free for affiliates?
Yes, ClickBank is free for affiliates. Affiliates don’t pay anything when they register with Clickbank.
After registration, they are free to pick any product they want to promote from the Clickbank marketplace or from a vendor’s site.
To promote you need to get a unique link called, hoplink which you will use to drive customers to the product page.
How do I become a ClickBank affiliate?
To become a ClickBank affiliate you need to do the following:
1. Set up your ClickBank affiliate account
The first step is to register as an affiliate with Clickbank. You do this by creating your ClickBank account. In order to do this, you go to clickbank.com’s homepage. While there click the “CREATE ACCOUNT” shown in the image below.
You will then be asked to provide your personal details such as name, email, mailing address, etc.
Besides your personal details, you will also be asked to provide your nickname which will be your account user ID.
There other details that you may not provide at this stage but will do later on. One of those details is your social security number or business tax ID.
You will only provide the above after you generate a certain level of earnings.
The provision of this tax information depends on whether you are acting as an individual or a business.
As an individual, you will provide your social security number but if acting as a business then it will be your business tax ID.
As part of the confirmation of your address, the first two payments will be in the form of checks that will be posted to you.
2. Find a product to promote as an affiliate
To find a product to promote you click on the “Marketplace” tab on the Clickbank site homepage.
In the Marketplace page, you can search for products that you want to promote.
Ideally, you should consider only promoting products that you are familiar with.
If not maybe it would be a good idea to buy the product and study it before you start promoting it.
Alternatively, you can contact the vendor to send you one for free.
Clickbank Metrics
Below are definitions of some of the ClickBank metrics that you find for products on ClickBank Marketplace.
Initial $/sale: This is the average amount of money affiliates make per sale
Avg %/sale: This is the percentage of the sales price affiliate take as commission.
Grav: This represents the number of affiliates who managed to sell this product in the last 12 weeks.
Avg Rebill Total: Average amount affiliates take as commission from the rebills.
Avg %/Rebill: Average percentage of rebills paid to an affiliate.
Tips on how to choose a good product to promote.
- Promote a product with a good gravity. The gravity of a product will indicate to you if the product is popular and the level of sales. For example, if the gravity figure is above 100 it means that promoting this product is extremely competitive. For those just starting out it may be advisable to avoid such products as you will be competing with many people. Pick products with gravity above 20 as it shows that the sales page is converting well.
- Find out customer reviews by searching for it in Google. If both affiliates and customers are happy then it may be a good product. On the other hand, if customers are complaining then stay away from it. Satisfied customers mean low refunds. On Clickbank, customers can easily ask for a refund without any questions from Clickbank.
- Check the levels of commission. You are in business so you need to pick products that you can easily make a lot of money from. Therefore consider how much commission you will make from promoting any product. If the niche you are targeting is a low traffic niche then you need some big-ticket items to make it worthwhile promoting any product. If however, you are getting hundreds of thousands of visitors then you can afford to go for low commission products.
- Rate the sales assistance provided. It can be expensive to develop your own promotional materials. This expense can be avoided if the vendor has promotional materials. It will even be more helpful if he has the text for ads, articles to use, etc. Usually, some of the experienced vendors may have tested all their stuff and can provide you the conversion rates for their adverts and landing pages. All this can help when you decide to spend money to advertise.
- The quality of the sales page. If the sales page is crap it will be hard to convince people to buy anything. A good sales page should be attractive and have enough words to convince a potential customer. Some of the sales pages I have seen have long pages full of compelling content.
3. Get your affiliate hoplink
Once you make up your mind on the product that you want to promote you will click on the Promote button to get the HopLink.
The HopLink is the unique link that you use to promote the ClickBank product.
It is a referral tracking URL that links a potential customer to a vendor’s site and also informs ClickBank on which affiliate brought the customer.
In the HopLink generator shown below, you need to input your nickname and optional tracking ID.
The optional tracking can help you to track sources of earnings if you are using more than one platform to promote your product.
For example, if you are promoting a product via email and a website you can decide to create two different HopLinks by using different tracking IDs.
4. Receive payment for your sales of the product
The hoplink that you create will enable ClickBank to track your sales and commissions as it is unique to you.
If you log into your account you will see the status of your promotional activities.
Any sales you have made sales will be shown in your account. You can also see statistics on clicks of your HopLinks and the conversion rates. This can help you in your promotional efforts.
Clickbank usually issues payment to its affiliates once every two weeks.
Ways on How to Make Money with Clickbank
There are so many ways people use unique HopLinks to make money with Clickbanks. Below are some of the ways.
1. Promoting the product on Pinterest.
I am not sure if this is still acceptable but I know that there were affiliates who used to promote their products on Pinterest. They did this by uploading images urging people to click the link which they got from ClickBank. I would urge anyone interested in doing this to check with Pinterest if this is not regarded as spam. Otherwise, you may get your account banned if this is against their spam policies.
2. Promoting the product on Facebook (How to make money with clickbank using Facebook).
Another way is to create a Facebook page for the particular subject or niche of your product. For instance, if you are promoting a recipe book, you can create a Facebook page for cooking. On this page, you can share your HopLink with your followers. The HopLink will lead the traffic directly to the vendor’s funnels or your squeeze funnel. To attract traffic to your offer you can also use Facebook ads. There are people who are making a lot of money using Facebook ads and you can join that club.
3. Lander>Opt-in>Offer.
In this method, you send people to a landing page and while there you offer them a free gift in exchange for their email. You just need to make sure that the gift has some relation to your offer. Afterward, when they opt in, you can email them the offer after one or two confidence-building emails. Be warned that if your first email mentions your offer it may put them off so avoid it.
4. Promoting your product through a website.
Another approach is to create a site that reviews the product. You then attract traffic which is either free or paid to that site. On that site, you can then invite the visitors to check out the offer through banner ads or links to the vendor’s sales page.
How to promote your product using a website or blog.
There are various methods for promoting ClickBank products and one of them is through content marketing.
Here you use a website or blog where you write reviews of the product and other general information articles related to that product.
There are blogs out there that are specifically set up for affiliate marketing.
It may not be the most effective way of marketing but it is one that I am most comfortable with. There are actually many bloggers that make a full-time income doing this.
Below are the steps to follow for this method.
1. Setting up a site.
For this, I highly recommend Bluehost one of the biggest web hosting companies out there.
The plan I am recommending is also very cheap. It cost $2.65 per month and besides this, you will get a free domain.
There are various Bluehost web hosting plans but I recommend the basic plan for a new blogger. It’s for one site.
As a new blogger, it is better to focus on one site first before you go on to own more sites.
So you can start with this $2.65 per month hosting and then upgrade once your first site is established and earning you money.
I can promise that if you work on it you should be able to earn enough money to pay this sum easily after a few months.
If you are serious about this I recommend the Income School where you can learn all there is in content marketing.
Their target is for your blog to earn enough money to replace your current income in two years’ time.
>You can learn more about the Income School here<
If however, you are short on cash then you can search for information on the net.
The only problem is that that information is not structured information that you will get from sites like Income School.
It can, therefore, be a bit confusing as I found out in my early experience in internet marketing.
Nowadays to rank in Google it takes about 6 months to 12 months.
The Bluehost web hosting introductory offer is for a period of 36 months and by that time many serious internet marketers will be earning at least $1,000 per month.
But as they say, these results are not typical but achievable from my experience.
Choosing a domain.
On the next screen, you will be asked to set up your domain. Bluehost offers a free domain to its new customers saving them some money for the first year at least.
In picking a domain name try to pick a short domain name. A short domain name is easy to remember for visitors to your site.
You can also pick a catchy name to stand out from the crowd. However, if you cannot it does not matter that much.
Another thing to avoid is picking the domain is the use of hyphens and numbers. These are difficult to remember so avoid them if you can.
I also recommend picking the .com domains as they are the most commonly used domain endings. Visitors are most likely to type in .com when they want to visit your site than .net and others.
Another suggestion is to include your niche in the name. For instance, if you are into finance you can include finance in your domain name.
Create a Bluehost Account.
After the domain selection process you will be taken to a page where you will be asked to create your account. Here you will provide your name and address
At the bottom of this online form, you will be provided with the account plan which by default is left at 36 months of hosting.
But you can change it to a monthly payment if you are short of cash.
There are also some extras that you need to watch out for. Some of them may be pre-ticked.
If you want any of them you can leave it as it is but if you don’t want them you need to remember to untick them.
It is definitely not a must to pick any of the extras even though some of them can be of help to a new blogger.
I am thinking here of the Bluehost SEO tools. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
This is the process of increasing the quality of your site so that you can rank higher in search engines such as Google.
Bluehost SEO tools help you with analyzing your site and give recommendations, tasks, and instructions for you to optimize your site.
Installation of WordPress
The last steps all involve the installation of WordPress. WordPress is the software used to create your blog and to customize it.
It is a content management system that allows you to do your blogging without having to do computer coding or programming.
WordPress is the most widely used content management software in the world. Others include Wix.
The installation itself is very easy but you can always contact Bluehost staff to help you if you experience any problems.
You can learn more about installing a WordPress theme on Bluehost here.
Choice of theme
At the end of the installation, you will be asked to choose a theme.
Here you can pick any theme for the time being. You can change this later on.
Before you start posting any articles I would recommend that you seriously consider buying a premium theme.
Premium themes offer more cool features making your website stand out.
There are a few themes that you should consider buying, they include the following.
The Thesis Theme for WordPressGenesis WordPress Theme
Thrive WordPress Theme
Elegant WordPress Theme
Creating articles for your site.
In creating articles for your site you need to concentrate on what people are searching for in Google about the product you are promoting.
One way to do that is to type the name of the product in Google search and check the suggestions that come as you type.
You can also look at the “People also ask” part of the search results and related searches at the bottom.
The idea is to combine both informational articles and promotional articles.
Information articles will help in bringing traffic to your site and building trust before you invite them to visit your sales or review pages.
Promotional articles will focus on buying keywords.
These are keywords that someone looking to buy will key in Google. For example if someone types words like best …, buy…. it shows that someone is about to choose what to buy.
To find keywords you can also use free tools like Ubersuggest to find keywords to write posts on.
You can also utilize the free versions of tools like KWFinder.
Besides providing ideas on keywords, these tools will also provide the difficulty of ranking for the keywords.
If you want to rank high fast you go for high volume low competition keywords.
You can also go for low volume keywords but be prepared to write a number of articles to get more traffic.
Actually it is easier to rank for keywords with low volumes as few people are targeting them.
From the keyword research, you can create an excel spreadsheet showing the keywords, volume, difficulty and other metrics.
Other metrics could include you searching the competition on google and getting the average length of the articles on page one of google.
There are sites like Wordcounter where you can paste the posts to get the word count of each post.
If you are to outrank the competition you need to write articles that are a bit longer than the average length of the top 10 posts on Google search.
For example, if the average length of the posts is 1500 then write an article that is 1750 words long.
A far better way of researching how to write your articles is using a tool like Surfer SEO. This tool analyses how your competitors have optimized their articles.
It will then provide you with exact tips on how your article should be written if you are to outrank them.
This tool has helped many bloggers to rise in the search engine very fast.
Conclusion
I hope you have learned one or two things on how to make money with ClickBank. The key to success is to start. No one wins by doing nothing.
If you want to have everything in perfect order you will just delay yourself. We all have and continue to learn from our mistakes over time.
You can make money from ClickBank if you do it right.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can ClickBank be trusted?
Yes, it can be trusted and I am speaking from my own experience and the six million clients that use its services. It is one of the leading retailers of digital products and has been around since 1998.
How much does it cost to sell on ClickBank?
Last time I checked vendors were being charged a one-time activation fee of $49.95. There is also a payment processing fee of $2.50. These charges do not apply to affiliates. Being an affiliate is free.
Does ClickBank pay through PayPal?
Unfortunately no. ClickBank only pays through checks or via direct deposit into your bank account.
What is the payment threshold on ClickBank?
You can select an amount from $10 to $1,000,000 as your payment threshold amount.
The default payment threshold is, however, $100 which you need to change if you want it higher or below.
Is Clickbank still profitable?
Yes Clickbank is still profitable if you find the right product to promote and how you promote it. There are many internet marketers who make a living just promoting Clickbank products.
I would aim for products where there is not too much competition. In that way, you would easily manage to advertise it on Google Ads or MSN ads without spending too much money.
If you pick a wrong product where there is too much competition you could struggle to rank on Google and will spend more on ads too as it is a bidding process when it comes to Google Ads or MSN ads.
How can I earn money from Clickbank fast?
I think the quickest way to earn money from Clickbank is to create a landing page to capture emails in exchange for a free product. After that, you can send them emails.
Initial emails should not promote anything. They should just be informational emails. In that way, you will build trust. After one or two emails you can then start sending emails promoting your product.
To get traffic quicker to your landing page you will have to to advertise it using pay per click ads from Google and others search engines. This is by far the quickest way to get traffic as it starts immediately.
If you rely on blogging you may have to wait for a few months before you get any free search engine traffic. In the case of Google it takes on average 8 months before your post ranks.
Relying on search engine traffic is therefore not the fastest way to make money from ClickBank.
How long does it take to make money on Clickbank?
You can start to make money on Clickbank as soon as today if you are using paid traffic as the traffic can start almost immediately. You however need to decide whether to capture emails first or you can start sending people directly to the sales page.
If you choose to send the traffic directly then depending on the conversion rate you can start earning money today. Sending traffic directly does not convert well when compared to creating a landing page that captures emails first.
Trust is an important factor in internet marketing. People don’t just buy stuff from strangers before they earn their trust. So expect few sales if you send traffic directly to a sales page.
How if you are relying on free blog traffic and be prepared to wait for months before you start earning any money. You can however shortcut this by relying on paid traffic which can start immediately.
If you are relying on paid traffic I would urge you to test first and see if the conversion is good enough for you to make a profit. You don’t want to go full throttle and lose money. Remember you are not a charity, you are running a business.
How much money can you make from Clickbank?
If you are thinking about how much money you can make on Clickbank then I can tell you from experience that it is very possible to make a three-figure sum every month. This is because the commissions on Clickbank are very high.
Let’s say for example you are making $10 per sale which is quite common, you only need to make 100 sales to hit $1,000. It is much better if you pick one that earns you $20 a sale as then you will only need 50 sales to make a $1,000.
Actually when compared to display ads affiliate marketing wins big time all the time. You don’t need too much traffic to make a living whereas if you are relying on display ads you will need tens of thousands of visitors to even make a thousand dollars.
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