How To Make Money With ClickBank 2023

Most affiliate marketers know about ClickBank (and if you don’t I’ll explain exactly what it does just below) but few of you guys know how to make money with Clickbank. A typical process for a newbie to affiliate marketing is that they sign up, find some crappy product with a high commission and start to fantasize about how it’s going to make sales. Then, they throw some random traffic at it and watch how nobody spends a dime on it. Finally, they come to the conclusion that the platform sucks. Sounds familiar?

Unlike traditional affiliate platforms, Clickbank serves as a marketplace for both people who create products and affiliates, so they can make money together without complex paperwork or agreements.

HOW DOES CLICKBANK WORK?

In other words, Clickbank is the middleman between creators of digital products, such as ebooks, video, music and so on, and people who can sell those products, i.e. Affiliate marketers. Obviously, depending on which party of the marketplace are you, Clickbank fulfills one of the two functions:

A Product Marketplace For Affiliates

As an affiliate marketer, you can jump right in, create your unique affiliate links for thousands of products (more on that later) and start to drive traffic right away to start making money. You will also see your earnings in real time. It’s free to join and there’s no screening process. No cap or complicated metrics. It’s basically a simplified affiliate network, open to anyone that wants to give it a shot. In case you want to try it out, simply go register on their homepage.

An E-Commerce Platform For Information Product Owners

As a product owner, you can add your product to the database and ClickBank will take care of all the checkout and e-commerce part, as well as offering an affiliate program for it.

You will be charged $49.95 onetime activation fee, for becoming a seller on Clickbank. I believe this fee does a good job of keeping some low-quality vendors out of the platform.

This is great if you don’t want to handle the technical part of things but you have to know that the platform will take quite a bit of money off your sales ($1 + 7.5% of the sales).

PROS & CONS OF CLICKBANK

I really like ClickBank and I think it’s a fantastic place for new affiliate marketers to get started and earn money online without the hassle of more advanced affiliate networks. There’s no cap, you don’t need to be approved for 90% of the offers and you can start selling straight away.

Trust me, that’s a huge plus when you get started and have no track record to show to those big affiliate networks.

Here is a short list of the pros & cons of the platform:

Pros

• Highly paid offers (75% commission is common)
• You can sell in most countries
• Several recurring offers to sell, for ongoing income
• Takes the tech out of the way

Cons

• Lots of shitty products & sales pages
• Lots of competition on popular products
• Hard to tell what does well without investing traffic
• High costs associated to the e-commerce platform

STEP-BY-STEP: HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH CLICKBANK

To make money with Clickbank, you have to follow the same formula as any successful venture. You need a solid product that customers want and create a funnel to convert the traffic, to begin with. Then you build up your traffic, optimize your funnel, and once you know you’re profitable (i.e. you convert $ more than you invest), you scale the whole thing.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH CLICKBANK

Easy on paper, but sadly, few people put the effort to get it right. 90% of affiliate revenues come from 10% of affiliates, so put your best work in.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PRODUCT TO PROMOTE

One of the best ways to make money with Clickbank is to start as an affiliate, promoting pages that have already been optimized, in order to build your sales funnels. Much like keyword research for SEO, picking the right product to promote on ClickBank is extremely important. No matter how good you are at promoting if you drive traffic to a sales page that doesn’t sell, you will not make much money.

HOW EVERYONE TRIES TO MAKE MONEY FROM CLICKBANK

If you read on other affiliate marketing blogs, you’ll see a ton of “tactics” on how to make money with ClickBank. Some of them work and some of them clearly don’t work. The issue most of these tactics have, apart from the last one, is that they have very limited preselling.

People are thrown to sales pages without knowing exactly why they are there or who is this guy trying to sell them an information product. From our experience, preselling is HUGE. You need to give people valid reasons why they should buy the product and if you can be that 3rd party giving a recommendation, your conversion rates will 5-10x very often (hint: that’s what I do all over Authority Hacker).

Additionally, repeat exposure to the offer does very very well for us. More on that later though. Let’s have a recap of the most “common” ways people make money with ClickBank before I show you our secret sauce.

• Direct Linking / Banners

This one is the most common and very often least profitable. Find a somewhat related article on your site and slap a banner on the sidebar or in the middle of the article, without any form of pre-selling the product specifically.

• Affiliate Banner

Because the traffic is somewhat related to the offer, some people will convert. However, your EPC (Earnings Per Click) will be very low because the product does not come recommended by the author.

• In Content Links

In content, links are usually in line recommendations that are embedded directly in the text. The recommendation often comes from the voice of the author and if they’ve done a good job building trust throughout the article/post, the conversion rates will be decent.

• In Content Affiliate Link

However, they’re not very prominent and will only catch the attention of the most attentive readers. Other than trusting the author, there’s not much of an incentive to click through.

• Reviews

This is one tactic we still use to this day and for good reason: it works! Review traffic is extremely targeted and people landing on your page have a very high chance to buy. If your review doesn’t look completely biased, there’s a good chance they’ll trust you and click through your affiliate link to buy the product. The issue with reviews is to actually get the volume of traffic you need to make a lot of sales.

The traffic on review keywords is low and the competition is fierce. Every SEO and their dog tries to make money online with reviews and you end up sitting in the middle of a negative SEO fest, for trickles of traffic.

Not ideal, if you’re trying to build a long term property. Also, there’s no other way to scale than horizontally (produce more reviews) because there just isn’t much traffic for each product review. This makes it hard to grow faster or use paid traffic to push things up.

CLICKBANK FUNNEL

You can target viral topics or high traffic keywords related to the problems the offer solves meaning there’s no traffic problem. It can run 100% without PPC if that’s not your thing (many of those run purely on organic for us).

You’re building an email list meaning that you own the audience. This means that you can sell more things to them once they reach your main list, and the value of your media property is greatly increased and compounds over time. Let’s dive into each element of the funnel and how you can execute each of them:

• Traffic & Content

This one is pretty straight forward. If you create value only content, getting links using these tactics and getting shares is fairly easy.

• Opt-In

Create a complementary piece of content to the article. For example, if the article is a list of tips, create 3 more tips that people can download. This can be more recipes or anything that is a continuation of the content. This way, the people that were engaged enough to read until the end will most likely want to trade their email for more.

• Thank You Page & Offer

Now that people have opted in, you need to redirect them to a thank you page where you can (finally) promote your offer.

While promoting the offer is important, it’s also important to “bridge” the offer with the lead magnet they just opted in for. Otherwise, people will be frustrated and think they need to pay for the lead magnet. Trust me we’ve made that mistake!

• Email Marketing

This is where things start to be fun. As opposed to people trying to throw traffic to a sales page once and then have no chance to see those visitors again, you have their contact details!

Note: If you don’t have an email marketing service yet, I recommend Getresponse for affiliate marketers, it’s far superior to Aweber and offers great automation for the exact same price and has a free trial for you to see if you like it.

You can use this in other affiliate programs or even for your own products to promote. Be careful though, as offers do occasionally get pulled. You need to be sure you have a backup offer in case this happens (or you’re ready to create a backup yourself).

I hope this tutorial inspired you to get out of the “easy” monetization methods and showed you that it is possible to build a long term property, be seen as a value adder and yet make money with Clickbank. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. 

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