How To Make Money With Clickbank (The “Right” Way)

A lot of people know about the ClickBank marketplace, and that you can make money with it. But how many people know how to correctly make money with ClickBank? Not very many!

How about we go over together in this post, a really cool strategy that you’ve probably not seen before, and that will most likely beat to a pulp, any of the traditional methods of making money with ClickBank, that you might have been taught elsewhere. Sound good?

Great.

So first off, what is it most people are doing out there anyways? Well, a very common practice is the following:

-They sign up for the platform. 
-They choose a product they think will make them money. 
-And then they randomly disperse their links throughout the interweb hoping and praying that someone will buy, and when nobody does, they come to the realization that maybe this platform strategy or option of making money online just doesn’t work.

They then give up and call this thing all “a scam”. This is especially true if they actually paid for the knowledge beforehand! It sucks.

Maybe some Guru sold them on the idea that they, as a Guru, possessed the “perfect method” and an even more perfect solution to make money with ClickBank that practically guarantees thousands of dollars overnight, and that the only real option would be to buy into this or her training.

Who are the “Gurus” anyways?

It’s like every one i ever consider “a guru”…just talk about there being…well… “other gurus”. Very interesting.

Well, it turns out it’s not that easy to make money with ClickBank as an affiliate (big reveal here, i know). Making money correctly with ClickBank affiliate marketing, has multiple steps involved and there’s no such thing as overnight success with affiliate marketing anyways.

There is a way however to do it correctly (a few actually but the core method remains the same), and which will give you a great chance to scale up nicely once you have everything in place.

Okay, so in this post let’s check out a kick ass strategy that i’m pretty sure you’ve not seen before, plus, i’ll present you with a road map to choose products to promote, that you can follow and apply as soon as you leave this page…Let’s get started!

Table Of Content

What is ClickBank
What Are The Pros & Cons Of ClickBank For Affiliates?
“Content Funnel” Strategy
How To Make Money With ClickBank Correctly Step-By-Step
How Pick The Right ClickBank Product
ClickBank Links
Typical Ways Of Promoting The Products
How To Correctly Promote Products
How Do We Get Traffic
The Optin
The Sales Page
Email Marketing
Scaling
What’s Next

What is ClickBank

ClickBank is a very trusted Marketplace for both Affiliates and product creators alike, that has been around for ages (since 1998…so over 20 years now!) and now has more than 6 million clients worldwide.

It’s a solid and reputable company, and the objective behind ClickBank is for both parties (Affiliates and sellers) to come together and make money through the sales of products, without too many complex agreements.

ClickBank basically serves as the middleman between the creators and the Sellers, aka affiliates. 

FOR AFFILIATES

As an affiliate, you can very rapidly create yourself an account and join. It’s free and there’s no screening process, which makes it very beginner friendly and very inviting.

As you may or may not know, a lot of affiliate marketplaces out there require some sort of affiliate track record, a referral or some other stuff that newbies just don’t have…so the barrier of entry is super low.

However there are some countries that ClickBank doesn’t allow affiliates for. But for the most part ClickBank doesn’t discriminate. You can see if your country is on that list or not, by simply registering on their homepage here.

FOR SELLERS

For sellers, ClickBank is a great platform to have your product listed on, because it’s relatively easy to set up, although it has gotten a bit more strict in regards to copyrighting recently.

They do however, require a startup activation fee and they also charge for fees on every sale you produce, which is something to keep in mind. There are also fees associated to money withdrawals and refunds and processing fees… so there is that too.

Most marketplaces have similar transaction fees to ClickBank, although you will want to have other options available, or in mind, if you sell on higher volume. There are marketplaces out there that charge no transaction fees, (might still charge other fees though) so if you’re a seller, keep your eyes peeled for those!

What Are The Pros & Cons Of ClickBank For Affiliates?

PROS

-You can sell in multiple countries, and they’re friendly towards international affiliates.
–Massive variety of products in multiple different niches.
-Membership based products as well as high ticket products available.
-Perfect for beginners because you don’t need a track record.
-They pay fast. Weekly or bi-weekly, which is faster than some of the other platforms.

Cons

– A lot of the sales pages look like trash. They’re super outdated! (but i guess they sell…so it doesn’t matter what i think).
– There are a lot of shitty products too. 
– They still pay out only by check or bank transfer (I suppose they have their reasons but I think PayPal would be an awesome option).
–Competition is pretty fierce, since the barrier of entry is so low, and so the less ethical methods run rampant, which can be kind of a bummer sometimes.

Okay, well now that we have a general idea of the ClickBank platform and how it can benefit both Affiliates and sellers alike, let’s go over this core strategy on how to make money with ClickBank, that differentiates itself a bit more from the rest.

“Content Funnel” Strategy

What this method is centered around, is the creation of a “content funnel”. It’s basically just content that is very helpful, likable and shareable, and that has the complete front end made without the intention to sell anything.

Throughout the page, we’ll give the potential customer a chance to get some more, congruent kick butt content if they decide to give us their contact information in the form of email (we’ll use it as a means to deliver the bonus contents and promote). 

Those who decide to grab it, will be highly targeted (since we didn’t force them to take anything) and we’ll present the original offer only after getting their contact information.

Social shares will allow us to get more traffic to our content, as well as retargeting the potential clients (that didn’t opt in initially) through ads. 

And finally, email promotions allow us to follow up and cross promote.

And now we can now scale both vertically and horizontally, as we see fit.

And that’s it!

Not try to bash on the originators of the strategy, but i’ll just be calling it the “content funnel” method in this post.

Maybe “content funnel” is already a thing that exists, i don’t know, but for the purpose of this article, i’m going to be giving it that name.

So that is the overview of the strategy. Now. Let’s go into detail.

How To Make Money With ClickBank Correctly Step-By-Step

Okay, we’ll be using the content funnel strategy to promote products correctly.

But what are the individual elements of this strategy?

Well, to make money with ClickBank (or pretty much any other affiliate marketplace…really) as an affiliate marketer, the process generally consists of three steps: Choosing a product, getting traffic and smushing these two together.

1) You need to choose a good, genuinely helpful and useful product that you believe in. Alternatively, you can choose a product that has good enough numbers (we’ll talk about those later!).

2) Next, you need highly targeted traffic, or an audience that could benefit from that product, and that is already looking for it (to make things easier for you).

3) Finally, you need a way to connect both together, and this will be done through a vehicle, which could be a social media platform, direct sales, SEO…whatever you wish. 

Simple right? 

Yessir. Simple, But Not Easy! 

Okay, now let’s go over the process of creating the content funnel and setting everything up, step-by-step. 

First, Head Over To ClickBank and create an account, if you still haven’t.

Next click on the affiliate Marketplace. You can find this at the top of the screen.

You will then have the option to search for a product, either by going to the top right corner in the search bar; through the advanced search by clicking the magnifying glass button; or by browsing through the left red side bar that indicate the different niches available in the marketplace.

Regardless of how you search for the product, different results are going to be sorted back at you from high to low on a metric called “popularity”. Like so:

How Pick The Right ClickBank Product

Alright so this is the main step of the process, and it’s as crucial as any one of the others, but if we mess this up then the rest is obviously going to be harder to accomplish successfully.

So, to pick the right product on ClickBank, I’d personally suggest you pick something that you are passionate about.

Many people i think will agree with me here, although i know some people that would argue that you shouldn’t pick what you’re passionate about. That you should think logically not emotionally and always go with the numbers, but because the NUMBERS indicate if a product is worth promoting or not.

Both methods are fine, i just think personally i’d rather pick a $27 product with recurring commission on something that I’m extremely passionate about and know my way around, than trying to fake my way through selling a $100 commission product that I don’t believe in or have no knowledge in just because it’s convenient.

The product might not even be all that good anyways and might even result in a buyers remorse and a refund because i promoted it incorrectly, because i went for the commission or because i didn’t care about the product etc etc.

Hope that makes sense.

Okay, since this is such a crucial step let’s go over what the data terms that are thrown back at you mean, mkay?

-Average $/Sale:
Basically the average amount that each customer spends throughout the funnel. Recurring billing included.

-Initial $/Sale:
This is the average amount of money affiliates make per sale. How much you’ll make on average if you send a customer. This number does not include rebills.

-Gravity:
Gravity is a number of affiliates that have sold this product in the last 12 weeks, and gives you an idea of how well it’s selling.

-Average %/Rebill:
This is the percentage of rebills paid to the affiliates, on average.

-Average rebill total:
This is the average dollars affiliates take as a commission result of the monthly rebills.

Those stats are all nice and all… but let’s see if we could piece together a general strategy that we can follow to choose a ClickBank product to promote. Sound good?

So in a perfect world, you’d have something you’re interested in. You’d have picked a niche right from the get go, and you’d be looking at the products, trying to crunch those numbers, but you’d have a general idea which product is best, because the topic is familiar to you.

However, since “picking a niche” is not really as easy as it sounds either (i know it can be as hard as anything else really), let’s say you don’t have something you’re passionate about.

In this case, most people would recommend you start with one of the 3 most profitable niches online which are: Health, Wealth and Relationship.

These niches are evergreen, meaning regardless of what’s going on, they’ll be around and selling. They have tons of offers and have a lot of buyers, since people are always trying to better one, two or all three aspects of their lives.

So let’s say we picked the wealth niche or make money online (MMO). MMo is more like a, “sub-niche”, but let’s not worry about that for now.

We now want to look at the product stats, particularly:

-How Well They’re Selling
-How Much They Pay Out
-Monthly Subscription? Yay or nay? 
-How Well The Sales Page Looks
-If There’s A Good Affiliate Resources Page Or Not

How Well They’re Selling

A very useful metric, to know if the product is currently selling, is the gravity. As we said, it’s the amount of affiliates that have made sales in the last 12 weeks promoting a particular product.

You want to be selling something that is currently already selling. Sales are taking place, you just want to “follow the money” and put yourself in between. A great product is paramount in making that happen.

All in all, and as a general rule of thumb: We want to aim for high gravity product, the higher the better.

How Much They Pay Out

We want to be looking at the amount of money the product pays out obviously…but not all that much. 

Beginner affiliates will usually go for the highest payout, super expensive products right around here. The problem is, if it has a really low conversion rate you might end up not making as much, as you would if you chose a lower ticket product like $20-$50 with a 5% conversion rate (not to mention that the traffic should be exceptionally good to make a higher ticket sale anyways).

So instead, we might want to look at lower ticket products that have a little orange arrow that points upwards. This indicates that there is an upsell inside the funnel, and it increase the average customer value, as you can see in the image below.

Monthly Subscription? Yay or Nay? 

Okay so up until now, we know we want a product that is high quality, high gravity, mid to low cost with upsells… what else?

Recurring commissions, is not an “absolute must”… but promoting products that have a monthly subscription, really is the icing on the cake. And it comes represented by the arrows in blue at the bottom of the product information line.

Monthly recurring commissions let you stack your initial efforts, and make “passive income”. Which will allow you to reinvest into traffic a lot quicker.

So if your product has a recurring billing, all the better.

Does It Have A Good Looking Sales Page?

Apart from what we’ve already discussed, we want to be looking at products that have good video sales pages that have highly engaging videos, social proof and that aren’t too old school. 

This parameter isn’t really all that important either, if the numbers are good. If the numbers are good, it doesn’t really matter what the heck the sales page looks like, it sells.

Personally, if i check out the page and go “What the fuck. GROSS”, i’ll probably not promote it. There are a bunch of other products out there.

Is There A Good Affiliate Resource Page?

A good resource page for affiliates, is extremely important. It will have anything from premade banners, free pdfs or videos, ad templates, discount codes, audience insights and just a whole slew of different things for you to use.

Good products will have a lot of affiliate resources to try to help you, help them. We want to promote a product that has everything that we could ever need, to help promote it.

ClickBank Links

Once we’ve found a product that we want to promote, we now need to get our magic affiliate link. 

Click on the big red promote button, add your username, and you should be good to go.

Also, in order for you to know where each of your sales has come from, whether it be email Facebook groups YouTube videos, articles or whatever, you can add a tracking code underneath the account nickname, which will track the traffic source.

The best practice is to create a new affiliate link each time for each different source, by modifying the unique tracking ID.

Typical Ways Of Promoting The Products

Okay now let’s go through some of the more general ways that affiliates are promoting products on ClickBank.

Direct Linking

Direct linking is where you… grab the raw link from ClickBank, and just try to promote it all around the web, for free or through paid ads, until you make a sale. 

This used to work well in the past…but it’s not recommended anymore. It’s not that you won’t make any money with this, but it’s not really worth your time in the long run.

It’s the beginner way of doing things where you send traffic, usually unqualified directly to the sales page without any presale whatsoever.

But hey! Who hasn’t done this before right?

Am i right fellas?

Anyone?

*gulp* Just me? Okay…

Regardless, without any way for you to capture the traffic or create a pre-sale, or something that is going to pre qualify people into purchasing your awesome product, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to convert the visitors into sales.

Also, in many cases multiple touch points are needed for a sale to take place anyways, and without having way to capture that traffic or retarget it, it’s pretty much lost.

Bridge Page

This is a much better way of promoting, than sending the customers over straight to the sales page because it acts as a “bridge” between the customer and the offer.

It allows for some pre selling or warming up, it also may or may not introduce you personally (if you’re branding yourself) and, if done correctly, it’s also compliant with the ad network.

Sending paid traffic from the big networks like Google and Facebook, straight to the ClickBank offer, will most likely get your accounts banned and so, the bridge page is hopefully going to allow you to bypass that.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are an excellent way to sell your products. People do them because they work, and the traffic is super targeted, since those people are already looking for the product you’re reviewing.

This will work great if you know what you’re selling. Otherwise it can come out as being biased, and people don’t like that.

The problem with product reviews however, is that, since they work well there are a lot of more affiliates trying to compete. Especially if the product has just come out. Newer launched products have lower search volume, and so ranking is “fairly easy”, which means a lot of people will be trying to do this.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that for you to keep growing using product review, you have to keep creating reviews on other products. So if you intend on creating an online presence this way, you’ll probably end up with a website or YouTube channel that is only about reviews… personally i don’t think that looks very nice, but hey…it also work.

How To Correctly Promote Products

A better way to do affiliate marketing with ClickBank is by not selling anything at all. At least not in the beginning. This is where a strategy like the content funnel strategy, comes into play.

What you can do instead, is you can create free valuable content and in the form of a “content funnel”.

Let’s say we now chose a dog training program, which by the way, i have another post That You Can Find Here where i make a “case study” on how I would go about promoting one of those.

(It’s beginner friendly, plus there is a picture of my awesome dog, Roxy there…i always try to find an excuse to try to show her off, i can’t help it).

Anyways…

Let’s say we chose a dog training program. The purpose of this “content funnel”, like we mentioned in the beginning, is to create content that is very helpful, likeable (and if we can, shareable) and that has the complete front end without the intention of selling anything.

Creating content that, on the front end, doesn’t sell squat, will not just make it more shareable (which gives you free traffic), but it’ll also help you out with Facebook ads and Google ads, since now, you’ll be able to send people to your piece of content, without getting banned or limited or blacklisted or whatever. 

But you might be thinking: “Well…but what’s the point if i’m not selling anything?”

Well, even though you keep the front end clean of any kind of sales pitch, you do however offer something on the backend, like bonuses tips, a free PDF or a video course that greatly compliments the original content and you deliver it through email by having optin forms (you’ll need a website for this).

This also ups your conversion rates tremendously because only the people that are interested in knowing more, will become part of that audience and so it’s more likely that they will end up buying the product after a few touch points.

This method of promoting, is miles and miles better than the “standard” methods out there, for a bunch of reasons:

-You’re creating great content, but isn’t too salesy.
-Your content is compliant with ad networks
-You’ll create something that is worth sharing, which will send more eyeball over.
-You can do it over and over again but it compounds
-And you’re building an audience of your own.

This seems like a lot of work, and it is! But it’s a sustainable and quite frankly very helpful and fun way to do things. At the end of the day only 10% of affiliates bring in 90% of the revenue because they’re doing things correctly, so let’s do it correctly! 🙂

So this step is all about creating that amazing piece of content.

You can go about doing this through any media you wish. You can use a youtube channel or a facebook or instagram profile…but in this post, we’ll be focusing on creating the funnel through a website.

How Do We Get Traffic

So now that we have a general idea of how we’re supposed to choose a product and create the content. We’ve gotten creative and we’ve built up a cool website with some content. Now how do we get traffic to that content?

There are a whole lot of different ways to initially get traffic to the content (remember we want to make it so that people share it too!), and it boils down to 2 different kinds of traffic, which are either free or paid…but let’s go over just a few of the ways we can send traffic to our content:

-SEO:

Creating content that is already highly optimized for the search engines, is a form of “getting traffic” in of itself. If done correctly, your original content will organically stick around and will bring you really targeted traffic for a long time. 

Once created, you can also more quickly send traffic from other search engines like other blog posts, guest posts, forum comments, youtube videos, sites like quora or pinterest, all of which are search engines, and allow you to build a “spider web” back to the original content.

This is a very long-term strategy, and it can take months for you to see your first sale if this is your main traffic source. The upside however, is that it could be bringing you traffic for years to come with minimal “additional effort”. 

-Social Traffic (mainly Facebook):

Social media is a little bit of a different beast, because as of right now, there’s no such thing as “ranking” because of how the algorithm is structured. This means that the content that links back to your original piece has a very short shelf life and is probably forgotten in a day or two.

However the upside is that content that is shareable has a lot more reach and can get you a lot of traffic quickly. Also, it’s very useful for creating ads and retargeting. In fact this is especially useful if you’ve already had visitors to your content (your website in this case).

A great way to send super quick traffic from these sites, is to create a profile and build up a large audience, and help the algorithm show you or your content to more and more potential clients. This is highly effective if done right!

The Optin

So going back to the dog training example, i now want to create something else to give away. So if i’m giving out 10 tips on how to train your dog, i would then have ready some additional tips, or a step-by-step guide or a free video course or something that is congruent, and i would add it to my website.

In your case, it could be additional recipes additional workouts, more woodworking plans, a free pdf or whatever it is you feel like you can give out. Make sure to check the affiliate resources 🙂 you might find some goodies there.

Now, there are different ways to add them to your original content, however since we’ll be using a website, we can use pop-ups, in texts opt-ins and in later stages use retargetting ads to retarget the visitors that didn’t optin, through Facebook network or the Google network.

In text optin forms, i think are particularly interesting because you can have them appear fairly late in the content for example at the end of an article, and they’re less intrusive.

This makes it so that the only people that will see it are the ones that have either scroll down rapidly or have gone through the entire content. But it’s likely that if they decide to grab whatever additional stuff you’re giving away, it’s because they’re super interested!

Now to create these optins, there are different tools you can use. I’d Suggest Builderall, since you can create the optin form, the web pages and you can also send out emails through the platform (which we’ll be mentioning later).

Alternatively, you could use Thrive Theme or Elementor Pro although neither of them have a autoresponder included as of right now. They’re amazing though.

The Sales Page

This is where you finally present the offer to the customer.

It is only after they’ve read through the content and it decided to optin to the additional information, that they are presented with the opportunity to upgrade to the paid product that you think will benefit them!

You may want to create another page here with a little text, to let your potential customer know, that, even though they’ll be getting whatever it is that you offered them, that you would highly recommend them to check out the product (that you’re selling on the following page). Very gently let them know about it, and have a button or link that takes them over to the offer. 

As you might have noticed, this method, is drastically different from what most affiliates are doing. It creates interesting engaging and shareable content, which will then allow you to get more traffic for free but is also geared towards conversions, where only the people that are really interested will decide to optin, and it’s only after that, that they’ll be presented with a product.

This method is non invasive and non pushy and just all around aweosome. A lot better than just spamming and pushing products down people’s  throats, especially if they’re not even interested in it to begin with!

I forgot to mention that to be be able to retarget the audience (that didn’t optin) through ad networks, both a Facebook and a Google pixel will be needed on your page, as well as one in the pre-sale page (after the optin) that would allow you to create a negative audience (we won’t be retargeting people that already gave us their email to opt-in!).

Email Marketing

This is the part that differentiates newer affiliates, from seasoned Pros (or so they say).

This is where you create a email sequence to follow up with your potential customer and give them another chance to pick up your amazing, kickass product.

Email marketing is crucial, because it will allow you to recycle the traffic without having to pay any more for it, and this is absolutely huge.

Think about it.

If you’re directly linking to an offer, it’s going to be very difficult to make a profit because not many people buy on the first go.

However by “capturing your traffic” with this method, it’s a lot easier. You know that the contacts that you have are interested in the product, and this will pretty much guarantee multiple touch points (which you’re unable to do by direct linking) giving you a higher possibly to make the sale. Woot woot!

To do this part, you will have to have an email autoresponder. A really nice tool that I highly recommend that acts both as the page builder and the autoresponder (and also allows hosting and website building) Is Builderall.

The best alternative, is to get WordPress. Buy a domain, get hosting, and add a funnel builder like Elementor Pro, or Thrive Themes. And this is supposing that you have the autoresponder already.

Now this is by no means an email marketing tutorial, but essentially what you would want to do now, is add your potential customer to a 3 to 5 day autoresponder sequence.

On the initial days you might want to answer some questions they might have about the product or show some testimonial that the product has worked for someone else. Mainly just remind them that the product exists.

On the final days of the promotion, you can add some scarcity, offer some discount coupons that you might have been given (once again, check the affiliate resource page!).

Basically, you want to convince the customer that they’re making a great choice for trying out a product that will help them out, or will get them closer to the specific goal they want to reach, whether it be training their dog, lose some weight, get their ex back or whatever.

Finally after the email sequence is over, you can pool that contact into a different list to where you will be occasionally letting them know of new content that has come out, or new products they might also find useful.

You can even create an additional content funnel and add them to a different email sequence afterwards too.

Scaling

Hopefully and if you’ve done everything correctly you now have an amazing shareable “funnel style” content bomb. Hurray! 

So, let’s say you already have some traffic checking your content out either through SEO, or maybe you had some quora answers made that were on point, or your social media posts got some eyeballs, or you promoted it through blog posts or someone found it to your YouTube channel… whatever might be the case: You already had someone share it, and you got the ball rollin’.

The next step is to scale it up vertically or horizontally.

Vertically, as in scaling the same exact content, for example through the use of paid social media traffic (or just more free traffic from facebook or forums or whatever) which will in turn create more subscribers and more shares. You can also expand the autoresponder sequence to, maybe 7-10 days to increase sales too.

Or horizontally, as in you can create more content around a different keyword. Maybe the person is interested in training their dog, but is more interested in, say, vegan dog food.

What you can then do, is create similar content to the first, and interlink or connect both content pieces together, as to maximize your chances (basically, create another “content funnel”). Having related content, will strengthen your online presence too. It’s totally worth it!

What’s Next?

Eventually (pretty far down the line) you’ll come to the realization that you…may want to switch from being an affiliate to being a product owner or product creator. This means you have control over the upsells, controls over the product and you will get a hundred percent of the money (minus fees).

This is not the only reason though, because apart from this, YOU will now have affiliates selling your products for you, which essentially is free traffic and free money.

And this is the unspoken truth of affiliate marketing: It’s actually “worse” to be an affiliate than it is to be a product owner because the product owners get traffic, sales AND customers for free (as long as their product is good enough, it converts, they have customer service in check and the likes).

Some sellers out there, in particular in the make money online niche, show screenshots of their earnings and say they’re making money with affiliate marketing, when in fact, they’re showing their earnings as a seller who have tons of affiliates selling for them.

Yes, they’re “making money with affiliate marketing”, it’s just not THEM doing it.

Anyways, that’s not the point…the point is:

It’s not easy to create your own product and that’s less people do it. It’s easier to be an affiliate. There is nothing wrong with that either! It’s just there are more consumers than there are producers and you should try to transition into becoming a producer. 

But, if you’re getting there, and want to create something valuable for the marketplace, be it ClickBank, or whatever other marketplace you wish, a good start would be teachable, you can upload your info products or courses there and start sellin’!

Conclusion

All right everybody that would be all!

I hope that you enjoyed the post, and i hope that this “tutorial” inspired you to create a more sustainable more fun and albeit more difficult…more profitable strategy on how to make money with ClickBank as an affiliate.

Go out there and make it happen!