ClickBank Affiliate Marketing: How to Make Money with Clickbank

Are you looking for the ideal place to get started as an affiliate marketer? ClickBank is a free to join affiliate network where anybody can browse the affiliate offers in the Marketplace, generate unique affiliate links, and make money by promoting digital products and services.

What is ClickBank?

Founded in a garage in California back in 1998, ClickBank is a popular affiliate network with over 200 million customers. Since its humble beginnings, ClickBank has generated over $3 billion in sales, becoming a top 100 internet retailer and one of the largest names in affiliate marketing. It’s an affiliate network, acting as a middleman between merchants and affiliates. Merchants can enlist the help of affiliates to promote their products, while affiliates can find products to promote and earn a commission for every sale they generate. Over the last 12 months, ClickBank has seen an increase in new affiliate products and a boost in popularity among affiliates:

Even as a beginner with no experience, you can sign up, create affiliate links for products, and start earning commission. You can also see your affiliate earnings in real-time. Joining is free, and there’s no drawn-out approval process, making ClickBank the ideal place to start your affiliate career.

Why Become a Clickbank Affiliate?

ClickBank generates around $250 million every year, making it one of the largest beginner-friendly affiliate networks. The key advantage of joining ClickBank is the vast range of digital products. Physical products go through a process of manufacturing, storage, and shipping - which all costs money and eats into rates of commission merchants pay affiliates. The beauty of digital products is that they don’t have any of these costs. Once a digital course, software product, or subscription service has been created, it costs the merchant next to nothing. Aside from the cost of marketing the product, 100% of sales revenue can be considered profit. That’s why digital products offer a much higher commission than physical products. You can find products on ClickBank with affiliate commission rates as high as 75%.

Need more convincing?

Here’s some of the key advantages and disadvantages of ClickBank.

Pros & Cons of ClickBank for Affiliate Marketers

Pros

Massive Range of Digital Products

Whatever your niche, you’ll find a relevant offer among the thousands of products listed on ClickBank. There are 24 different product categories to help you narrow down your choice, and new products are added to the ClickBank Marketplace every day.

High Commission

ClickBank pays some of the highest rates of commission you’ll find on any affiliate network. The commission varies depending on the merchant and product, but it’s not unusual to find products offering 75% commission to their affiliates. This is much more generous than what you will receive from Amazon Associates, which caps commission at 10% and pays around 5% for the majority of product categories.

Global Affiliate Network

Available to affiliates from the majority of countries around the world. If you want to scale your affiliate business to an international audience, ClickBank also provides multi-language support, enabling you to promote affiliate products in four languages.

Recurring Commission

There are plenty of offers that pay recurring commission on sales, increasing the income you can generate from each referral. The majority of affiliate networks offer a one-off commission payment per purchase, but there are plenty of subscriptions, courses, and memberships on ClickBank that provide recurring payments to affiliates.

Beginner-Friendly

ClickBank has an intuitive dashboard and an easy sign-up process. As an affiliate, all you need to do is fill in the registration form, select an affiliate product you want to promote and generate your unique affiliate link. You can sign up and start promoting products within a matter of minutes.

Cons

Some Poor Quality Products

ClickBank isn’t as selective over the products on its Marketplace as some of the other major affiliate networks. That means finding a decent product amongst the low-quality products can be a challenge. You need to know how to filter your results and narrow your search to find high-quality offers (we’ll show you how to do that later in the guide).

Lots of Competition

Some of the best selling products have lots of affiliates promoting the same offer. If you choose a product with a high Gravity rating, there’s a good chance you’ll be competing against lots of other affiliates. As a beginner affiliate marketer, you need to identify the products that are profitable but aren’t swamped by competing affiliates.

Slow Customer Support

If you need to get in touch with a customer service representative, don’t expect an immediate response to your email. ClickBank has a reputation for inconsistent customer service among affiliate marketers. There are thousands of merchants and affiliates using the network, but this is an area ClickBank should aim to improve.

ClickBank Affiliate Marketing Step-By-Step Guide

Joining ClickBank as an affiliate marketer is a quick and easy process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to walk you through the sign-up process.

Step 1: Visit the ClickBank Homepage

Head on over to ClickBank.com

Step 2: Click on Create Account

Click on “Create Account” in the top right of the homepage.

Step 3: Enter Your Details

You’ll be directed to a sign-up page where you need to enter your personal details and create a password for your account.

After filling in your details, click on the submit button.

Step 4: Complete Your Profile

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be directed to your account dashboard homepage. From here, click on the “Complete My Profile” button.

Step 5: Fill in Profile Information

Most of the form is pre-filled from your previous step, but you’ll need to add your address and recovery email information.

Step 6: Enter Payment Information

In the next section of the form, you need to enter your payment information and preferences.

ClickBank offer four payment options:

Check

The default payment method is via check. You’ll receive a check sent to the address listed in your account and addressed to the payee name you provide.

Direct Deposit

If you live in the U.S. or in other select countries around the world, ClickBank can transfer your payment directly to your bank account.

Wire Transfer

If direct deposit isn’t available in your country, you can receive your payment via wire transfer.

Payoneer

If you have a Payoneer account, you can provide your details and receive payment directly to your online wallet.

Step 7: Create Account Nickname

After filling in your payment details, click back to the main dashboard, and select “Create Account.”

The last step is to create an account nickname:

That’s it. Now you’re a ClickBank affiliate. So, let’s get to the important stuff; how to make money promoting ClickBank products.

How to Make Money as Clickbank Affiliate

The easiest way to make money on ClickBank is to promote affiliate products that already have a robust sales funnel in place. Choose the right product, and you just need to send traffic and let the merchant’s sales page do the work. Choose the wrong product, and it doesn’t matter how much traffic you send, you won’t make any money. So how do you choose the right products?

How to Identify a Good ClickBank Product

Being ruthlessly selective over affiliate products and offers is a vital skill for affiliate marketers. It’s important to limit your choice to products in your niche, but for this guide, we’re going to conduct a general search to illustrate how to identify a decent product to promote. Head on over to the ClickBank Marketplace and click on the search “magnifying glass” without typing anything into the search bar.

You’ll now see a list of affiliate offers from multiple product categories. You can click on the “sort the results” drop-down menu to sort the affiliate offers according to different metrics, with “Popularity” and “Gravity” being the most important. The Popularity rating indicates how popular the offer is with affiliates, and the Gravity rating indicates the amount of money affiliates are making promoting the product. The higher the Gravity rating, the more money affiliates are making promoting the offer.

However, simply choosing the products with the highest gravity rating isn’t a profitable strategy, especially for beginner affiliates that are yet to establish themselves in a niche. The higher the gravity rating, the more affiliates that are promoting the offer. More affiliates means more competition. As a beginner affiliate on ClickBank, you want to look for:

• A Low-Cost Product with up to 3 Upsells - The higher the product price, the higher the barrier to purchase, and the more you need to do to convince people to buy.
• Video Sales Page - A high-quality video sales page can dramatically boost conversions on a landing page. Studies show that a video landing page can increase conversions by up to 86%. Choose a product with a high-quality video sales page.
• Native Sales Page - This page appears like regular content, but plays a vital role in educating readers about the product and pre-selling the offer before encouraging the visitor to click through to the main sales page.
• Positive Reviews - You don’t want to promote an inferior quality product to your audience, but there’s also a financial motive for avoiding products with bad reviews. If people aren’t happy with their purchase and ask for a refund, you’re going to lose out on commission.
• Gravity Rating Above 20 - If an offer has a Gravity rating below 20, it’s an indication that not many people are interested or that the sales page doesn’t do a good job of converting traffic into sales.

Before we move on to choosing a product, sort the Marketplace results according to Gravity, and take a look at the products listed on the first page. For each offer, click through to their affiliate tools page and see what tools and resources they provide to help affiliates drive sales.

You should notice that these best performing products share certain things in common that contribute to their success. By identifying these shared factors, you should be able to spot the products that have the potential for success but are less competitive.

Here are some of the common traits you’ll notice successful ClickBank affiliate offers share:

Affiliate Tools

A good merchant should provide you with tools to help you generate sales. Not only do ready-made ads, templates, and banners make your job easier, but they also show that the vendor cares and values their relationship with affiliates.

Reviews and Testimonials

Positive reviews and testimonials show that the product delivers on what it promises in the sales copy, but they can also boost conversions and generate more sales. Research shows that 88% of people trust user reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Video Landing Page

Video does a great job of engaging prospects and explaining a product in an entertaining and memorable way. Research shows that people retain 95% of a message when they watch a video, compared to 10% when they read it in text format.

Strong Landing Page Copy

You don’t need to be a professional copywriter to identify persuasive sales copy. Read the landing page. See how well it draws you in and convinces you to purchase the product. There should be a clear call-to-action that dominates the page and makes it clear what the prospect should do next.

How to Choose the Right Products to Promote

Now you should have a good idea of what you’re looking for in the Marketplace, it’s time to select a product. Here’s a checklist to help you identify a profitable product to promote:

Passion for the Niche

It’s much easier to write about a product and sound credible to your audience if you have an interest in the niche. For example, if you have no interest in golf, you’re going to find it hard to establish trust with a knowledgeable audience of golfers. You’re also probably going to lose interest in a golf product after immersing yourself in it for several weeks. To avoid burnout, focus on products that interest you, and that you find appealing.

Gravity Rating

It’s always advisable to choose a product with a gravity rating of 20+ to ensure there is a market and demand for the product. However, you can find hidden gems and make money promoting a product with a lower gravity rating if it meets the other criteria on the checklist.

Solving a Problem

If a product solves a specific problem that lots of people encounter, there will always be potential customers willing to pay for it. This is why choosing a niche you have a passion for or knowledge about is so important. The better you know your target audience, the more you can identify the pain points they experience and the products that provide a solution.

Strong Landing Page

This is where you’ll be sending your traffic, so it needs to be convincing and make it clear what people should do next. A strong landing page reduces the amount of work you need to do as an affiliate. Your job is to send traffic, and it's the responsibility of the landing page to convert that traffic into paying customers.

Affiliate Support

Send an email to the vendor and see how responsive they are. A good merchant will offer help and support to their affiliates. They make money when you make money, so it’s in the interest of the merchant to help you generate as many sales as possible.

If a product ticks every box on the above checklist, it’s a strong candidate for affiliate promotion. To generate your unique affiliate link, click on the “Promote” button in the Marketplace listings:

Enter your affiliate nickname, click submit, and your unique affiliate link will appear.

Place this affiliate link on your website and in your promotions to track the traffic you send and the sales you generate from promoting the affiliate offer. We’ll get into the techniques you can use to promote your affiliate offer later. First, let’s take a look at how to use ClickBank data and statistics to identify the products that will deliver more sales.

Understanding ClickBank Data & Statistics

ClickBank’s easy to understand statistics and data make it an excellent network for beginner affiliate marketers. However, there’s a huge amount of products on ClickBank, and plenty of poor quality offers that you want to avoid wasting your time and effort promoting. ClickBank “Stats” can help you identify the profitable products that are worth your time. Let’s take a look at an example affiliate offer:

If you look at the highlighted “Stats” section of the listing, you can see lots of different metrics. This information is vital for identifying the best ClickBank affiliate opportunities. So what do these various statistics mean, and why do they matter?

Initial $/Sale

This is the average earnings an affiliate receives for each sale they generate promoting the product. Any one-time upsells are included, and any refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes are also taken into account. While this shows you what you can expect to earn per sale, it’s vital to remember this is an average across all affiliate sales of the product, and the amount you receive may be less or more than this figure.

Average $/Sale

For a one-time purchase product, this number is the same as the initial dollar per sale. But if the product is a resource, course, or a subscription service that requires multiple payments, this number is the total cost of the initial sale plus the rebills, divided by the total number of initial sales. In simple terms, this is the amount you can expect to receive over the lifetime of each customer that you generate.

Average %/Sale

This number shows the average rate of commission that affiliates receive across all of the merchant’s products, inclusive of rebills, one-time purchases, and upsells. Merchants can offer different rates of commission for different products, so the rate of commission you receive depends on the individual product offer.

Average Rebill Total

This number shows the average earnings you can expect to receive from rebills for a subscription, membership, or service product after the initial sale.

Average %/Rebill

This shows you the average commission percentage rate you can expect to earn for rebills after the initial sale. The majority of merchants offer different rates of commission on rebills and initial sales. The average rebill percentage is usually lower than the initial sale commission.

Gravity Rating

This is one of the most critical metrics for ClickBank products. It shows you how many affiliates have made money promoting the product over the course of 12 weeks. When an affiliate makes a sale, the Gravity rating increases. Recent sales are given more value in the calculation, so the Gravity rating gives you a good indication of how many affiliates are currently making money promoting the product. However, Gravity rating also indicates how many affiliates are promoting the product. The higher the gravity rating, the higher the competition.

The Gravity rating is a great way to identify popular products that can be profitable, but you need to make sure there is still room for another affiliate to make money. If you find a product with a Gravity rating of 150+, that’s an indication that there are lots of affiliates competing for sales. As a beginner affiliate, you probably don’t have a trusting existing audience you can promote the offer to. That’s a problem if you try to promote a highly competitive ClickBank product. You’ll find yourself crowded out and struggle to make sales.

A Gravity score of less than 10 indicates that the product doesn’t have much market appeal, but a Gravity rating of 50+ means there’s a lot of competition. Look for products with a gravity rating between 10 and 50, where there’s less competition, but also a track record of other affiliates making sales.

Icons to Look for on Affiliate Products

Beneath the “Stats” section on the ClickBank marketplace listings, you’ve probably noticed there’s a handful of icons. There are two icons that you should look for when identifying profitable affiliate offers.

The Rebill Icon

This icon shows that the product is a subscription, membership, or service that has recurring billing. As an affiliate, that means you can make recurring income in rebills after the initial sale. You still need to judge the product on the criteria we mentioned earlier, but recurring commission can be a great way to boost your affiliate earnings over time.

Pitch Plus Icon

This icon shows that the product has an upsell offer, with the opportunity for additional revenue in addition to the initial sale value. If the merchant has a high-quality, compelling landing page, you can expect up to 25% of the people you send to convert on the upsell offer, increasing your affiliate earnings on the sale.

These icons aren’t a dealbreaker for an affiliate product, but they can be an additional boost to your affiliate income if the product meets the criteria for a good product we discussed earlier.

Advanced Search

You can speed up the process of finding profitable ClickBank products by making use of the advanced search feature. From the Marketplace, you can find the advanced search filters on the left-hand side of the page.

This will enable you to refine your search by sorting results according to different ClickBank statistics. The Gravity rating and Avg $/ transaction are critical metrics for identifying profitable affiliate offers. You can also filter results according to the Pitch Plus and Rebill icons.

ClickBank has thousands of different offers to promote, but a lot of those products are poor quality or too competitive for somebody taking their first steps into affiliate marketing. Use the marketplace statistics and advanced search feature to narrow your list and identify the products with the most potential for affiliate earnings.

Now you know what makes a good ClickBank affiliate product and how to find them in the Marketplace, the next step is to promote your affiliate offer and earn your first commission.

How to Make Money from ClickBank

After you’ve found a good product to promote, you need to send people to the merchant’s landing page through your unique affiliate link. When somebody clicks on your link and completes a purchase, you earn a commission. So how do you promote your affiliate links and encourage people to make a purchase?

Banner Advertising: Trustworthy Fitness

Banner ads can be an effective way to promote affiliate products. Plenty of ClickBank merchants provide free banner ads to help affiliates promote their products. You can post these banner ads onto your webpage.

Trustworthy Fitness is a great example of an affiliate website that uses banner ads to promote ClickBank products. They publish content and reviews related to fitness, nutrition, and health and wellbeing. It’s important that the products you promote through banner ads are related to the topics you cover on your website.

The amount you earn as an affiliate is usually directly related to the amount of effort you put in to promote the product and contribute to the sale. If you paste a banner ad onto a webpage featuring content that is utterly unrelated to the product, you can expect to see a poor conversion rate. If the content is closely related to the product, you can expect to see some conversions. You can place the banner ads on your website if your content is relevant to the offer, or you can leverage another website’s traffic by purchasing advertising space for your banner ads.

Trustworthy fitness promotes ClickBank products that will appeal to an audience interested in health and fitness. In the example below, they use banner advertising to promote a fitness product that helps to relieve back pain:

When a visitor clicks on the banner ad containing the affiliate link, they are directed to the merchant’s landing page.

When somebody makes a purchase, Trustworthy Fitness are credited with the sale and receive a commission.

Trustworthy Fitness Key Stats:

Estimated Traffic: 35,940 unique visitors per month
Domain Authority: 27
Backlinks: 5,590
Moz Rank: 3.6

In Content Affiliate Links: Ben Greenfield Fitness

You can promote your ClickBank affiliate products by placing affiliate links within your content. These links can perform well when they are relevant to the topic being discussed in your content. For example, if you write a guide or tutorial to help people to overcome a problem or achieve a goal, you can link to your affiliate product and encourage people to use it as an additional resource. Ben Greenfield Fitness is an excellent example of an affiliate website that uses in content links to promote affiliate products.

The best way to sell a product is to offer a solution to a problem. In the above article, Ben provides a well-researched and high-quality free guide on gut bacteria health. He details why it is important to your health, and links to multiple research cases and high authority websites. After establishing trust with his audience and highlighting the problem that many fitness enthusiasts encounter, he provides a solution in the form of an in content affiliate link to a product.

If you think of the solution to a problem as a jigsaw, your content provides most of the pieces, but people need to purchase the affiliate product to complete the jigsaw and achieve their desired outcome. Ben Greenfield Fitness does a great job of utilizing in content affiliate links to drive traffic to affiliate product landing pages.

This form of affiliate promotion works best when it comes as a direct recommendation from the author of the content. If you do an excellent job of building trust within your content, you will see conversions and earn commission.

Trust is vital when it comes to affiliate marketing. You want to be as transparent as possible with your audience. If you place affiliate links in your content, make it clear to your audience by placing an affiliate disclaimer at the start of your content or somewhere on your webpage. At the top of the example article, Ben includes a link to an affiliate disclosure to make it clear to his audience that his content contains affiliate links.

If your visitors think that you are trying to hide something, they won’t trust your recommendations, they will leave your website, and they won’t come back.

Ben Greenfield Fitness Key Stats:

Estimated Traffic: 290,940 unique visitors per month
Domain Authority: 60
Backlinks: 3,800,000
Moz Rank: 5.3

Affiliate Product Reviews: Big Blue Test

Reviews are one of the most effective ways to make money as an affiliate marketer. When people search for reviews of a product or service, they are already in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, and they are close to making a purchase. If you provide an unbiased quality review of the product, it’s likely that they trust your recommendation and click your affiliate link to make a purchase. Big Blue Test is a great example of an affiliate website that utilizes reviews to generate affiliate commission.

It’s important to remember that you are writing a review, not a sales page. Don’t go overboard praising the product. People don’t expect products to be perfect, so point out any flaws and be fair with your criticism. If it’s a quality product with decent reviews, the benefits should outweigh the negatives, and you will be able to recommend the product to your audience. As an affiliate, your job is to send people to the merchant’s landing page. It’s the job of the merchant’s sales copy to close the deal. When Big Blue Test review a product, they include a “What We Liked About the Program” section, but they also include a “What We Didn’t Like” section to balance the review:

If it’s possible, you should get first-hand experience of every product you review. If you contact the merchant and tell them you are writing an affiliate review, they should be able to provide you with a free copy of the digital product. Aside from standalone product reviews, you can write comparison articles to target less competitive keywords that still show buyer intent. At the end of the review, when the reader is ready to make a purchase, Big Blue Test includes an affiliate link to the ClickBank merchant’s landing page.

When somebody clicks through to the landing page and makes a purchase, Big Blue Test receives a commission on the sale.

Big Blue Test Key Stats:

Estimated Traffic: 52,050 unique visitors per month
Domain Authority: 37
Backlinks: 10,610
Moz Rank: 4.1

Conclusion

ClickBank is the perfect place to start making money online as an affiliate marketer. If you are selective about the products you promote, invest the time to produce quality content, and focus on building an audience that trusts your recommendations, there’s no limit to the amount of money you can earn. In 2017 alone, affiliate marketing networks generated 5 billion clicks and 170 million transactions and was estimated to be worth $14.9 billion worldwide.

It’s important to note that affiliate marketing is a career choice, not a get rich quick scheme. If you’re going to be successful, you need to treat it like a career. That means dedicating your time and energy to learn how to build a long term business, not a spammy website that tries to siphon off commission without offering anything in exchange. If you provide value to your audience and promote the right products, you will make money and succeed as an affiliate marketer.