One of the simplest ways to make money is affiliate marketing. You don’t need to create any product in affiliate marketing. You promote products of others and once you make a sale, the product owner will give a % sale as commission. It is a great source for passive income.
If you are new to this , you will be thinking, how to find such products, How much money I can make on each sale? How to track my sales and finally how to market products to make huge affiliate commissions.
This is where Clickbank affiliate marketing comes into the picture.
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WHAT IS CLICKBANK
Clickbank is an affiliate network known for being home to thousands of digital products like e-books, videos, and software. They’re simply middlemen between product vendors and affiliates.
You have to sign as an affiliate to start making money. Once you sign up for a Clickbank affilaite account, you can browse through their product categories , products and select some products you like to promote. Once you select a product, ClickBank will give an affiliate link for the product. You needed to start making sales through the affiliate link and start making money,
WHY CLICKBANK? IS CLICKBANK LEGIT?
Click is legit. They are not as popular as Amazon affiliates but they are very popular among other affiliate networks.
There are many other networks as Clickbank but here are points where Clickbank scores over:
Very high commission:
Some of the products have commissions as high as 70% so if you make a sale of $100, you get a commission as high as $70. They are able to do that because most of their products are digital so they are less making or production costs.
They pay fast:
They pay weekly or bi-weekly compared to other affiliate networks who hold payments for 30 days. If payments are held for 30 days, it may create a cash flow problem if you are running ads for paid traffic. That way Clickbank weekly payments are very good in keeping cash flow healthy.
Newbie friendly:
Once you have a ClickBank account approved, you get your affiliate links directly without any approval process. A lot of other networks will take time to approve affiliate links. This will block newbie affiliate marketers from promoting their products. Clickbank automatic approval process makes it easy for newbie affiliate marketers to get started easily with affiliate marketing.
International affiliate friendly:
Clickbank payments are friendly for international markets by supporting payment methods like Payoneer, PayPal, etc.
Big variety of products:
Clickbank payments are friendly for international markets by supporting payment methods like Payoneer, PayPal, etc.
HOW MUCH MONEY CAN I MAKE WITH CLICKBANK?
This is a very subjective question. It depends on what products you promote, their commission percentage, number of sales you make, etc.
It is not uncommon to make 3 figures daily. Most of the products you make a commission of $15- $50 in commissions. Say the average is $30. If you make 4 sales per day, you can make around $120, that is not very bad right?
But if you are completely new, it is not very uncommon, you may not make any sale for the first 2-3 months. From that point onwards, once you prove yourself that it is working, you can start making money.
If you’re looking for great examples of people making good money on ClickBank, check out Warren Wheeler of AMNinjas. He recently wrote a case study explaining how he was able to bring a brand new affiliate website from $0 to $300+ per day in less than 3 months with ClickBank.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH CLICK BANK: THE $500+/DAY BLUEPRINT
Let us turn to steps to make a $500+/Day blueprint using Clickbank. Here are three steps to make this happen.
- The product/offer.
- The funnel.
- The traffic.
We will go into each step in detail, let me briefly explain three steps. The product/offer that you will be promoting from Clickbank. This seems like an easy step but choosing the wrong product may not make you any money but you may lose money as other steps built on top of this. We will discuss the product selection in detail in the next section.
Next is a funnel, Funnel is nothing but a user journey from the point they see your product affiliate link and steps they go through before they make any purchase. There are different approaches as well, we will discuss those in detail.
Finally the traffic. You selected a product, you set up your funnel, now it is time to promote your product. We will see what are different ways to promote your product in detail.
THE PRODUCT
So before you choose a product you need to hop on the ClickBank website and join Clickbank affiliate program by Creating clickbank affiliate account by signing up. This is a straightforward process that you can start here. Once you’re done, it’s time to navigate to the marketplace and start browsing.
EXPLORING THE PRODUCTS IN AFFILIATE MARKETPLACE
Most beginners may be tempted to select a product from a niche familiar to promote. Let us first see how to select products that are top-selling before going into that. Below is a screenshot of the Affiliate marketplace in Clickbank. Just click on magnifying glass in Find Products bar and let us look at the results.
This will allow you to see aggregate products from all categories. You can use the “sort results by” drop-down menu to sort the results according to a number of different criteria. For our purposes, we’ll keep it set as “Popularity” for now although I also encourage you to sort by “Gravity” and browse products that way.
At this point, forget categories, niches, and everything else. We want to find which is the best selling product. High gravity means a lot of affiliates are making money through that product or it is a proven product.
You may be thinking, you sort by highest gravity and start promoting that product. There is one cavity for this. High gravity products have a lot of competition and it is not easy to promote those products for starters.
Before you move on to the next sections, browse through 10-20 high gravity products. Visit their sales pages and affiliate tools pages. Notice how they sell their products to customers and affiliates like you.
You can quickly notice some patterns. Those common patterns contribute to the high success rate of their products. Let us see what are those commons patterns are:
Video Sales Pages (VSLs): There are video sales pages that convert easily due to their ability to convey information for customers to understand the product and its features easily.
Strong Affiliate Tools: Top products generally provide a lot of affiliate tools to get started to promote their products. They often even create ready to go ads, templates, and contents for you. This shows vendors care about affiliates and retaining them.
Social Proof: Most of the products have social proof to show that customers are using the product successfully and their feedback on the product.
Strong copy and clear call to actions: If they have written a sales page, it is very convincing and drives you to take action. There is often a story behind it and you can’t miss the buy button. It leaves no doubt in the buyer’s mind that what should be done next.
CHOOSING A PRODUCT
At this point, you have some ideas on what product to choose, what is their gravity and niches. Let us take a closer look at them:
Interest in the niche: Passion or interest in a niche. People really underestimate this point. You will be eating, living, or breathing on these products for weeks, months, and years to come so it is best to choose a niche you love. Having an interest in the niche you love, keeps going when things get tough.
Gravity is not a deal-breaker: People tell you to choose a gravity of 30+. This is not a huge factor. As long as it meets other points in the section, you can give gravity a miss.
“Wow” factor and solution for niche problems: If your target market sees this and instantly thinks ‘I need this, How did I miss this’ then you got a potential winner in your hand. It helps to be knowledgeable in your niche so it is easy to identify and judge good products.
- Great sales page: Clean, convincing and easy to complete checkout.
- Affiliate tools/support: Try getting in touch with the vendor for affiliate support. Good vendors will be prompt with affiliate support and will show you that they care because they make money when you do.
Let us pick a good example of a product:
How to get Clickbank affiliate id:
To get your affiliate link simply click “promote” and enter your ClickBank nickname. Click submit and your link will come up. All you have to do is to copy/paste it and use it during promotions.
THE FUNNEL
Once you select the product, it is time to select the funnel or typical journey your visitor will go through before buying a product. Here are some ways:
Direct linking: This means you’ll send people directly to the vendor’s sales page. This used to work well and still does in some rare cases but most of the time, it’s not recommended to go down that route. You need to “warm-up” your visitor first before sending them to the offer page. Unfortunately, because this is easy to do so a lot of people choose it.
Lander > Offer: This is a much better approach than the above. A lander or landing page is a web page that you create and that acts as a middleman between the offer and the visitor. This could be a review of the offer, a video, an article…etc. The visitor would land on it, consume it, and then click a link and get redirected to the offer. Warren Wheeler’s case study on AMNinajs.com uses a variation of this funnel.
Lander > Opt-in > Offer: You basically send your visitor to a landing page and offer them a free gift related to your offer in exchange for their email address. You then send them the offer (among other things) via email.
SO WHAT’S THE RECOMMENDED APPROACH?
Although the third approach is the most complex in terms of setup, it has a major advantage: you’re building your email list. You can get in touch with everyone who filled your form and can promote offers to them again and again. This is why it’s the recommended approach.
There is a popular saying that ‘money is in the list’ and it really is. An e-mail list is a long term asset that you can use to promote your product so let us see how you can do this.
Step 1: Create your landing page. Whether it’s a review, article, video or otherwise, you’ll need web hosting and/or a tool to create. I recommend GetResponse to create your landing page. Please check my post How to create landing page in GetResponse to know more.
Step 2: Create your opt-in forms. These are the forms that will capture your visitor’s email address. This is also doable with GetResponse opt-in forms.
Step 3: Next, you’ll need an email marketing platform that allows you to manage your email list and send automated email sequences to them (promoting your Clickbank product and other content). For this, my recommendation is GetResponse as well. (See my full GetResponse Review here).
Step 4: Done! Now you have the product, a landing page (say it’s an article related to the niche/product), and a lead magnet, which is a free ebook/video…etc you’re giving away for free on the landing page in exchange for an email address.
A visitor reads the article, gets intrigued, subscribes to get the freebie, then you email them the freebie using GetResponse. A couple of days or so later, you pitch them the affiliate product. A lot of vendors actually prepare email swipes for you. You can browse their affiliate tools page for inspiration.
With the funnel set up, now you’re ready to start promoting the product with traffic!
TRAFFIC
So how do you drive traffic to your website or product promotion? When driving traffic, you can ‘pay’ by spending effort and time or pay for traffic. Let me explain these ways of traffic generation:
SEO
SEO, in a nutshell, is working on making your website rank high in Google search results when people enter specific search keywords. The big pros of SEO are that it’s a very long-term strategy and could keep bringing you traffic for years with minimal effort. It’s also inexpensive or almost free if you do all the work yourself manually.
The drawback is that it’s slow at first, it could take 2-3+ months to see your first sale if that is your main traffic source. It’s also tedious in the sense that it requires a lot of effort link building, especially if you’re trying to rank for highly competitive keywords.
PAID TRAFFIC
If you have a budget and are willing to pay for traffic, you might want to explore investing in Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, or any of the other networks you can buy traffic from. Their first advantage is a double-edged sword. You can literally start receiving traffic within minutes from starting a campaign. But once you stop running the campaign, the “traffic tap” stops.
You also pay for every visitor/impression. The risks and stakes with paid traffic are higher but there are also some interesting rewards like the ability to scale crazily overnight by launching new campaigns and increasing budgets. This “on-demand” scaling is not doable with SEO.
You can also opt to use a hybrid approach which I would highly recommend. If you’re on a budget, focus on SEO, and once you start seeing results reinvest everything back into more SEO and content, then start exploring paid traffic. This is how you prevent your eggs from being in one basket.
ORGANIC SOCIAL MEDIA
Creating Facebook pages, attracting followers, and publishing content was once a lucrative practice. However, as you may already be well aware, Facebook has significantly decreased its pages’ organic reach and it’s almost impossible now to depend on organic traffic as a reliable source of income or visitors.
Thankfully though, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube are still big players when it comes to organic reach. Many affiliates make a lot of money promoting products organically on these platforms.
YOUTUBE
There are a number of different approaches here. You can record a video review of the product and leave its purchase link in the description. You can create a video giving free value related to your niche and recommend the product as an “upgrade”. If you can’t do this yourself, you can always hire someone on Fiverr for a very affordable price.
Even though Facebook’s organic reach decreased significantly, Instagram is still going strong. This works especially well for visual niches like food, pets, and sports. Lots of interesting content out there to post in these niches and gain a huge following.
The basic strategy is this: Post interesting content consistently with relevant hashtags. Use a service like Hashtagify for hashtag ideas. Follow users in your niche and engage with their posts. I also know a couple of people who grew their Instagram accounts quickly solely depending on shoutouts from influencers.
Pinterest is another way to promote products. There are a lot of audiences who try these methods and or are successful. If you love creating good images, Pinterest traffic is very useful.
HOW TO USE CLICKBANK AFFILIATE MARKETING TO MAKE $500 PER DAY
I know this is a lot of information and you want to know exactly what steps to follow to start making money. Truth is every single option above can make you money but here is recommended approach for beginners
- Pick a product that solves a problem, has high commissions and that you believe in its potential and importance to your audience.
- Create an article related to that product. It should add value. Do some keyword research and find some low competition long-tail keywords to write about. For instance, if your product is about dog training, write an article about “top 10 dog behavioral problems and their solution” ( I didn’t do keyword research for this) .
- At the end of the article, give away a free guide containing more dog training tips or “8 Dangerous Foods for Dogs You Didn’t Know About”, you get the idea. Something to get your reader curious and wanting more.
- When they subscribe to your list, send them a couple of emails linking them to more articles or useful pieces of content, then pitch your dog training product after you’ve built some trust.
- Repeat this process and do some link building. If you have the budget, you can actually start running Facebook Ads and/or Adwords campaigns to the articles in parallel. Make sure your website is 15+ pages to maximize your chances of getting good traffic from Google.
The above is the basic, long-term strategy I recommend. It’s a lot of work but it pays off. You can always go the shorter route of just slapping together an opt-in page and driving paid traffic to it. However, these pages are much less likely to rank in search engines or bring you organic traffic.
Going the “valuable content creation” route allows you to utilize virtually any traffic source sequentially or in parallel and bring a strong, long-term asset that consistently brings in leads, traffic, and sales.
I hope this is helpful, especially for beginners. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to comment in the section below.
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Here is an interesting article on how to make money on 90-day old sites.
