ClickBank Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: How to Earn Money as an Affiliate or Product Vendor — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com
Today we’re talking about ClickBank. I want you to understand exactly how Clickbank works, and if you’re a beginner, how to get started with it. What are the pros and cons of using Clickbank as an affiliate marketer? How could you get started making money pretty much right now?
Clickbank started about 18 years go, back when I started internet marketing, and it’s basically a digital product sales mechanism. There are two different sides to using Clickbank, one as a vendor and the other as an affiliate.
Clickbank Vendors
Clickbank has tens of thousands of product vendors. They mostly work with digital products. These may be software products, services, e-books, or something like that. They also get into some physical products as well, but mostly it’s digital.
If you have a product or service, or something you want to sell, you sign up to be a Clickbank vendor. I order to have your product on Clickbank, you have to pay a $50 product review fee. They review your product and make sure it’s good, that you’re not doing anything shady.
Once it’s approved, you set the price of your product. Then Clickbank gives you a link where people can purchase the product. When they do, they put their credit card information in, and you get a cut of the sale—which is the product price, minus $1, minus about 7% for processing fees. It’s much more expensive than a regular merchant account, but it’s very easy. You can sign up and be in business literally in minutes.
Clickbank Affiliates
The other side of the coin is the affiliate side. Product vendors can choose to pay affiliates to promote their products, and they decide how much commission affiliates can make, anywhere from 1 – 75%. As an affiliate, you can sign up with Clickbank for free. You’re not charged any fees, but because the vendor is charged 7%, that gets taken from your cut when you make a sale.
When you sign up for an affiliate account, you get your username. Then, you can go and find a product. You do this by going to the Clickbank product marketplace. There you’ll find tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of products, and you can choose which ones to promote. You’ll see some information that goes along with each product:
Product name: This is exactly what it sounds like.
Average per sale: This is the average amount you can expect to make when you sell the product.
Gravity: This is how many affiliates have made a sale in the last month. So if there is like 900 gravity, that means 900 different affiliates have made at least one sale. That means it’s pretty popular (but also competitive).
Promote: When you click that button, it’s going to generate a long Clickbank link. This is your affiliate link. Whenever you send someone to the page through this link, and they purchase the product, you get paid.
Rebill amount: If it’s a monthly subscription, this is how much you’ll get paid monthly.
[smart-affiliate-ads group=”5″ position=”random” limit=”3″]
You can have links for as many different affiliate products as you want. Then you can go into Clickbank and see which offers made you how much money that day. You can see exactly what’s going on at a glance.
On my site, I actually have a Clickbank calculator where you can figure out how much money you’ll make from a product as an affiliate. You can go to www.AffiliateDude.com/Clickbank, see the calculator, and learn more about how to make money with Clickbank.
The Good and Bad Sides of Clickbank
Most people here are looking to get into Clickbank as an affiliate, so let’s talk about some of the good and bad with Clickbank affiliate marketing. The upside to Clickbank is that it’s easy. You sign up at Clickbank, you get an account, and you can start making money right away (if you can get traffic). Your account is live, and your links are live. You have one account, and there are thousands of products available.
Clickbank also has some downsides. One downside is that you have make a sale in order to get paid. This is different from CPA (cost-per-action) marketing, where that’s not always the case. With CPA marketing, sometimes you can get paid just when people fill out forms, or download things, or call a phone number, or try a product for a dollar. But with Clickbank, you only get paid when you make a sale.
Another downside is that a lot of the products on Clickbank are made by people just trying things out, so they might not be professionally done landing pages that get conversions. As affiliate marketers, we want to promote the things that convert. We want things that are going to give us what we call the biggest EPC, or earnings-per-click.
Tips for Using Clickbank
You want to find products and services that are based on what your market wants. So if you’re in the market for parenting, you could go for “kids riding a bike,” “parenting tips”, “parenting skills”, anything related to parenting. You could go to the Clickbank marketplace and find things to promote.
Let’s face it. When you promote a sales-type thing, the average conversion rate is 1% or lower. That means if you send 100 people to your site, 99 are going to leave without you making any money. So, if 99 people leave out of every 100, and you don’t get paid, that means 99% of your marketing efforts are a total and complete waste of time, money, and energy. And quite frankly, that sucks.
But there’s a way we can combat this. When I use Clickbank, I don’t just want to go put the link out somewhere random. I like to set up a blog or website about the topic. When I get people to my site, I want to capture the names and emails of people who come looking for the product. So I offer something that’s going to help them, in exchange for their information. Now, instead of a 1% conversion rate, I’m probably going to get something like 30% to 60% to put their name and email in the box. I use that to build a mailing list. Right after they put their name and email, I can shoot them to the Clickbank offer if that’s what I want to do. Personally, I like to have a little thank-you page with other offers, and that does really well.
Now I’m not wasting traffic. I can follow up, and market to my list over and over, and I can make a lot more sales. It’s extremely easy to do. When you’re dealing with internet marketing, 1% more can mean all the difference in the world.
So when you’re doing Clickbank marketing, 1) make sure your offer fits your traffic method, and 2) make sure you’re driving them to a website where you at least have other affiliate offers, or at best create a mailing list. And then when you send them over, you’re going to get a check from Clickbank, and you can go in and track everything. If you want to be a real affiliate and actually make this stuff work, I would suggest first and foremost to have your own website. I teach you how to do this at www.GoHubSite.com, where you can follow the instructions, and you’ll be in business in just minutes.
So, is Clickbank the be-all-end-all? Maybe, maybe not. But is it good? Yes. Is it something you should have in your affiliate marketing playbook? Absolutely.
For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.