How To Make Money With Clickbank For Beginners (2022)

What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is a great resource for entrepreneurs doing affiliate marketing to find products and services they can sell for a profit. There’s currently 200 million customers using Clickbank with over $4 billion in sales to date. 

There's an endless amount of categories, qualities, and prices you can choose from when finding what product or service interests your target market the most. 

Clickbank has taught entrepreneurs how simple the internet business world could be. Just sign up as a member, create links with their affiliate marketing tools that promote whatever item you like best in any category on the site (whether it would work better through video content marketing or text). Then collect commissions off each sale! It doesn't get more straightforward than this.

How Does it Work?

Clickbank offers a unique opportunity for affiliates and entrepreneurs to make money. 

On the one hand, it can be used as an affiliate platform where you promote products from other companies in exchange for commissions on sales that are generated through your links or advertisements. 

However, Clickbank also works with product creators who want their creations promoted by making them available exclusively at this site.

You have a few options when paying out money on Clickbank. 

There’s weekly, biweekly, or monthly payments starting from a $10 threshold before getting paid anything beyond $10. It is also adjustable depending on what suits your needs best for cashflow.

Why Choose Clickbank for Affiliate Marketing?

You've heard about the rise of online education, well Clickbank is no exception. In fact, it's one of the biggest contributors to this phenomenon with some of the biggest companies in sales revenue each year! 

What you may not know is that there are so many reasons why digital products like videos have higher margins than physical ones. 

Firstly, most of your revenue can be considered full profit (outside of any marketing costs) because all copies cost nothing.

Category Gates

Not every affiliate program is going to be perfect. Instead we need to take a balanced approach and look at some of the good and bad things about this program. 

Then you can get an unbiased view and make the best decision for you and your business.

With that, let’s get into how to actually make money with Clickbank.

How to Use Clickbank for Beginners - Step-by-Step Tutorial.

There are two types of gated categories: Category and brand restrictions.

1. Sign up for Clickbank.

You’ll need to sign up for an account. This is very straight forward with just your basic information such as name, email address and password. 

A phone number is required for sign up in case Clickbank needs to contact you regarding your account. 

As part of the sign up process there’s a spot for you to put in your tax ID.

Any affiliate that earns over $600 is required to provide a tax identification number. 

This number can be your social security number (SSN), but Clickbank recommends you get an employer identification number (EIN) which is available from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for free.

2. The Clickbank Marketplace.

This is your homepage to select all the products you want to promote. On the left hand side are the categories or different niches that best align with your interests or business. If you already know what you want to promote then you can go straight to ‘find products’ and search that way.

Once you’ve found your niche and you hit search, this is what the results will look like.

To make it easier to understand what we’re looking at here, I’ve broken the results into different sections. 

This is how popular a particular program is according to other Clickbank users. Not really a good metric to go off.

The average commission an affiliate will get for each conversion. The number includes all sales from initial sales to any upsells, and rebills.

At the bottom of the screenshot where it says stats, this is where things start to get interesting. This metric is what you will initially make once you get your first sale. It includes commissions from any upsells or order bumps. This number is only shown if there are any recurring products such as memberships or subscriptions that customers will continuously pay until they opt out of the program.

This is only shown if there is a subscription or membership where on average, is the commission you will earn as an affiliate for every recurring payment of the owner’s product.

Short for Gravity, it is a statistic unique to Clickbank. It’s a measure of performance from the number of different affiliates who actually earned a commission from this product in the last 12 weeks. The idea is that the higher the number, the “hotter” it is and the more likely others would be of promoting that same product. 

Bear in mind though that if the gravity is high, you can bet that there will also be plenty of other affiliates promoting the exact same product and bringing in much more competition.

Short for category. This is simply the Clickbank category and subcategory.On the left hand side of the page you can filter out certain metrics to only show those affiliate programs that specifically match your search criteria. The last box we will look at is the affiliate details. This will usually include a link with more information, incentives and conditions for affiliates looking to promote that program. Sometimes, you’ll even see a contact for the program so if you have any questions you can email them directly.

3. Select a product to promote.

When choosing a product to promote, there’s more than just looking at the one with the highest gravity score. If you do just choose the highest gravity, remember you’re also bringing in plenty of competition. But it doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Having competition means a product is actually selling. There is definitely demand. So what is it about the product that makes it a good one and that we can actually make money on Clickbank.

You want a landing or sales page to be visibly appealing to potential customers. If it looks scammy or poorly written with plenty of grammatical errors, you can be sure it won't convert as highly.

The more you know about your niche the better idea you’re able to get of your customer’s wants and needs. There’s no point being in the pet niche and promoting a treadmill just because it pays well to the affiliate.

By this I mean, are there tools they can offer you to help promote their product? Things to look out for would be banners you can use in your promotion, photos, or even snippets you can put in your material to help close the sale.

When you’re starting out with affiliate marketing, it may look good to just go with a program that has a high barrier to entry but you may end up getting a lower amount of sales. 

By going with a lower initial cost you’re able to hook the customer and then upsell them as they make their way through the sales funnel. 

This is a good way to find social proof. If actual customers are happy with the product then more are likely to buy the same product as well and have a much lower refund rate. This will mean that your audience is more likely to buy any other offers you promote to them in the future. They will begin to trust that the products you are putting in front of them are actually going to help with their problems.

Rebilling is recurring revenue. So you’ll make money on the initial sale but also keep generating cash. This is a great strategy to look for because it will guarantee an income for as long as the customer is a member of that product. 

As I mentioned before, you don’t want to go with the highest gravity (because of competition), but you still want some money going into your clickbank account from sales. As a minimum, set the gravity scale to 25. 

But of course you want to look at more than just the gravity score. If you apply the other factors mentioned above then as long as the product seems like good value and actually solves someone’s problem then that’s what is ultimately going to convert for you.

4. Save your affiliate link.

Now that you’ve chosen your winning product, it’s time to go get your special affiliate link. 

That will open up a new window that looks like this.

When you’re logged in make sure that your account nickname is there. 

The tracking ID below it is optional. That is there to help affiliates track their activity for different promotional methods or campaigns for one vendor. It can contain a combination of letters, numbers, or underscores but cannot exceed 100 characters. Putting in this information is not required for your HopLink to function correctly.

Click Generate Hoplinks and you’ll finally receive your affiliate link that is unique to you and your account. 

Make sure you save this link. You’re going to need it later. Pro Tip: Try to make the link look nicer when people hover over it. Some people may get scared if they see a whole bunch of letters and numbers redirecting them to another page. Use plugins like Pretty Links for WordPress, or Bit.ly to generate a much more user friendly link. 

5. Promote Your Product Effectively.

So far, we’ve learned about how to find the product and get the link to keep track of your sales. But what good is any of that if there’s no one to even see your product? 

To generate traffic there’s really only two ways, free and paid. If you go through the paid route, you might be lucky enough to get some sales quickly but the cost of advertising can get expensive quickly. 

However, if you go with the free traffic option, a big perk is, well...it’s free! But it also takes a little more time to generate sales. 

Depending on your affiliate marketing strategy, go with the mixture that is best for you and your business. 

To effectively make sales with your product you need to precondition the customer. By this I mean, don’t just throw your customer onto a landing page and expect them to buy your product just because you’ve got a cool looking website. 

You need to make the customer feel comfortable with why they are there. Is there an actual reason they should even be looking at your page? 

From my experience, the more times I was able to get in the faces of my customers the more sales I got. This is known as the mere exposure effect. 

So let’s look at some basic ways to promote your product first.

This is probably the most common type of display ad out there but also the least profitable. It’s a very simple concept though. 

Stick up a banner that is relevant to the type of content the consumer is viewing. These are usually posted to the sidebar, header or footer of a website.

Now you may get the odd click here and there because it’s loosely relevant to the topic, but it’s not really consistent. 

There’s definitely better ways to promote out there. 

These are also not as effective unless the reader is actually concentrating on it. These links are usually embedded throughout the article and come as a recommendation from the author themselves. 

If they’ve done a good enough job convincing the reader, then they will click on the link and take them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

This probably has the highest chance of a customer converting to a sale from the intent of their search. 

Most people who look for reviews are almost at that stage of buying the product. They need either some more information, or convincing that this product is actually for them. 

Should you make a good case of why that customer needs that product, create a buy now button and that’ll take them straight to the landing page. 

Just one thing to be aware of is that traffic of people looking for particular reviews remains low while the competition is exponential. So to get a lot of sales, you need a lot of traffic coming in. 

If you want your page to convert, then it needs to be search engine optimized. This is the ability to rank your page high enough within the search engine through organic clicks. 

It’s the skill of finding relevant keywords and adding them throughout the article to appear high within the SERPs. 

To maximize this, you should take those chosen keywords and add them into your meta description, titles, and alt tags.

The power of social media is strong these days. It’s a very effective way of getting in front of an audience without a lot of expenses needed along the way. 

Also known as paid traffic, PPC is paying for advertising. It’s a quicker way of making money with your chosen affiliate program provided you have the funds to back it. 

While using paid ads is not crucial for affiliate marketing, it is a good way to get back data on your chosen product quickly and whether it’s landing with your audience or not so you can make the relevant changes faster. 

6. Scaling Up.

So now that you’ve built your first funnel, don’t be in too much of a rush to make changes. Give the page time to run and then use that proven data to either change to a different product to promote, or even change to a different Clickbank affiliate program. 

Eventually, instead of relying on small commissions from the Clickbank affiliate marketing program, you could try making your own product to sell. 

If you’re really doing well, then why not create your own affiliate program to let other affiliates make sales for you. 

Of course it’s easier said than done, so I would only consider it if I had proven data that the product was actually pulling in traffic and sales.