Do you have a Clickbank account and looking for ways to boost sales? If yes, this is the right article for you to read because it provides some of the best strategies on how to increase Clickbank sales within a short time.
ClickBank is one of the most popular online websites for buying and selling information products. On this platform you can find email marketing software, audio books to help with public speaking and just about anything that you can imagine.
A typical process for a newbie to affiliate marketing is that they sign up, find some crappy product with a high commission and start to fantasize about how it’s going to make sales.
Then, they throw some random traffic at it and watch how nobody spends a dime on it. Finally, they come to the conclusion that the platform does not work.
- How can you Make Money With Clickbank?
- How to get Started With Clickbank
- How much do ClickBank Affiliates Make?
- Where can I post my Affiliate Links for free?
- How can I get Sales in Affiliate Marketing?
How can you Make Money With Clickbank?
To make money with Clickbank, you have to follow the same formula as any successful venture.
You need a solid product that customers want and create a funnel to convert the traffic, to begin with. Then you build up your traffic, optimize your funnel, and once you know you’re profitable (i.e. you convert $ more than you invest), you scale the whole thing.
Read Also: Blueprints and Roadmaps you can Learn to Earn from the Comfort of your Home
Easy on paper, but sadly, few people put the effort to get it right. 90% of affiliate revenues come from 10% of affiliates, so put your best work in.
Let’s start with the product.
How To Pick The Right Product To Promote
One of the best ways to make money on Clickbank is to start as an affiliate, promoting pages that have already been optimized, in order to build your sales funnels.
Much like keyword research for SEO, picking the right product to promote on ClickBank is extremely important. No matter how good you are at promoting if you drive traffic to a sales page that doesn’t sell, you will not make much money.
What Is A Great Product To Promote
Screening offers is a big part of knowing how to make money with Clickbank. Here are the things we look for when it comes to screening offers to promote:
- Low-cost initial offer with up to 3 upsales
- Video sales pages & “native” sales pages (pages that feel like content)
- Products with good reviews online (low refunds = more money and less list burnout)
- Gravity above 20 (means that the page converts fairly well)
How Everyone Tries To Make Money From ClickBank
If you read on other affiliate marketing blogs, you’ll see a ton of “tactics” on how to make money with ClickBank. Some of them work and some of them clearly don’t work.
The issue most of these tactics have, apart from the last one, is that they have very limited preselling. People are thrown to sales pages without knowing exactly why they are there or who is this guy trying to sell them an information product.
From our experience, preselling is HUGE. You need to give people valid reasons why they should buy the product and if you can be that 3rd party giving a recommendation, your conversion rates will 5-10x very often (hint: that’s what I do all over Authority Hacker).
Additionally, repeat exposure to the offer does very very well for us. More on that later though. Let’s have a recap of the most “common” ways people make money with ClickBank before I show you our secret sauce.
Direct Linking / Banners
This one is the most common and very often least profitable. The tactic is simple. Find a somewhat related article on your site and slap a banner on the sidebar or in the middle of the article, without any form of pre-selling the product specifically.
Because the traffic is somewhat related to the offer, some people will convert. However, your EPC ( earnings per click) will be very low because the product does not come recommended by the author.
In Content Links
In content, links are usually in line recommendations that are embedded directly in the text. The recommendation often comes from the voice of the author and if they’ve done a good job building trust throughout the article/post, the conversion rates will be decent.
However, they’re not very prominent and will only catch the attention of the most attentive readers. Other than trusting the author, there’s not much of an incentive to click through.
Reviews
This is one tactic we still use to this day and for good reason: it works! Review traffic is extremely targeted and people landing on your page have a very high chance to buy.
If your review doesn’t look completely biased, there’s a good chance they’ll trust you and click through your affiliate link to buy the product.
The issue with reviews is to actually get the volume of traffic you need to make a lot of sales.
The traffic on review keywords is low and the competition is fierce. Every SEO and their dog tries to make money online with reviews and you end up sitting in the middle of a negative SEO fest, for trickles of traffic.
Not ideal, if you’re trying to build a long term property. Also, there’s no other way to scale than horizontally (produce more reviews) because there just isn’t much traffic for each product review. This makes it hard to grow faster or use paid traffic to push things up.
Building A Value-Oriented Media Funnel
All the methods we talked about before tend to work to some extent but they’re usually worn out and overused by everyone in the industry making it very competitive and hard to scale unless you have a site with hundreds and hundreds of reviews.
Plus, nobody links or shares any of the content above because it sells and people tend to hate linking or sharing stuff that sells something to its readers. It’s just the way it is.
Not being sharable or linkable is a huge handicap in today’s social web. This means you will have to pay or produce all of your traffic and if you ever want to have a chance to show up in Google, you’ll have to spend hours doing tedious link building. Not fun, not scalable, not economical.
So how do you remain shareable while making sales? Simple, give free stuff and add value. But how to make money with Clickbank then? You sell to the people that wanted more free stuff and gave you their email for it.
You basically keep your front end clean of ANY sales pitch. You run it like a media company offering free content to the readers.
You then offer lead magnets through content upgrades, opt-in pop-ups and retargeting. The lead magnet offers more free stuff to those who are interested enough to trade their contact information for it.
You can THEN start linking to the offer from the thank you page and start emailing people about the offer so you make sure they don’t miss out on it.
But wait! If I only show my offer to those who opted in am I not losing on sales? Well, if someone doesn’t care enough about the topic to give you their email address, they probably won’t give you money for it.
Let’s dive into each element of the funnel above and how you can execute each of them:
1. Traffic & Content
This one is pretty straight forward. If you create value only content, getting links using these tactics and getting shares is fairly easy. There are 3 main ways I recommend you to go after traffic:
- SEO: If you’re going to create content, you might as well optimize it for search engines. If you want more info on implementing SEO for your authority site we recommend some free authority SEO course.
- Facebook: Pretty much all audiences are on Facebook and you can get very cheap traffic. We recommend this method by Digital marketer or to build a big fan page, engage it, and drive traffic through organic reach.
- Content distribution networks: Judging by the number of people running this tactic across networks like taboola and outbrain we imagine this must be fairly successful. This works especially well if you’re covering a widespread issue.
Remember these rules. Keep the content clean of promotions (apart from your opt-in), give value, establish yourself as an authority and don’t be greedy. That will really set you apart from 99% of affiliates.
2. Opt-In
Create a complementary piece of content to the article. For example, if the article is a list of tips, create 3 more tips that people can download. This can be more recipes or anything that is a continuation of the content. This way, the people that were engaged enough to read until the end will most likely want to trade their email for more.
To distribute this lead magnet I recommend you look into:
- Opt-in pop-ups – They just do wonders for us, with up to 6% opt-in rate on this very site and 5.5% on Health Ambition. We collect hundreds of emails daily with those.
- Content upgrades – They’re a great final call to action at the end of your content, hard to miss along with the pop-up. It’s also very inexpensive to set up.
- Retargeting + Opt-in page – If people didn’t take your offer on the site, maybe they got busy. Add them to a retargeting list on Facebook and send them to an opt-in page to download the bonuses.
To create all of these, so far the best tool is still Thrive Leads (review). But if you are going to be using Elementor PRO as a site builder they also have a great pop-up / opt-in builder baked in.
3. Thank You Page & Offer
Now that people have opted in, you need to redirect them to a thank you page where you can (finally) promote your offer.
While promoting the offer is important, it’s also important to “bridge” the offer with the lead magnet they just opted in for. Otherwise, people will be frustrated and think they need to pay for the lead magnet. Trust me we’ve made that mistake!
How to get Started With Clickbank
To begin your affiliate marketing at Clickbank, you can follow these four steps.
Set up your Clickbank affiliate account
Signing up as an affiliate is easy. From the home page, click the Sign Up tab, which directs you to the page where you input the standard information (name, email, mailing address, and so on). Account registration is free. You can then choose a nickname, which acts as your account user ID.
In the event that you generate earnings of $600 or more, you’ll be asked for either your Social Security number if you’re doing business as an individual or your business tax ID number (if payment is being made to your business). After you register, the site will email your user ID (the nickname) and your assigned eight-digit password.
As you generate commissions, the site mails you your first two checks. You can then opt to have payments submitted electronically to your bank account. Part of the reason why initial checks are mailed to you via regular postal service is for security: The site can verify that your address is real.
Find a product to market as an affiliate
From the homepage, click on the Marketplace tab. Do a keyword search for products that are in your chosen niche. Make sure the product is in your specialty and a good fit for your target market.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when you’re considering a product to promote:
- What is the product’s gravity? The gravity gives you an indication of the product’s sales and popularity. It can also tell you to what extent the competition is with others who may also be promoting the product.
- Is the product getting good reviews on the Internet? Put the product’s name in your search engine and review the results. Gauge whether customers and affiliates are generally happy with the product. Identify any complaints.
- What do Clickbank’s statistics say about this product? When you look at the product, Clickbank offers key information about it and the results being generated. You can find out metrics, such as average commission amounts per sale, to see how profitable it may be to you and see how well the product ranks in terms of total sales, in its category, and so on.
- What sales assistance does the vendor provide? Some of the most successful vendors provide extensive guidance to help affiliates succeed. If you see a product, go to the vendor’s website and see their affiliate’s page (you can typically find a link at the bottom or top of the homepage).
Learn to what extent the vendor provides advice and sales tools, such as sample landing pages and sales copy that you can freely copy and include in emails and other venues (such as websites and blogs). The more tools and guidance an affiliate provides, the better for you.
Get your affiliate hoplink
After you decide on a product, click the Promote button. In the next window, you enter your nickname and a tracking ID. This field is optional, but it’s good to use.
When you finish putting in your nickname and the optional tracking code, Clickbank will instantly generate a hoplink, which is a unique link that you can use in your marketing efforts. When anyone clicks on this hoplink, Clickbank tracks it and provides you with full credit for any sale that occurs.
You can place the hoplink as easily as you can place any other link. You can put hoplinks on a website, email, blog, Facebook page, or article.
Get paid for any affiliate sales
Clickbank tracks the sales and any commissions generated by your promotional efforts. You can log in and check your account and the results you produced. If you have any commissions, Clickbank typically issues payment every two weeks for affiliates.
At this point you can decide on what else do you want to do. You can continue promoting the product you chose, or you can find other products and vendors. Many affiliates like to promote multiple products in the same niche to enhance the sales opportunities.
How much do ClickBank Affiliates Make?
The biggest factors involved are the products you choose and how you promote them. We’ll break down exactly how to do that in the next sections. But if you’re asking if it’s possible to make money with Click Bank as an affiliate in general, then the answer is yes, definitely.
It’s not uncommon to see people doing 3 figures daily on ClickBank. A typical sale earns you $15-$50 in commission. Say the average is $30. This means you need 4 sales a day to hit $100+. Seems doable, doesn’t it? Depending on your level of expertise you could hit your first sale in days or months.
But if you’re a complete newbie, it’s not unrealistic to aim for your first sale in 2-3 months. From that point onwards, once you prove to yourself that it works, things become much easier.
Where can I post my Affiliate Links for free?
The best traffic sources for affiliate marketing originates from a specific audience who wants to buy the services and products that you are promoting. If you are searching for good quality free traffic, the below mention sources are useful.
Facebook is the world’s second-ranked website you may promote your products on facebook by creating your fan page or group. You can buy traffic for affiliate links via Facebook Ads, but remember it’s the content that you post on social media that will build relationships and trust with your audience.
Quora
Quora is the best-ranked website for questions and answers on Google. You have to answer a question that is related to your niche within a few paragraphs. You can keep your affiliate links in the answer but, don’t give short answers and try to post too many links because it may be considered spam and your account might be blocked.
Youtube
Having your own channel with good content and subscribers is good for you. If, you don’t have your own channel then search videos & channels related to your product and post your links in the comments.
Twitter is the best way to promote your product this is ignored traffic, You just have to use ‘Advanced Search Options’, when searching for tweets. For example, if you are promoting a DSLR camera, then search for “I am looking for DSLR” you will find the tweets of those targeted people who are looking for a DSLR camera.
It is the USA’s #4th ranking website. It is also an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content such as a text post or a direct link.
It is known as “catalog of ideas” is an image-based social network. By using some of the features available on Pinterest, you can also easily promote your affiliate products by creating your own Pinterest board based in your niche.
By sharing your affiliate links in WhatsApp groups or to contacts you may also generate revenue.
Craiglist
Craiglist is classified ads site and is a good option for UK’s targeted audience since you can post your affiliate products for sale.
If you are an affiliate marketer, you want to make as many sales as you possibly can and there’s none better than when they come from free, high-quality traffic. Here are some more strategies for getting free targeted traffic to your affiliate page:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website noticeable to the search engines so that it appears high in the search rankings when somebody searches for something that is related to your products.
You don’t have to be an expert in Search Engine Optimization to generate affiliate marketing traffic to your website. Give all your effort to learn about those little tweaks that you can make on your website which could improve your click-through rate.
Develop Your Email List
Email list building is the lifeblood of the affiliate marketing business model. The majority of your commissions will come from the people who are on your list. You do not need to have a big list before you see any results. Even a small list can reap big rewards with the right source of affiliate marketing traffic opting into your list.
Start A Blog
Your blog can turn out to be one of your most effective marketing resources. Search engines will send traffic to websites that are consistently updated with suitable content and a blog is an ideal place to do this. The more you post, the more often the search engine spiders will visit your site and the more affiliate marketing traffic you will receive.
How can I get Sales in Affiliate Marketing?
1. Promote Relevant Products
New bloggers often find themselves being seduced by the lure of making large commissions off high-priced products without even given a second thought to their target audience. By promoting affiliate products that aren’t completely relevant to your target audience, as well as the content those links are to be included in, you’ll only confuse and annoy people.
For example, if you run a food blog, there’s no point in trying to sell gardening equipment, just like there’s no point in including affiliate links to virtual assistant courses on a gardening blog. Successful affiliate websites are always highly targeted in nature.
2. Provide Valuable Content
In the early days of affiliate marketing, when it quickly earned a reputation of being a major cause of online spam, people would often quickly knock up a website and plaster it with unoriginal placeholder content that offered nothing of value to readers.
Oftentimes, these affiliate websites even consisted only of useless squeeze pages with long and rambling sales pitches. These days, if you’re not publishing valuable content that’s genuinely interesting and/or useful to people, you won’t get very far at all.
In other words, you need to have a genuine passion and knowledge in your niche to be able to create content that people want to read and will build trust. That trust is what sells.
3. Use Sustainable SEO
As was always the case, many successful affiliate marketers rely heavily on traffic from the search engines. However, the search engines are a lot more sophisticated than they used to be, and they no longer prioritize content visibility based purely on things like the number of times a key phrase is found in an article.
Instead of using dated and spammy SEO practices, such as prioritizing keyword density, you should focus on providing valuable content. However, keywords are still important, particularly when you base your content on answering questions people are asking in Google. Just make sure to prioritize the human experience and not the search engines.
4. Improve Website Performance
Internet users are notoriously short on patience, and attention spans tend to be vanishingly small to the extent that even a loading time of four or five seconds can be enough to turn many people off. Improving website performance, particularly on the small screen, is essential for retaining your visitors and, consequently, increasing your sales.
If you’re using a good content management system, such as WordPress, combined with a well-optimized and mobile-friendly theme, you shouldn’t have much of a problem with performance. However, other major influential factors include the quality of your hosting company and the size of your images and other media.
5. Leverage Product Reviews
While the products you advertise on your website are ultimately the seller’s responsibility, you can end up risking your own reputation as an affiliate if you’re promoting products that your readers aren’t happy with.
As such, you should always check out what other people are saying about products and services you are thinking about promoting to make sure that they’re likely to be genuinely suitable for your target audience. Maybe you bought something a few years back that you absolutely loved, but things have gone down over the years. Maybe you had a great experience with a company but a lot of people out there haven’t.
By researching existing product feedback, you’ll also be in a much better position to build authority. Point out the possible negatives upfront and address them. This will make you a much more trustworthy resource to visitors.
6. Be Transparent
Being transparent means being upfront and honest, but you might be surprised how this can also lead indirectly to increased sales. However, the most important factor of all is to make certain that your website and its content follows the terms and conditions laid out by the affiliate network you’re working with.
Above all, the FTC requires that you disclose your partnerships through a disclaimer. (If you are looking for an easy way to disclose, Type-A Tribe offers a pro version of their FTC Disclosure Plugin to Tribe members.
Use code ITSJUST2DOLLARS to get your first month for just $2.) Having a privacy policy is also important to provide yourself with a layer of legal protection while also being professional and transparent.
7. Don’t Hard Sell
The hard sell is the bane of any spammy affiliate marketing strategy, and it’s not very effective either. People expect to be exposed to the hard sell if they’re going directly to an online store, but it’s quite a different matter if they’re visiting a website to learn more about a subject.
If your content doesn’t answer people’s questions, entertain them or provide something else of value, then all that’s left is the hard sell that offers absolutely no valuable content whatsoever.
People want to visit your website to read interesting content and, as such, the affiliate marketing element should always be peripheral to that. And the great thing about blogging is that your story is what sells. Share it!
8. Build a Mailing List
Email marketing is often overlooked by affiliate marketers, but research has consistently shown that it continues to offer the highest return on investment of all digital marketing strategies. It costs very little, if anything at all, to get started with email marketing as well. Building up your mailing list will take some time, so you should always have a clearly visible subscribe box on every page of your website.
9. Analyze Everything
One of the greatest advantages of any online activity, such as affiliate marketing, is that there’s a wealth of data generated. Making sense of this data can be difficult, but tools such as Google Analytics and your affiliate program dashboard reporting make things a lot easier.
Read Also: How to Successfully Promote Products With Clickbank Without Having a Website
Using the right tools, you can easily see who is visiting your website, how long they’re viewing your content and how many of those visitors are converting into sales. You should analyze everything right from the outset to find out what’s working and what isn’t worth spending your time on. You should also regularly rotate your ads and affiliate products as you find out what sells and what doesn’t.
10. Be Patient
Affiliate marketing isn’t a way to get rich quickly, especially if you intend to take the sustainable and, ultimately, more profitable approach. It takes a lot of time to build up organic traffic to any website, and it will typically be anything between three and six months before you start seeing significant traffic from the search engines.
You can use paid advertising to raise awareness of your website earlier on, but doing so can quickly eat into any profits you might make from affiliate sales. The best approach is to be patient and committed to regularly publishing great content on your website. Eventually, you’ll start earning valuable traffic of the type that converts.
Final Words
Affiliate marketing with Clickbank can be both rewarding and profitable, but it comes with building yourself up as an authority in your niche. For the most part, a successful affiliate website answers the question of ‘what’s in it for me’ by offering genuinely useful or entertaining content.
If you have the skills, confidence and patience to create excellent content, then you already have everything you need in place to start working on increasing your affiliate sales.
