How To Make Money With ClickBank in 2021: No Nonsense Guide

Make Money With ClickBank in 2021 — Most affiliate marketers know about ClickBank (and if you don’t I’ll explain exactly what it does just below) but few of you guys know how to make money with Clickbank.

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 sucks. Sounds familiar?

Well, here’s how it worked for us.

2020 was the first year we tried to make some money off the platform. We ended up making $37,075 off it without trying very hard (ClickBank has always been a secondary monetization method, so far, for our businesses).

As we saw the affiliate marketing revenue from Clickbank grow we paid more attention to it and decided to optimize the process so we can make more money online with Clickbank.

After a few months of hard work, we managed to transform this small income stream into something a lot more sizable as you can see by this screenshot:

In this post is that I’ll show you exactly how to make money with Clickbank using the process we devised during this time period.

Let’s get started!

What you will learn

- What ClickBank is and how to use it to make thousands of dollars monthly

- How to pick ClickBank products to promote

- The most common ways to promote ClickBank products

- The unique funnel we use to scale up our sales

- How to build these funnels

- How to scale them up and take over the offer

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What Is Clickbank?

Many people consider Clickbank just another affiliate network.

But unlike traditional affiliate platforms, Clickbank serves as a marketplace for both people who create products and affiliates, so they can make money together without complex paperwork or agreements.

How Does it Work?

In other words, Clickbank is the middleman between creators of digital products, such as ebooks, video, music and so on, and people who can sell those products, i.e. affiliate marketers.

Obviously, depending on which party of the marketplace are you, Clickbank fulfills one of the two functions:

1. A Product Marketplace For Affiliates

As an affiliate marketer, you can jump right in, create your unique affiliate links for thousands of products (more on that later) and start to drive traffic right away to start making money. You will also see your earnings in real time.

It’s free to join and there’s no screening process. No cap or complicated metrics. It’s basically a simplified affiliate network, open to anyone that wants to give it a shot.

In case you want to try it out, simply go register on their homepage.

2. An E-Commerce Platform For Information Product Owners

As a product owner, you can add your product to the database and ClickBank will take care of all the checkout and e-commerce part, as well as offering an affiliate program for it.

You will be charged $49.95 one time activation fee, for becoming a seller on Clickbank. I believe this fee does a good job of keeping some low-quality vendors out of the platform.

This is great if you don’t want to handle the technical part of things but you have to know that the platform will take quite a bit of money off your sales ($1 + 7.5% of the sales).

That’s why if you start making some serious sales volume, you may want to move out of the platform to platforms like Thinkific or Teachable because these don’t take a % of your sales.

In addition to % of sales, you’re charged $2.5 dollars payment processing fee, every time you take out the money. Clickbank can also approve customer refunds and charge you $0.50 or $1 for that.

The rise of the LMS platforms like the two above is probably why Clickbank has been losing some steam in the last few years …

Why Clickbank?

As an affiliate marketer you might ask yourself, why sell ebooks and online courses from unknown producers, if you can just sign up with say CJ or Amazon Associates and sell reputable products. I removed the CJ review as CJ is a very fickle bitch. I have had more than 1 client have their accounts removed for no good reason. They are popular but, I don’t recommend them.

Firstly, online education is a huge market and Clickbank itself generates close to a quarter billion dollars in sales revenue each year.

Secondly, there’s a beauty to digital products. That beauty is the highest margins possible. Because, to make a copy of a video and sell it, costs nothing.

100% of the revenue can be considered the profit (outside of marketing costs).

High profits = high affiliate commissions. And Clickbank pays up to 75%.

Pros & Cons Of ClickBank

I really like ClickBank and I think it’s a fantastic place for new affiliate marketers to get started and earn money online without the hassle of more advanced affiliate networks.

There’s no cap, you don’t need to be approved for 90% of the offers and you can start selling straight away.

Trust me, that’s a huge plus when you get started and have no track record to show to those big affiliate networks.

Here is a short list of the pros & cons of the platform:

- Highly paid offers (75% commission is common)

- You can sell in most countries

- Several recurring offers to sell, for ongoing income

- Takes the tech out of the way

- Lots of shitty products & sales pages

- Lots of competition on popular products

- Hard to tell what does well without investing traffic

- High costs associated to the e-commerce platform

https://youtu.be/5subV1AC3tY

Step-By-Step: How To 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.

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.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MAKING MONEY FROM HOME!

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.

Here is a short video of our friend Ted going through the ClickBank affiliate marketplace to find juicy products to promote.

https://youtu.be/22aNnG6nzMc

The Different ClickBank Metrics

Initial $/sale: The average amount of money affiliates make per sale.

Avg %/sale: The % of the sales price affiliates take as a commission on average.

Grav: Gravity, the number of affiliates that sold this product in the last 12 weeks.

Avg Rebill Total: Average $ affiliates take as a commission as a result of rebills.

Avg %/Rebill: % of rebills paid to the affiliate, on average.

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.

Read more: How to write product reviews that sell without being cheesy

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.

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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.

Here is an outline of the system we use:

This system is the best out there, in my opinion, for the following reasons:

- You keep your front end clean of commercial offers meaning you can get tons of links/shares etc.

- You can target viral topics or high traffic keywords related to the problems the offer solves meaning there’s no traffic problem.

- It can run 100% without PPC if that’s not your thing (many of those run purely on organic for us)

- You’re building an email list meaning that you own the audience. This means that you can sell more things to them once they reach your main list, and the value of your media property is greatly increased and compounds over time.

Let’s dive into each element of the funnel 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 I recommend our free authority SEO course (see what I’m doing here?).

- Facebook: Pretty much all audiences are on Facebook and you can get very cheap traffic. I recommend this method by Digital marketer or to build a big fan page, engage it and drive traffic through organic reach (case study coming soon on that one).

- Content distribution networks: I don’t have a ton of experience with these but judging by the number of people running this tactic across networks like taboola and outbrain I 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. Read more on opt-in pop-ups.

- 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. Read more on content upgrades.

- Retargeting + Opt-in page — If people didn’t take your offer on the site, maybe they got busy.