How To Make Money From ClickBank in 2015 : No Nonsense Guide

How To Make Money From ClickBank in 2015 : No Nonsense Guide

Most online marketers know clickbank (and if you don't I'll explain exactly what it does just below) but few of you guys ever made money from it.

Usually people sign up, check out a crappy product and wonder how it can actually make sales. Then, they try to throw some random traffic at it and seeing that nobody bought it, curse at the platform and call it crap. Sounds familiar?​

2014 was the first year we tried to make some money off the platform and we ended up making $37,075 off it without trying very hard clickbank has always been considered as a secondary monetization method, so far, for our businesses).​

 

I have good hopes to bring this number to around $60,000-100,000 this year, scaling some of the tactics I will be revealing bellow.

But let's jump right in with a little catch up lesson, for those of you who don't understand what I'm talking about right now.​

What is Clickbank?

While many people will call clickbank yet another affiliate network, that's not all it is. The platform is more of a marketplace for product creators and affiliates to make money together without cumbersome paperwork or agreements.

A product marketplace for affiliates

​ As an affiliate, you can jump right in, create your unique affiliate links for thousands of products (more on that later) and start pushing traffic right away. 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.​

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.

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 eventually. But when you get started and only make a few hundred dollars per day, it's a great help to not have t o deal with all the tech stuff.

Pros & cons of ClickBank​

I really like ClickBank and I think it's a fantastic place for new affiliate marketers to get started 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 networks.

​That's why if you start making some serious sales volume, you may want to move out of the platform eventually. But when you get started and only make a few hundred dollars per day, it's a great help to not have t o deal with all the tech stuff.

Pros & cons of ClickBank​

I really like ClickBank and I think it's a fantastic place for new affiliate marketers to get started 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 networks.

How to Pick the Right Product to Promote

The best way to get started 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 push traffic to a sales page that doesn't sell, you will not make much money.

Here is a short video of me going through the ClickBank marketplace to find juicy products to promote.

How Everyone Tries to Make Money from ClickBank

If you read on other online marketing blogs, you'll see a ton of "tactics" 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 preselling the product specifically.

 

​Because the traffic is somewhat related to the offer, some people will convert. However, your EPC (earning 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.

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 it's 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 do you make sales 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.​

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's 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 there 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.

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 to 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 setup. Read more on content upgrades
• 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.

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