Do you want to know how to make money with Clickbank?
This is a question I get over and over.
If you don’t nail down how to do affiliate marketing the right way, you’re going to do nothing but waste time, money and energy. Possibly even ruining your reputation online and once that happens, you’re out of luck.
I’ve spent years as an affiliate marketer myself, tried various affiliate networks, and have formulated my 3 piece framework that will set you up to cash in and grow your income substantially over time.
In a word: Trust
Through all the sales messages, promoting various links and SEO I've done... I've found this to be the golden formula for any online business.
It’s called T.T.O. and it stands for Traffic, Trust, Offer. It’s the secret to your online marketing success that no one is telling you about and I’m going to share it with you in this post.
I’m also going to give you a detailed overview of the Click Bank Marketplace.
I’m going to tell you how to analyze the data and identify products that have a high likelihood of converting.
I’m going to give you some deep knowledge that will give new affiliate marketers a running start.
Let's dive in! Well, sort of...
Why Not Just Jump into ClickBank Head First
People have to understand that this isn't a game of just lazy SEO and spamming Links all day. It takes hard work to learn the craft so you can start making smart decisions when you start promoting your products on Click Bank.
I've read dozens of comments of ClickBank affiliates who give up on sales when they didn't even get a proper start. So many just end up quitting before they've even taken the first step.
But that doesn’t have to be your story....
You CAN absolutely get things straight IF you play your cards right.
But with any business online, success does not come overnight! Long-term is the name of the game and, believe me, it’s well worth your efforts!
There is a lot of false information out there from the scammers and the fake gurus but I’m going to teach you the most critical steps you need to take to make real, sustainable money on ClickBank.
Nuts and Bolts: What You Need to Know Before Jumping into ClickBank
But how does ClickBank work? I am about to give you an in depth, nuts and bolts review of the ClickBank affiliate marketplace.
Now, this one is a monster but stick with me!
I want you to see exactly how the system works so that when I give you my 3 part framework you can apply your new knowledge to your real world affiliate marketing business!
The main thing you need to know, before we jump in, is yourself!
If you know yourself and you know your audience then you will have a much better time figuring out this system.
If you choose high ticket products just because they’re a high ticket item but don’t know anything about those products, it’s going to be much easier to make a mistake, promote a scam product or be ill equipped to give your audience the value they deserve.
What makes more sense?
To pick products you know nothing about?
Or
To choose products from a niche you’re familiar with?
Remember, when you’re looking to choose affiliate products to promote, they need to be products in a niche you have knowledge in. This is key in making money as an affiliate marketer.
If you are going to spend countless hours doing Search Engine Optimization and making sure each and every affiliate link you post is correct - then you're going to want to have a general interest in the stuff you promote... Rather than doing something just because it makes money.
If you’re in the golf niche, you should actually love and know about golf.
If your in the dog niche, you should have experience with taking care of dogs.
Don’t just pick out any product because it comes with a high ticket tag attached to it.
Choose affiliate products in a niche you have an unfair advantage in, one you enjoy, one you have experience in and are knowledgeable about.
You’ll be able to connect better with your target audience, and it’ll be easier for you to teach and build trust with your audience enabling you to make affiliate offers that can solve their problems.
Most affiliate marketers are failing because they do not invest enough energy in understanding the products they are marketing, they do not test and compare different products, affiliate marketing networks and affiliate tools, and they keep working within an uninteresting niche...
Let’s find the best Clickbank products to promote, than I will teach you the 3-step T.T.O. formula to increase conversions of your affiliate offers.
ClickBank - How It All Works
If you really want to make money online, take notes and review Clickbank alongside this post to get a hands on understanding of the platform and all that it has to offer.
I’m going to walk you through ClickBank's features, how to use them and afterwards I’ll explain in more detail of how to analyze the provided data. If you know about "on page SEO" then this is somewhat of a similar process. This time, you're looking at each link through the eyes of an entrepreneur.
So, affiliate marketers, let's start making sales.
If you prefer to watch these steps, check out my video below
Let’s just jump right in! In another browser, go to Clickbank.com
Click on Affiliate market place located at the top of the screen. You should see a screen that looks like this.
There’s a couple ways to search for products. You can search for products within the search bar label “find products”, under the category section on the left or you can do an advanced search.
I’ll go into more detail about your advanced money making search options in just a bit. First, you need to get a feel for the marketplace homepage and understand type of data and statistics you’ll be looking at.
Let's Get Familiar
For this blog post, I’m going to use “golf” as our product example.
Choose the sports category on the right and you’ll see a list of subcategories appear underneath where you can click on “golf”.
Your results will look something like the picture below. Depending on when you do this follow along tutorial, the sales numbers and statistics may reflect differently from the picture below.
These are all the different offers related to “golf”.
The results will generate based on popularity and they’re sorted from high to low.
However, you can sort your results by:
- keyword relevance
- avg $
- initial $
- avg %
- avg rebill total
- avg % rebill
- or gravity
Pretty simple, but what do all of these terms mean?
What ClickBank Data and Statistics Will Tell You
If you look at the example, there’s a section towards the bottom of the offer in red that says “Stats”.
It’s very important that you’re able to read the page and the results to help you find the most profitable products to sell and help you sort through rubbish offers.
The details are important here...
The first number I’m going to tell you about is above the “promote” button, but everything else will be down below the offer.
Let’s check out the data terms and what they mean for you.
Average Dollar Per Sale
This refers to the cumulative total of the average amount affiliate affiliaters will earn for each product sold.
It includes any recurring billing on a product and upsells that are involved in the vendor’s funnel.
In simpler terms, the Avg. $/ sale is the lifetime value for a product.
Look for an Avg. $/ transaction on a product of $100 or higher.
Initial Dollar Per Sale
At the bottom of the product, in the “stats” section, you’ll see the Initial $/ sale.
This is your front-end value.
If you look back at the photo, for this product, affiliate marketers make an average of $35.65 on the first transaction.
Then, there’s the rebill which isn’t really that much.
So essentially there’s a bout a $4 difference between the initial dollar per sale and the average dollar per sales which means you would earn $4 when you sell this product.
Average Percent Sale
This is the average % you earn as an affiliate.
For the example product “The Stress-free Golf Swing”, it’s 74% of the total cost.
Average Rebill Total
The average rebill total is the amount of money you make on the backend.
Usually it wouldn’t be a number much different from the Avg $/ sale amount.
But as you can see in this product we’re using as an example, there’s a big discrepancy between the Avg rebill total and the Avg $/ sales.
So as an affiliate, I would be curious as to why there’s such a discrepancy there.
If you’re making $35.65 on the front end and $104.03 on the backend, the average dollar per transaction should be much higher than $39.
Average Rebill Percentage
Again, this one is money on the backend and it’ll only show up if the vendor does recurring billing.
This could be commissions from memberships, or a subscription of sorts, anything that would have the people billed regularly.
Keep a sharp eye...
With our example, there’s a 50% average rebill, which is an OK percentage and just means that 50% are recurring customers. Just watch for the number of people tend to stay on auto bill. It can be very tempting for people to click that "unsubscribe" link on their rebill notifications.
Gravity
As affiliates sell a product, the gravity number goes up.
On day one after selling a product, the gravity number goes up by 1 point. On day two, if you haven’t sold the product, that gravity number starts to go down. So from 1 point, it goes to 0.95, 0.90, 0.85 and so on.
It’s not a reflection of the number of affiliates selling products, it’s more of a stat that shows what’s a “hot item”. It’s a weighted number calculated over a 8 week period.
Pay lots of attention to this metric!
You want to look for a product with a higher gravity number, because that’s a good indication that it’s a popular item and you can make more sales off of it.
However there is a fine balance of gravity.
When the Gravity Gets Too High
Say the gravity number is in the 150, 200, 250 range or higher, that means it’s an extremely competitive product.
Unless you have a lot of trust built with your own audience, it will be too competitive to go into with cold traffic. People just won't buy.
But you’ll see the best way you can one up your competitors when we go through my T.T.O in just a bit.
Personally, I’m not interested in products with a gravity of 0,1 and 2. I would consider a product with a gravity of 3 and 4, but I would shoot for a gravity number between 5 and 50.
Icons to Look for on Affiliate Products
There are 2 favorable icons under the stats that I LOVE to see!
The first one is the Rebill Icon which I like to call mailbox money.
This icon means this product has recurring billing so you can keep making sales on this product over time. There’s still the consideration of how well the product converts and what is the customer lifetime value.
The second icon to look for is the Pitch Plus Icon.
This icon means that this product has an one click upsell offer which means more opportunity for additional sales with that product. And if they have their upsell formula dialed in, about 30% of people will take them up on that offer.
You don’t have to pick items with these icons, however I personally look for them because they’re basically saying you can make a higher profit off of that product you sell.
Advanced Search
This may be a really simple concept, but I want to point out that there are some great ways to refine your searches on ClickBank.
What’s cool is you can set the parameters to whatever you want.
You can search by:
- Gravity
- Initial $/ transaction
- Avg $/ transaction
- Avg Rebill Total
- Avg %/ transaction
- Avg %/ Rebill
Personally, I like to search by Gravity and Avg $/ transaction.
You can also choose the product type and that Pitch Plus and Recurring option I mentioned, that’s in there too. Pretty convenient if you ask me.
Let the Marketplace Statistics be Your Guide
When you’re searching through the affiliate products you want to look for a product that has a good gravity number with a high average dollar per transaction.
It might be tough to learn exactly how to do this because there are lots of other digital affiliates out there looking to promote things in the same way.
Of course if you want to start to look with different parameters, you can.
If you don’t understand all the different data yet, you will...
If you want more information on the marketplace statistics sales, go back to the affiliate marketplace homeplace and click stats or, click the word stats in red found on every product description.
It’ll take you to a page that looks like this where you can do additional research on the categories, your search options and other resources. This is where a lot of people should read the fine print.
You should know that not every affiliate product is going to be a winner.
There are a lot of excellent products on ClickBank (gems) as well as a lot of scammy products.
I’ll help you filter out the scammy products below.
Now that you know how to find Clickbank products the question is...
Can You Make Money With Clickbank?
Making money with Clickbank is simple but few actually put in the work that is required to offer affiliate products successfully.
Just like every other business opportunity it takes not just work, but the right work done consistently to make money with Clickbank.
This is the three piece framework you absolutely have to nail down.
This is important, write it down somewhere, burn it into your brain. I call it T.T.O. Which stands for Traffic, Trust and Offer.
This combination is what the so called gurus leave out.
Let's unpack this a bit...
If you want to continue making money as an promoting digital products, you have to look at this as your business, not just some cheap easy way for you to earn a few bucks.
Affiliate marketing is one of the top online businesses, dial in these three fundamentals and your future self will thank you.
Traffic: How You Want to Drive Your Clickbank Offers
As a 3rd party seller, your job is to be a problem solver at scale.
If you don’t know what’s your unfair advantage, dig deep, this awareness is an asset in your business.
Then, you have to decide how you want to drive that audience to your offers.
You have two options when it comes to traffic.
Paid Traffic
If you have more money than time, start with the successful $5 a day Facebook ad campaign.
If you’re just getting started, paid traffic is an extremely difficult route to take.
There are a lot of moving pieces that you have to dial in right away.
If you don’t know how to build your funnel, aren’t an experienced copywriter or learning copywriting, or don’t have experience in buying advertising, it’ll be a tough direction to go in.
You can easily spend $1,000 to $15,000 on ad spend without a single ROI!
This is why I recommend newbies in affiliate sales and marketing world avoid paid traffic and explore the best Facebook ads alternative.
Earned Traffic With Content
Got more time than money or just starting out? Content marketing is for you!
You can drive massive traffic with content marketing and it’s a “free” way to earn traffic.
Become a keyword research ninja and create helpful core content through a content marketing strategy. That includes, the written word for your blogs, videos on YouTube and or podcasts.
Then you can create social links around your content that funnels the web traffic onto your content and ClickBank links.
There’s even entire websites that only make money with affiliate marketing!
Be consistent with creating content...
Get picked up by the search engines, learn from my free SEO course, and watch your traffic begin to grow.
This will take a lot of work,but it is 100% worth it.
Trust: How to Stand Out
Once you are getting the traffic, you need to build trust with them.
There are a ton of people selling what you’re selling, so how can you be one of the affiliates who makes it if you don’t stand out?!
If you want to make money with ClickBank, your audience has to trust you, period.
This is another important step in this process. Of all the comments and questions I've gotten over the years, normally
Okay, so how do you build trust then?
Through value-laden content and helpful emails.
Think about it, let’s say for example you create a review post for multiple products, you do the research and you tell your audience the cost of each product and where they’re sold, who would YOU trust more?
Someone just trying to sell you something… or someone who has taken the time to offer you extra value? It’s the same for your email list.
When you give, give, and give some more, your audience will know you aren’t just in it for yourself and you are someone who is actually trying to help them and solve their problems.
They’re smarter than you think, and if you seem shady or unauthentic, people will smell it from a mile away. Don’t forget what I said about your reputation, it’s no joke.
Again - Building trust is vital.
Trust will never be something you can buy, you can only build relationships over time through your own integrity and hard work.
Offer: Deliver Value to Improve Lives
Gary Vaynerchuk recommends the Jab, Jab, Jab, Hook approach, a.k.a. Create content, give, give, give, and THEN make an offer.
Listen to what your audience is saying. Read the comments each step of the way. This is when you'll know if the link you shared in the last email was really worth something.
These are fine details but it really pays to what comments are coming back in from your list.
Once you have given them your free advice, free tips, free videos, etc, and you have gained their trust, you can now present your affiliate offer.
What happens if they don’t buy?
Give them more jab. Try another offer.
Continue delivering value...
Help them improve their lives, achieve their goals and solve their problems, the treasure map to success online!
It is not easy, but it is simple and the only way to truly win!
Without trust, no one will buy from you, no one will open your emails, no one will give your offer a second thought.
The T.T.O approach is how you pay your debts, build a business for yourself, and create the life of your dreams.
Deep Knowledge: Growing Your List is Non-Negotiable
It’s imperative for you to grow a list.
Building your list is not only a way to grow your potential customer list but safe guards you against any algorithm changes that may happen on a platform.
You’ll still be able to connect with your audience and people you aim to serve.
So how do you create and build your list?
Create a great opt-in page that will bring more value to your audience or solve a problem they have.
Your offer in exchange for their email address.
Follow through, deliver with excellence, give them what they want what they opted in for, then you build trust.
Want to send them to an affiliate offer immediately?
A bridge page in your affiliate funnel offers people an opportunity to go check out a ClickBank product immediately after optin.
Or...
Do a follow-up sequence then link to the affiliate program.
Then you split test both.
Choosing A Niche
There is a MASSIVE list of things to choose from when you get started. Remember! You wan't to pick something you have a vested interest in!
This is a condensed list of what ClickBank affiliate network has to offer... I'ts not even HALF of the categories!
Categories to Choose From
Arts & Entertainment
- Architecture
- Art
- Film & Television
- General
- Music
As Seen On TV
- Auto
- Health and Beauty
- Kitchen Tools and Gadgets
Betting Systems
- Casino Table Games
- Horse Racing
- Lottery
Business/Investing
- Economics
- General
- International Business
- Outsourcing
Computers/Internet
- Databases
- Email Services
- Hardware
- System Administration
- System Analysis & Design
- Web Site Design
Cooking, Food & Wine
- BBQ
- Baking
- Cooking
- Drinks & Beverages
- Special Diet
- Special Occasions
- Vegetables / Vegetarian
- Wine Making
E-business & E-marketing
- Copywriting
- E-commerce Operations
Education
- K-12
- Student Loans
- Test Prep & Study Guides
Employment & Jobs
- Cover Letter & Resume Guides
- Job Listings
- Job Search Guides
- Job Skills / Training
Green Products
- Alternative Energy
- Conservation & Efficiency
Health & Fitness
- Remedies
- Sleep & Dreams
- Spiritual Health
- Strength Training
- Women’s Health
- Yoga
Home & Garden
- Gardening & Horticulture
- Homebuying
- How-to & Home Improvements
Languages
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Sign Language
- Spanish
Mobile
- Apps
- Developer Tools
- Ringtones
- Security
Software & Services
- 3D Printing
- Developer Tools
- Digital Photos
- MP3 & Audio
- Personal Finance
Spirituality, New Age & Alternative Beliefs
- Astrology
- Hypnosis
- Magic
- Numerology
- Psychics
Sports
- Coaching
- Golf
- Hockey
- Outdoors & Nature
- Racket Sports
- Running
- Soccer
- Softball
- Volleyball
Conclusion
If you're a ClickBank newbie, I hope this post has helped you understand how to make money with ClickBank marketplace and what it takes to generate sales and make money with ClickBank.
Be sure to check out the additional resources to help you grow your business online and let me know in the comments if you have any questions, I’d be happy to help.