ClickBank Affiliate Marketing Guide for Absolute Beginners

Welcome to the ClickBank affiliate marketing guide for beginners. If you are someone who wants to make money by promoting ClickBank products online but don’t know where or how to get started, this affiliate marketing guide is for you.

ClickBank is the place where most affiliate marketers begin their journey. Even we started as newbie affiliates on ClickBank a few years back.

The reason why most affiliate marketers prefer ClickBank over other affiliate marketplaces is because of the fact that getting started with ClickBank is relatively easier than on other platforms, thanks to its simple approval process. And also due to the availability of a wide range of affiliate products in different markets and niches.

Now, before learning how to make money promoting ClickBank products, let’s find out what exactly do we mean when we say the terms ‘affiliate marketing’ and ‘ClickBank’.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a business model where you can earn money online by promoting and selling other people’s products and services. You don’t need to create the product, manage customer support or handle refunds.

To earn money with affiliate marketing, you just need to promote the product using a link or a URL called the ‘affiliate link’, that’s given to you by the vendor of the product. This link is unique to you.

When a visitor clicks your affiliate link, visits the product page, and buys the product, you get the affiliate commission. If there is no sale, you get no commissions.

But if the visitor comes to the page and doesn’t buy the product, but returns after a few days and buys it, you still earn the commission, provided the purchase has been made well within the cookie period. Now, that brings us to the question, what is a ‘cookie’?

What’s an Affiliate Cookie?

A ‘cookie’ is a small piece of data that is saved on the visitor’s computer browser when he or she visits a particular website. If a person visits the website using your affiliate link, a cookie is saved on his or her browser that is attributed to your affiliate link.

If the ‘cookie period’ has been set to 30 days by your affiliate vendor, and if the website visitor returns to the sales page and makes the purchase within 30 days, you earn a commission.

For example, the affiliate cookie duration for Amazon affiliate program is only 24 hours, while some other affiliate programs offer a year-long cookie period. It varies from vendor to vendor.

As far as we understand, the cookie period for ClickBank is for 60 days. Now, that brings us to the question ‘what is ClickBank?’

What Is ClickBank?

ClickBank is an online marketplace that provides a transparent platform for product vendors and affiliate marketers to sell and promote digital and physical products on the internet.

As affiliate marketers, one thing we love about ClickBank the most is the fact that all the payments are handled by ClickBank itself and not by the individual product vendors.

Meaning, if you make a sale of a product as a ClickBank affiliate, your affiliate commissions will be paid by ClickBank itself and not the vendor. This is a very important feature because there are a few vendors on other affiliate platforms who deny commissions to the affiliates without any valid reasons. More so, if you are a newbie affiliate marketer.

ClickBank Commissions – How Much Can You Earn?

ClickBank pays some of the highest commissions in the affiliate marketing industry. Many of its products offer commissions upto 75%.

That means you can earn a whopping $75 as a ClickBank affiliate for selling just a $100 product. If you sell only 10 of these products per month, you will end up with an extra $750 in your bank account in the form of affiliate commissions. That’s the power of affiliate marketing.

But how exactly to start ClickBank affiliate marketing? How to select the products to promote and more importantly, how to promote them?

ClickBank Sign Up

To start affiliate marketing with ClickBank you are going to need to sign up for a new ClickBank account. On October 29, 2019, ClickBank changed the account creation process for new customers.

Now if you want to sign up for a new ClickBank account, it needs to be done through the Master Account feature. The master account feature allows you to link multiple accounts together to a shared account.

The signup process itself is quite straight forward. To sign up for the new ClickBank account click here. You can watch the ClickBank video below to know more about ClickBank’s new feature.

Important ClickBank Terms/Matrix You Need To Understand

Once you have finished signing up for the new ClickBank account, its time to move forward with choosing the right affiliate products to promote. But before that we need to understand certain terms that are ClickBank specific. Knowing this is very important.

Gravity

This is the most important term that you need to understand when doing ClickBank affiliate marketing. Gravity is a ClickBank generated performance rating that indicates the number of affiliates that have successfully promoted a particular product.

Although the ‘Gravity’ itself isn’t a definitive number, it gives you an approximate picture of what is selling like hot cakes and what is not. For example, if a ClickBank product has a gravity score of over 300, that product is definitely more popular than the one that has the gravity score of 75.

The moral of the story is that, higher the gravity score, popular the product and higher the number of affiliates promoting it. Also, remember that choosing a high gravity product alone doesn’t ensure success.

Because higher gravity also means higher the competition. The best approach is to choose a sweet spot in between. Go with something that has neither a very high nor a very low gravity score.

Initial $/Sale

This is the number that represents the average dollar earned by a vendor for the initial sale of the product.

Avg %/Sale

This is the number that represents the average commission percentage paid out to affiliates for the initial sale.

Avg %/Rebill

This is the number which represents the average commission percentage that is paid to affiliates for re-bills.

How To Choose The Products To Promote?

To choose a product to promote the obvious first step is to enter inside your ClickBank account. To choose an affiliate offer to promote, we will need to enter the ClickBank marketplace. To do that, click on the ‘Marketplace’ tab near the header section of the ClickBank dashboard.

On the next page, you can see different ClickBank categories listed on the left sidebar. These are arranged in alphabetical order for easy reference.

Now, depending on your niche and/or the interests you can select one of these categories. For this example, let’s choose the ‘Health & Fitness’ category. When we click on that particular category, a whole list of sub-categories opens up, as given below.

Addiction
Beauty
Dental Health
Dietary Supplements
Diets & Weight Loss
Exercise & Fitness
General
Meditation
Men’s Health
Mental Health
Nutrition
Remedies
Sleep and Dreams
Spiritual Health
Strength Training
Women’s Health
Yoga

Now at this stage, we can either choose to search for a product in a sub category of ‘health and fitness’ or can choose a product directly from the main category itself.

Best ClickBank Products to Promote

For this example, let’s choose a product from the main category itself, without going deep into any of the sub categories. When we click on the ‘Health and Fitness’ category on the left side bar, all the products listed under this category will be shown in the centre of the ClickBank interface.

The products listed here are arranged according to the popularity of the product, by default. We have the option to rearrange them based on Avg $/sale, Gravity and other ClickBank matrix using the dropdown option given above.

Also, there are excellent filtering options on the left side, if you are searching for products in a specific range.

For example, using the slider bar on the left, we can tell ClickBank to show us only the products that have a gravity score of between 15 and 100. Similarly, we can use the other filters to choose specific kind of products.

Now, as we can see in this example, ClickBank is showing us a product named ‘Resurge’ on top of its search result, under the ‘Health and Fitness’ category. Average $/sale for that particular product is being shown as $103.99. Average%/sale is being shown as 72%.

That means, if you choose to promote this product and make a sale, you will earn a commission of approximately $70. Now, that’s a lot of money for selling a single product.

If you see the ‘Gravity score’ for the same product, it is 795.38. That’s really high. What this score tells us is that the product itself is selling like hot cakes and there may be thousands of affiliates promoting this product at present.

If you are a beginner, promoting this product may be slightly difficult, if not impossible. That’s why it may be a better idea to choose a product that has a gravity score of more than 50 but less than 100 if you are a newbie.

A gravity score in that range indicates that the product is popular, but does not have thousands of affiliates competing for its promotion.

Now, to promote the product we need to click on the ‘Promote’ button, in front of the product name.

A new window will open up, where we need to click on the ‘Generate HOPlink’ option, to generate a unique affiliate link.

Now, copy this link and save it somewhere on your device. Don’t worry if you lose it. You can always generate a new HOP link.

Here is the HOP link we generated.

https://89f02-xm6a6d767qjhxdw73m71.hop.clickbank.net/

Now, this is the link, we need to promote online. Whenever a person clicks this link and makes a purchase, we are going to get approximately $70 in the form of affiliate commission. As simple as that!

But as you can see in the above example, the link itself is quite lengthy and looks a bit repelling. To solve that problem we can use a ‘link shortener tool’ to shorten the link.

There are many free and paid tools available online, that can do this job (But the free ones come with their own set of limitations).The tools we use are GeniusLinks (can use without website) and Thirsty Affiliates (need a WordPress site).

We used GeniusLinks to shorten the URL which we just generated using the ClickBank hop link generator. Our shortened URL looks like this.

geni.us/resurge

Now the next step is to promote this ClickBank link.

But before that let us just go through all the different categories inside the ClickBank marketplace from where we can select products to promote.

How to Promote ClickBank Offers Online?

Now, the next step in this ClickBank affiliate marketing guide is to establish channels for promoting our chosen ClickBank product. Whatever method you select, your main aim should be to bring a ton of targeted visitors to the offer page and earn a lot of money doing it.

Please note that you need to get ‘targeted’ visitors and not any other kind of visitors. Targeted visitors are those who are interested in the solutions your product delivers. They are the ones who are searching the net looking for a specific solution.

For example, in our case, we need people who are specifically looking for ways to reduce their body weight fast. They are our target audience. If a person searching for ways to earn money online arrives at our ‘Resurge’ sales page, he/she most probably won’t even look at the offer.

Now let’s look at the different ways of promoting a ClickBank offer.

ClickBank Affiliate Marketing With a Website or a Blog

Building a niche authority website or a blog and then promoting affiliate offers through that platform, is the best way to earn affiliate commissions with ClickBank products.

This method involves starting a blog that is based on a particular topic or a niche.

For example, if we want to make money promoting ‘weight loss and diet products’ we will need to build a website or a blog based on those topics. We will need to perform keyword research in that niche and then write keyword focussed articles.

Once our articles start ranking in search engines like Google, Bing etc. interested people will visit our website and read our articles. And that’s where we have the chance to promote our affiliate offers.

We can include links to relevant ClickBank affiliate products from within our articles. Whenever a person reading the article clicks that link, visits the sales page and makes a purchase, we will earn a commission.

That was a broad outline of how things work when you choose to build a website or a blog to promote affiliate offers.

Starting an affiliate website is a great way to make money online. However, it has its own share of limitations as well.

The biggest drawback of starting a website to earn money online is the time it takes for you to succeed. It is not a get rich quick scheme.

If you want to make money online fast with affiliate marketing, starting a website may not be the right way to do that. But if you want to build a sustainable online business, a niche blog or a website should be the priority.

You need to create quality content and publish it on your website regularly to find traction in search engines. If you start a blog in a moderately competitive niche, it is going to take anywhere from 6 months to one year for you to start earning money with affiliate marketing.

But once your blog/website gets established, builds authority, and traffic increases, earning money with ClickBank becomes relatively easier.

Building niche authority websites is a type of online business model where you can work once and continue to reap the benefits of your labour, for many years to come.

Read this if you want to learn how to start a blog from scratch.

Affiliate Marketing without a Website

Most people don’t have the time or patience required to build niche affiliate websites and blogs. If you are one of them, the following methods of affiliate promotion may be the right fit for you.

Affiliate Marketing with YouTube

Doing ClickBank affiliate marketing with YouTube may be considered one of the fastest ways to earn money online. Many people find starting a YouTube channel much easier than starting a website or a blog.

Also, getting traffic to your sales pages with YouTube videos is much quicker than with a traditional blog or a website, thanks to the unique YouTube features such as ‘related video’ & ‘suggested videos’.

To do ClickBank affiliate marketing with YouTube, you need to start a channel in the niche where you want to promote affiliate products. In our example, we would need to start a channel in the diet and weight loss niche, if we want to promote diet products to our audience.

Now, one major problem many beginners have with starting a new YouTube channel is that they don’t want to come in front of the camera or do voice-overs for the videos. If you are one of those, we have got a solution for that too.

It is called ‘Vidnami’.

This is a video maker tool that allows you to create stunning, professional-looking videos quickly. You can also use its auto-voice feature to generate human-sounding voice overs if you don’t want to record your own voice. Vidnami is one of the highly recommended tools on this blog.

>>>Check Out Vidnami from Here<<<

Once you start a YouTube channel and publish some videos, it is time to start promoting your affiliate offers. To do that, you just need to display your affiliate link in your YouTube video’s description area.

Please remember that the ClickBank affiliate link you promote in your video’s description area should be related to the topic/content of your video. Don’t just promote a random affiliate offer.

We earned our first affiliate commission using one such YouTube video. We neither showed our face in the video nor gave our voice. It was a talking avatar styled video reviewing a particular product.

We know that it is not the best way to promote an affiliate product. But it still worked out great for us and we made $183 in affiliate commissions.

The best part was that the commission we made was recurring. So we earned $183 for 3 consecutive months with one sale. It was definitely worth our effort considering the time we took to create that YouTube video, which was hardly 30 minutes. We had made that YouTube video using this tool.

Social Media Marketing

Another effective way of doing ClickBank affiliate marketing is through various social media channels like Pinterest, Twitter, FaceBook etc. Among all the popular social media websites, Pinterest is the best one for affiliate marketing.

Whatever social media channel you choose, the strategy is like this.

Start a social media account
Build a simple landing page
Take the visitors to the landing page
Redirect them to the sales page

What’s a landing page?

A landing page is a webpage which is built with a single aim. In our case, that aim is to drive visitors to the sales page. Such a landing page is also called a ‘bridge page’.

Now, you may ask, why not take the visitors directly to a sales page rather than a landing page? The answer to that question lies in ‘pre selling’.

Yes. We need to introduce our visitors to the product we are promoting and the problems it can solve, before sending them to the respective sales page.

By doing this, you can see your conversions going through the roof. If you send your visitors directly to a sales page without telling them what the product is, the chances of them purchasing the product are very slim.

Here is a simple landing page we created for a demo purpose. This page contains a demo video, simple headline, 2 calls to action buttons and a timer. That’s it.

But how to create a landing page if you don’t have a website?

The page you saw just now was built without a website. We have explained everything about building such a landing page in this guide titled how to build a landing page without a website.

Affiliate Marketing Pro Tip

If you want to take your ClickBank affiliate marketing to the next level, start collecting email addresses on your landing page, rather than simply redirecting your visitors to the sales page.

But why would anybody give you their email address?

That would be in return for some valuable free download.

To start collecting email addresses of your visitors, you need to make them an attractive offer in return for their email address. You can give them a free download offer that may be an eBook or a PDF or a video or a work sheet or something else entirely.

Once you have your visitors email addresses, you can mail them regularly with valuable tips and suggestions. Occasionally you can mail them promotional affiliate offers, provided those products better your readers lives in one way or another.

Don’t just mail them about some crappy affiliate products, which you haven’t bothered to test it yourself.

How To Get Paid With ClickBank?

ClickBank pays eligible affiliates in the following ways.

Checks

You can get paid through a check. ClickBank mails you a paper check to the address you mentioned during the registration procedure. This is the default payment method.

Direct Deposits

You can also ask them to directly deposit the money into your bank accounts. This option is available for people in the US and some other selected countries. People residing in the following countries are eligible to get the direct deposit from ClickBank.

XACH deposits are available to bank accounts in the following countries:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Canada
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
French Guiana
Germany
Gibraltar
Greece
Guadeloupe
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Martinique
Mayotte
Mexico
Monaco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Reunion Island
Romania
Singapore
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
Spain
Saint Pierre & Miquelon
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
XACH deposits are available in multiple currencies for Canada (CAD, USD) and United Kingdom (GBP, EUR).

Wire Transfers

You also have the option to get paid through a wire transfer into your bank accounts, if your country isn’t eligible to get the direct deposit. The wire transfers, however, may cost you an extra $35 per wire sent as the ClickBank processing fee.

Payoneer

You can also get paid using the international money transfer service, called Payoneer.

Conclusion

If you want to find success with ClickBank affiliate marketing, you are going to need patience and perseverance. We have earned a decent amount of money promoting ClickBank offers in the past.

Although we don’t promote ClickBank offers now as aggressively as we used to do it in the past, it is definitely one affiliate program we believe in. If you are a beginner, this is definitely a great place to start your online income journey.

ClickBank Affiliate Marketing Guide for Absolute Beginners