CLICKBANK - The real deal

I'm here today to talk to you about ClickBank and I just wanted to say that this is a special topic I’m writing about because I’m bringing it to you by request. I got a request from one of my followers asking me to write about ClickBank because I talk about it a lot where I go through my top 7 money makers.

For those of you that don’t know, ClickBank is a digital goods marketplace. Meaning it’s sort of like Amazon except all of the products are digital. So, as an affiliate you refer people to these products and you earn commissions. That’s it.



There’s nothing hidden, everything is upfront and it’s completely transparent. Now, some of the products you may decide to promote that are sold on ClickBank may be questionable by your audience. That’s why you have to know the products that you’re promoting. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit.

So when you go to ClickBank.com, you can go up to the top and click “Marketplace”. This is an organized directory of all the products that can be sold or referred from ClickBank and you as an affiliate, blogger, advertiser, etc. can earn a commission.




Can you make money with Click Bank? You've probably seen the hundreds if not thousands of screen shots with people making hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars everyday. What you aren't seeing is how they managed to produce those results.

There's two ways to make money on ClickBank. You can promote a product as an affiliate and earn up to 75% commissions. Or you can take the second route and be a vendor, have your own products and have affiliates promote your stuff. The truth is, ClickBank is huge. There are tens of thousands of active affiliates promoting the thousands of available products in the ClickBank marketplace. With nearly 2.5 billion dollars of payouts that ClickBank has issued in their 14 years of being in business, you might be trying to figure out if it's possible to grab a piece of the pie. The truth is, anybody can and it's easy once you figure out what you need to do.

It comes down to a simple 3 step formula.

1) Find a product to promote.
2) Drive traffic to that offer.
3) Get your weekly earnings directly deposited in your bank account.

The truth of the matter is, most people get lost on step two. It's easy enough to find a product to promote because there's so many available.

The problem comes down to getting traffic. We've investigated and found out how so many people are doing it. We've found the secret for why so many people are making so much money on clickbank. Every successful clickbank affiliate and vendor have told us the same thing. They told us that they knew how and where to get traffic.


Vick Strizheus goes through how he gets 100,000 visitors per day and makes an tens of thousands of dollars every week, selling other people's stuff (the easy way!). Please note that this service is completely free and there's nothing to buy.

Once your learn how to get traffic to your clickbank offers, you'll find how easy it is and why they're are so many of those clickbank earning screen shots all over the web. The truth is, anyone can do it! All you need to do is take action and make sure to watch these free videos on how to sell other people's stuff on Clickbank.

Click the button below and watch the cool free video on how I get up to 100,000 visitors per day and earn as much as $8,354.44 - $48,833.00 in a single week selling other people's stuff... the easy way!

Affiliate Disclaimer: I am disclosing that I will earn an affiliate commission for any purchases you make. Please note that I have not been given any free products, services or anything else by these companies in exchange for mentioning them on this site. The only consideration is in the form of affiliate commissions.


Why is Clickbank so attractive and profitable to so many users? This is because the commissions are so high. Compare Clickbank to amazon, amazon’s affiliate program pays between 4-8%, so if you sell a book for $40.00, you will only receive over $3.00 at most. Amazon has to pay the publisher, the author, shipping and handling, a third party if ones involved, amazon gets a portion of that sale, and then there is you left to pay out minimal commissions to. You are like the 6th person in line to get a cut of that money. With Clickbank, you have an electronic book, there is no shipping or handling; the product is sent via email.

The only people getting paid really are the author and you. A lot of authors or Clickbank publishers will pay you 50, 60, even 70% commissions to refer their book. Let’s go back to that example if you were to sell a $40.00 book. With Clickbank, you could possibly receive $28.00 (a significant difference from $3.00). The commissions are very high; you could be bringing in lots of money, depending on how much the Clickbank author wants to pay. That is the great thing about Clickbank.

The downside is of Clickbank is that there is a lot of junk available on it. Note that eBooks are easily created. All you need is a PDF creation software; you can buy Adobe Acrobat Professional, or some other cheaper software programs that are out there that will allow you to create PDF files. It is nothing for people to gather facts on the web and regurgitate them into 20 pages or so, call it an eBook and slap on a $49.99 price tag on it, sell it on Clickbank and call it a day.

You have to be very careful, so I choose the products on Clickbank very carefully, if I see something that I want to refer to my audience, I don’t just look at the price I’m going to earn per sale off of it, I also by the book. By doing so, I review it and make sure that it is something that I want to associate with. If you’ve ever been to Clickbank and read the sale pages for those products, they all look the same; they are all written very “salesy,” very pitchy. For example, “Lose weight in 3 days!” It’s just all these crazy claims, you got to be careful at what products you promote, because there is lots of junk out there. Generally, what I do is buy the book, read it from front to back and if it’s something I want to associate myself with, or refer my audience to, I write a review. Depending on the book, the review might be long, might be short. I did a review on a book on “My Flat Stomach Exercises Site,” and it was a pretty long review because I wanted my audience to really know that I purchased the book and read it.

As you probably know, there is so much hype when it comes to the whole weight loss thing and I wanted people to know that this book is different from so many other, common books out there. I wanted my audience to know that I really did buy it, so I made my review very specific.

You might say, “Why would I spend money on a book, what if I don’t want to promote it, or don’t like it? Then I just lost $40-$50.” Well I look at it like this, it is an investment. I treat my affiliate site, my affiliate products like a business. Everything I do, any money I put forth on my business is an expense. Yes, there are times where I bought something and didn’t like it, nor promote it. The time where I have bought something and didn’t like it, I just wrote off as an operating expense on my tax form.

This is what business is; sometimes you will buy things you don’t need; that is what running a business is about. It is much better to buy something and review it and make sure it is something you want to stand by, than to say, “Look I get $70.00 for every person I refer this book to, let me slap it onto my website!” Then you just start referring garbage, and you lose your credibility, and it’s just not worth it.

Clickbank can be a wonderful way to monetize your site, but you just have to be careful. Go to clickbank.com, click on the marketplace link, browse through some of the books, and see if there is anything that fits your topic or theme. If it looks like it is something that will help, or pertain to your audience, buy the book, read it and write a review.

The great thing to writing a review is, it will increase you chance of getting a commission. People will see your review and say, “Okay, I see she/he has bought the book and read it and telling me specific things that I pertain to and that would benefit me. I think I’m going to buy it.” It will increase your chance of selling the book by just stating, “This is a good book, buy it.” It is all about credibility right; one of the main reasons why I am able to have a steady income online is because I have built up a lot of solid credibility in the niches I have chosen to involve myself in.

If you want to make money, you have to build that credible person in whatever topic or theme you choose. Clickbank can be a great way to monetize your site. You just have to know how to work the system and be honest. I hope this helped you.

If you’ve ever come across Clickbank, I’m sure you’ve seen products that have been sold on there. Clickbank is basically the largest online retailer of digital information. It is an Affiliate Program Network and also a payment processor. It acts like an affiliate manager, standing somewhere between the vendor, buyer, and affiliate.

The purpose of Clickbank is to allow people whom are authors of digital products, eBooks, tutorials, and other types of online informational products to sell them through a process called affiliate marketing. I’ll be reviewing Clickbank, talking about it as an affiliate network or a way you can make money as an affiliate by selling the vendor’s products.

How it works is, a vendor will create a product, upload it on Clickbank and affiliates will go and sell those products for a percentage of the sale. Let’s say, you are an author and write an eBook called “The Fastest Way to get a 6-Pack.” Although you may have done a great job writing the book, you may not be as great at promoting it; you’ll find it hard to make sales of your eBook. What you do is, you list your eBook through the Clickbank marketplace, allowing people who want to sell your eBook, or promote your eBook as affiliates to go ahead and do that and earn commissions off of it.

So you’ve listed your product through Clickbank and instead of trying to sell or market it on your own, you have an army of affiliates working through the Clickbank network, who are out there pushing your product for you and generating those sales. Clickbank is great because it gives you access to thousands of digital products that give out commissions up to 75%, depending on how much the vendor is willing to pay. It really doesn’t matter if you sell 10, 20, 30 or more different products at the same time, as you will only have to have one account and Clickbank will send you all the checks.

If you go to the Clickbank homepage and click on marketplace, it will bring up a whole list of categories on the lift hand side panel. What you get is a list of categories in which there are products to promote. People are creating these eBooks, audio programs, etc. and listing them for sale on Clickbank and then you got them listed under these various categories. You as an affiliate marketer, maybe with an interest of a particular category, can click on the category and see what is offered for sale. On the description of the product you can see how much gravity the product has, which basically means the amount of affiliates that are promoting that particular product and earning commissions on it. The percentage of commission is also stated by the description of the product.

Clickbank has a great advantage over its competitor sites, like Amazon because of its high commission payout. This is why it is a great reason to become an affiliate! You could be constantly buying products that you have interest in, learn about them and sell them for commissions!

What are people saying about ClickBank? Read some of the Warrior Forum reviews!

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Originally Posted by Mohsin Rasool Wow, it seems totally changed Clickbank site. I like new look and style, fully responsive design and fresh look. I really love it Mohsin

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Originally Posted by vilmosg I think the marketplace has got a better search engine. It was awful, but now it is much better.

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Originally Posted by KenJ Looks much better. More professional and business like. KenJ

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Originally Posted by michaelfreeman I am looking into creating an affiliation network with click bank. Good to know. I think click bank is probably the most reliable mediator between affiliates and product/service money sites. Very interesting. Mike

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Originally Posted by williamtan Big change indeed! I've actually got to double check the URL on my browser to ascertain I'm at the right ClickBank, LOL. The site now looks more professional and clean.

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Originally Posted by tinknocker WOW! I'm impressed with the new look. I had given up on them because they seemed to be going in the wrong direction with all the confusing new way of dealing with affiliates. I am definitely going to be checking them out and hope they are moving in a more business/affiliate friendly direction.

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Today I want to talk about how to find products to promote on Clickbank, what you should look for and what products to stay away from. First you go to the Clickbank marketplace, here you’re going to find all the products you can promote sorted by category and you’ll have the ability to sort by a variety of factors, such as popularity, average earnings per sale and more. You’re going to need to find a product that relates to the customer base that you’re marketing too, for example if you have a website about dogs, you’re going to want to promote products that talk about dog training, dog health, and so on.

With that being said, since there’s a variety of ways that you can promote Clickbank products, I’m just going to go over some simple, hard and fast rules that I follow when deciding to promote a product on Clickbank:

1. Collect all the products that fit in my niche and start sifting through them. Go to the product website and ask myself would I buy this product? Am I enticed by the sales page or does it turn me away? You’re impression will likely be similar to other people going to the website, so if it doesn't sell you, it’ll likely not sell other people either.

2. Search the website for something I consider “Clickbank full pause.” These would be things like Adsense ads, or other ads on the sales page that aren't going to pay you, the affiliate. Also look out for anything that doesn't help convert the sale, such as links to other websites, the vendor heavily promoting their own affiliate program, or anything else that will lead your visitor away from the sale. You don’t want to waste your time sending visitors to a page only having them make the vendor money and not you.

3. Read the sales letter, study it simply because if the website looks beautiful means nothing if the copy on the page is poorly written and is full of bad grammar.

Now assuming the product you’re considering pasts those tests, here are some other elements that I consider:

1. What’s the pay out, how much will I make if I promote this product? Will it be enough to make a profit if I can sell 1 out of 100 visitors?

2. How popular is the product? If it’s ranked number 1 in its category in the Clickbank marketplace, it may mean that it will convert well, but it also means that it is highly competitive and sometimes it could already over-saturated the market, so keep that in mind.

3. Does the product have any up sells or do they have any recurring payments? You can find this information on the Clickbank marketplace. Usually I prefer these types of products as it means you’re going to make more money.

Some people look at all the technical data that Clickbank provides, such as gravity or even long-term gravity history, but all you really need is basic marketing common sense to find good products to promote on Clickbank. Once you’re more advanced, you can start to consider those things like gravity, but remember you can always test out different products against each other, and you should. Don’t worry about finding the perfect product right of the bat, marketing with Clickbank requires trial and error, so you’ll likely need to test out selling different products anyway. I’d like to leave you with one last tip with finding a product to promote on Clickbank. This is something I don’t see a lot of people do, but it can really make all the difference for you. That is, contacting the vendor. This has been my secret for years and it really pays off. Most vendors are eager to help you sell and exceed at selling their product.

Some vendors offer unpublished bonuses or prizes and many have different marketing tools for you to use. It never hurts to ask your vendor about these things, so make sure you reach out to the vendor of the products that you’re considering to promote. Just the fact that they’re involved in wanting to help you is also a good sign that their product is worth promoting and you never know they may have some really valuable marketing insights for you as well. There you have it, I hope this helps you find some good products to promote on Clickbank.

 

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To become a successful affiliate and to have a sustainable business on Clickbank the first and most important step is choosing your niche. The most important thing to know about choosing your niche is that you should spend a lot of time and research on this stage. A lot of people want to get started right away with Clickbank; they’re really excited and want to jump right in, so they don’t spend much time on this step, people just pick a product and immediately start promoting it without thinking about the sustainability about it or whether they really want to be in that niche. There are three big questions that you want to ask yourself before choosing a niche to promote in on Clickbank:

• What are you interested in? If you’re not interested in the subject, you’re not going to be able to stick with it, so you’re going to want to put in a lot of thought into this and explore the possibilities out there.
• Do people spend money in this niche?
• Are there products to promote? You can’t be a successful affiliate if there are no products to promote in your niche.

What are you interested in?
When you’re thinking about what you’re interested in and what you want to promote as an affiliate on Clickbank and what to build your affiliate business around there are a ton of different topics you can go with but these are 4 big categories that you could start to think about and explore to find the perfect niche for you:

• Hobbies – what do you like to do as a hobby? For example fishing, gardening and chess.
• Passions – what are you really passionate about, how is your lifestyle like; some categories could be fitness, causes or education.
• Problems – what problems would you like to solve for yourself or for other people. Obesity, depression or home repairs are a few topics where there is a lot of pain and urgency to getting these issues solved, so people are going to be doing research and be willing to spend money on those areas to get them taken care of. Therefore it could be really profitable for you as an affiliate if you could help those people solve these problems.
• Trends like healthy living, organic eating and homeschooling are categories that can be tied into a broader niche and build a lot of content around.

Think about your life and which of these categories you would be interested in and which topics within them would potentially be good for exploring as a niche. The key to picking a niche to work with in Clickbank is whatever you pick, make sure you stick with it. You’ll need to consistently create content and be involved in the niche and its community, participating and interacting other people, you can’t be passive and put up some content and never touch it again and hope to be really successful as an affiliate. You need to think about Clickbank like a long-term business, something that you’re going to invest time and eventually money into. Think about something that interests you and something that you’re going to want to work on in the first month, beyond 6 months, even a year. The goal here is to become an authority in your niche, so don’t pick something that you are mildly interested in or something that you’re not interested in at all just because you think it’s a good money making opportunity on Clickbank.

Do people spend money on it?
People spend money on all kinds of different niches, so the answer is usually going to be yes; if you look in the marketplace on Clickbank, there are tons of different categories of products. There are going to be a few really weird niches that you may not be able to monetize at all or people are just going to be looking for information, like if you’re a collector on quotes – there’s not much money to make there as an affiliate on Clickbank. What you want to look for to see if there’s money to be made in a niche are things like advertisers. Things like billboard advertisers, magazine or newspaper or Google Adwords advertisers are common. If you can see that people are willing to spend money advertising in this niche, then there is certainly money to be made in it. Magazines on a topic shows there is a big interested audience, especially if there are multiple magazines in a niche is a great sign. Books based on the niche are also a good indicator of whether people spend money on the niche or not. Associations or groups are organizations people are typically paying to be a member in or hosting live events, so this shows money being involved in that kind of association or group.

Are there products to promote?
You need to consider if there are products to promote on Clickbank in your niche; these are information products. Physical products would be through networks outside of Clickbank, but you’re going to build the most profitable affiliate business possible if you can do a mix of information and physical products. For example a DVD on how to perfect your golf swing is both an information and physical product.

One of the biggest secrets to finding a niche for Clickbank is you want to niche down. A lot of people go too broad when they’re starting out; they think about something too general, which is sometimes too competitive and there’s no way to gain an audience or get recognized as a top authority in that space. For example there are a lot of people interested in health and fitness. There’s a lot of money to be made in this niche, however if you go into it as an affiliate and think that you’re going to be an authority figure, you’re going to be competing against huge businesses and celebrities that have a lot of money and prestige. If you can go ideally two levels deeper in your niche, like focus on dieting all the way to weight loss for busy moms you can become the top 5 authority figures in that specific sub-niche. You’re going to want to make sure you have a large enough market to work with, but typically if you go a couple levels deep like that, you’re still going to have a lot of people you can identify with and there will be plenty of money to be made in that space on Clickbank.

 

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Growing your audience is where you’re really going to see the results that you can use to build a long-term, successful affiliate business on Clickbank. The first step in growing your audience is to do your research. You need to really understand who is the audience that you are going to be speaking to and promoting products from Clickbank to. Some questions that can help identify who your audience is:

• Who is your ideal reader/visitor? Think about the persona of that person.
• What do they look like, talk about, care about, hate, fear, desire? You want to think about their emotional state and needs as well as their demographics needs. Don’t just think about gender, age or location; think about what really motivates them.
• Who do they hang out with, talk to, argue with, idolize, want to be? Those are going to give you some great ideas for the type of topics and products on Clickbank that they might be interested in.
• Where do they hang out online or in person, where do they want to go or travel to, where do they want not want to go?
• What products, brands or personas do they love and hate?
• How do they talk? Formally, informally, passionate, analytically?
• What lingo do they use? What type of other terminology do they use?

These are going to give you ideas of keywords that you can target in your content when you want to rank in search engines. Thinking about what kind of language they use is going to be helpful in figuring out how to start getting people interested in what you have to say.

Two questions to answer when you’re trying to identify how to grow your audience:

1. Why are they coming to you? – why are they coming to your site or platform, what are they hoping to get out of it – are they looking for a solution to a problem or wanting to get more information or are they looking to do something better or faster? What exactly are their desires?

2. Why should they listen to you as opposed to all the other people or experts out there talking about the same topic? – They’re not going to listen only to you, but what do you have to offer them that makes it worth their time, effort and attention that they’re giving you? If you don’t have a compelling reason or difference, it’s going to be really hard to get people interested and keep their attention. Maybe you helped them receive the results quicker or you are friendlier or likable, you could deliver the information in a way that’s unique; think through what you could do differently that would make your platform appealing to these people.

Great content on your platform whether it’s written or video is the foundation of building your platform and audience to be a successful affiliate on Clickbank. These days having great, original content is not optional. There’s so much out there in terms of people creating and sharing information and if your stuff is just a rehash of what’s already out there, it’s likely to get ignored. Having great, original content is just really the price of entry to becoming a successful affiliate on Clickbank, it’s not what’s going to take you over the top and make you extremely successful. If you want your content to connect to people and to be able to helpful for people needs to be:

• Honesty
• Valuable - don’t waste people’s time, give them something that’s actually useful and that they’re going to be glad they took the time to consume it. Otherwise you’re going to lose them and they probably won’t give you another chance.
• Deliver the information in multiple formats – do some text blogging, video and podcast; if you deliver it in multiple ways, you have a greater possibility of reaching people where they are and how they like to consume the information.
• Make the information as short as possible, but no shorter – people don’t have a lot of time online, they have a million things competing for their attention, so you want to say things as concisely as you can, but don’t make it so short that they don’t actually get anything useful or valuable out of it.
• Results oriented – this is what’s going to really get people to like you, come back to you and recommend you to their friends, which is going to really help you grow your audience for Clickbank.

One of the things that’s really going to set you apart and make you stand out in your niche is having a personality. What’s your personality when you’re speaking out to your Clickbank audience and is it the right personality for them? What you don’t want to be is everything to everyone because you end up being boring and no one is excited to follow you, listen to you or even argue against you. Having people argue against you is not a bad thing at all, it can actually help you get more attention and even build a tribe around you where people that like you argue against your behalf.

A common rookie mistake that I see happen all the time from new affiliates on Clickbank is trying to monetize and make money from your site or platform from day one. This is just a bad idea because it ends up looking like you’re just trying to make money rather than connect with people and share a message or your thoughts; you’re much better off focusing on building your audience, putting out good content and connecting with important people in your industry for Clickbank than immediately slapping on advertisements on your site or first blog post as an affiliate promotion. You’re going to make so much more money from Clickbank when you already have an audience in place, but if you’re trying to sell people things from day one, they won’t have a reason to like or trust you and won’t have a reason to come back to you for your future recommendations on Clickbank products. Remember to build an audience first, you can start to monetize relatively soon after that, but just don’t do it right off the bat.

The next big piece to growing your audience for Clickbank is adding value to the community that’s in your niche. You can do things like participating in forums and have real conversations with people and figure out who are the real power players are in your niche and build real relationships with them by supporting them, do good things for them and share information that’ll be useful to people. The people in that niche will start looking at you as an expert and start coming to your website and coming to you for advice and products; network through Facebook and Twitter with people in your niche. A great way to get your name out there, your reputation going and to generate traffic is to guest post for blogs in your niche. If you have links back to your site, it’s great for SEO as well. Attending events and conferences is a great way to get out and meet people. There’s something with face-to-face interactions that helps bring down the barrier of being anonymous or not knowing to trust somebody.

Stay in contact with your email list. Besides just sending out your content and updates, you need to share great resources and information from within the Clickbank community. You can also survey people or ask questions like what they are struggling with, what they’re having a hard time getting answered or what kind of content they want to see you create - you can use to better serve your audience for Clickbank. Add value and share stuff before you start promoting Clickbank product to them. I wouldn't recommend that in your very first email that people get when they sign up to your list be an affiliate promotion, it might upset or scare people off that you’re only trying to sell them something and not trying to make a relationship or give them valuable information. How you treat your list can really make or break your reputation.

The secret to Clickbank affiliate success is consistency. This seems like to be one of the biggest challenges and most people fall down when they’re starting their affiliate business on Clickbank. When they get started, they’re really excited and do a bunch of work for a week or two and get discouraged that they haven’t made any money yet and give up completely…it doesn't work you’re going to have to put up regular, consistent action even if it’s only 10-15 minutes a day, that’s going to show much better results than doing a bunch of work in a short burst and never touching it again. You’re going to want to be blogging, doing videos and mailing your list consistently. Too many people are thinking short-term on this and as soon as they start slowing down or not seeing the results they want to see, they give up, but the people that are working consistently and push through that are the ones that see the big results and sustainability of their affiliate career on Clickbank.

 

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