How do people get paid by ClickBank?

If you’re already familiar with affiliate marketing and ClickBank, you can scroll down to the “How To Get Started With ClickBank” section to get into the nitty-gritty of how to make money with ClickBank ($500 per day goal!). Otherwise, keep reading!

One of the simplest ways to make money online is to sell other people's products, a practice known as affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, you find an interesting product online and agree with the vendor to give you a commission for every sale you drive to their website.

If you're an experienced affiliate marketer familiar with sales funnels, you have an advantage starting out. Even if you don't, learning how to make money with ClickBank is something even an entire beginner can do!

While not as simple as slapping in an affiliate link from Amazon, being a ClickBank affiliate can be incredibly lucrative. The key is learning how to get the most out of what this platform has to offer.

Most importantly, how can you effectively pick and promote the right products so you can make a nice living doing it?

Contents

• What Is ClickBank?
• Why ClickBank? Is ClickBank Legit?
  • Pros of the Clickbank marketplace
  • Cons of the ClickBank marketplace
  • Is Clickbank Safe for affiliates?
• How Much Money Can I Make with Clickbank?
• How to Make Money with ClickBank: The $500+/Day Blueprint
  • 1) The Product
  • top Traits to look for in ClickBank products
  • Choosing a Product on clickbank
  • 2) The Sales Funnel
  • 3) Traffic
• How To Use Clickbank Affiliate Marketing To Make $500 Per Day
  • Making Money on Clickbank FAQ
• it's Time to Get Your ClickBank Affiliate Empire Started!

What Is ClickBank?

ClickBank is an affiliate network home to thousands of digital products like e-books, videos, and software. They’re simply middlemen between product vendors and affiliate marketers.

If you’re the vendor, you create your own product and set it up using ClickBank’s system. They then list your product in their marketplace so tens of thousands of affiliates can see you.

They handle the tracking using unique tracking links and cookies, so they know exactly where the sale came from and credit the referring account accordingly.

Confused? It’ll be clearer in a moment. A lot of people start off as affiliates and then, later on, become vendors. We will focus on making money as an affiliate in this blog post, as it’s the simpler route.

As an affiliate, all you have to do is sign up for a ClickBank affiliate account and then start browsing their marketplace which lists all the available products from their partner vendors.

Once you find a good product, ClickBank will give you a unique “affiliate link” that points to the vendor’s sales page.

All you have to do then is make people buy through that link. You earn a commission for any sale made through your affiliate links.

Why ClickBank? Is ClickBank Legit?

Yes, ClickBank is legit. They aren't as well known as the Amazon Associates or Walmart Affiliate program, but they do a great job of providing affiliate marketers with digital products to recommend our readers.

If you're looking for a digital product to promote as an affiliate, ClickBank is one of the first places you should check out. The ClickBank marketplace is renowned as a place to find a wide array of digital products you can make affiliate commissions on.

Digital products tend to have extremely high commissions per sale. A good ClickBank offer will often make you much more than the 3% cut you receive from selling physical products on traditional affiliate platforms.

Is ClickBank a digital product affiliate network that delivers this year and beyond? Or are its best days in the past?

The good news is that there's still plenty of value here. If you're willing to take the time to find the right product and deliver targeted traffic, the sky is the limit! 

That being said, there are plenty of pros & cons to ClickBank. It's important to know the good and the bad before you jump in. Especially if you're a ClickBank newbie.

Pros of the Clickbank marketplace

Here’s a breakdown of the top benefits the ClickBank marketplace brings to the table.

• Very high commissions

Most ClickBank products pay 70%+ commission. You read that right. So in that case, if you sell a $100 product, you earn $70. You might think that’s way too high to be real, but it's an entirely legit way to make money online.

Clickbank can do that because most of its products are digital, which means there are no “production” costs, “shipping” costs, or any other costs that are usually associated with physical products, hence the high commissions.

• They pay fast
  

As often as weekly or bi-weekly. Many affiliate networks pay on a NET 30 basis, which means they keep your money for 30 days after you've earned them. This can be a huge inconvenience and create cash flow problems especially if you're running paid traffic.

• They're newbie friendly
  

Some affiliate networks are strict when it comes to accepting new affiliate marketers. They're usually scared of fraudsters who can potentially jeopardize the network's relationships with their advertisers and vendors by using shady promotional techniques.

While this cautiousness is generally good, it also makes it hard for new affiliates to get into those affiliate marketing networks. How can you start taking baby steps and experimenting with things when you're not even allowed to promote products?

• International affiliate friendly
  

Their direct deposit payment method works with Payoneer. This popular digital wallet can help you quickly get paid online by selling products no matter where you’re from in the world (with a few exceptions).

• Big variety of products
  

With tens of thousands of Clickbank products available across about two dozen categories, there are a ton of niches and opportunities to find what works best for you.

Cons of the ClickBank marketplace

While there's still a lot to really love about ClickBank as affiliate marketers, it's important to get the full story. It's not all golden tickets and rainbows.

If you want to know how to make money with ClickBank, you need to know how to get around some very legitimate potential objections.

So the most common cons of ClickBank include:

• Many terrible products

While there are some great digital products on ClickBank there are even more terrible ones. It's up to you to find the good in the ClickBank marketplace and stick with those while avoiding the spam, scams, and products that you really don't want to be associated with.

• High commissions attract scammers & spammers
  

Because of this many people have been spammed with offers from affiliates or low integrity marketers looking for a quick buck. This is one of the main causes of any reputation issues ClickBank may have with potential buyers.

• Heavy competition on popular products

The best and most popular ClickBank products will have major competition. That means often a singular blog post or product review won't help you stick out from the crowd. You'll need more to compete, especially if you don't have an established online platform.

• Hard to find low-competition “gems”

There is a lot of trash digital products on this platform. Most of the best products have high gravity. That means you may have to spend a lot of time doing keyword research to find a good ClickBank product you're proud to promote that doesn't have insane competition.

• Requires giant commissions to attract affiliates as a seller
  

If you end up going on the selling side of things as a product creator in addition to being an affiliate, you will need to offer a big commission percentage. This same common practice that makes ClickBank great for affiliates can be a negative if you are a seller trying to attract good affiliates to promote your ClickBank product for you.

While the pros of being a ClickBank affiliate tend to outweigh the cons, it's important to have the full story.

Now that you see both the potential benefits and drawbacks of what ClickBank affiliate marketing has to offer, you can decide whether it is right for you or not.

Is Clickbank Safe for affiliates?

Yes. ClickBank is an affiliate marketplace used by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of affiliate marketers. It is just a way to find new affiliate products to recommend and then connecting with the owner of the product.

Think of ClickBank as the Amazon or Walmart of affiliate offers. You can shop around, find what you like, and then promote it on your website with an affiliate link.

How Much Money Can I Make with Clickbank?

This is a highly subjective question. The biggest factors involved are your affiliate products and how you promote them. We’ll break down exactly how to do that in the following sections.

But if you’re asking if it’s possible to make money with ClickBank as an affiliate, then the answer is 100% yes!

It’s not uncommon to see people doing 3 figures daily on ClickBank. A typical sale earns you $15-$50 in commission. Say the average is $30. This means you need 4 sales a day to hit $100+.

Seems doable, doesn’t it? Depending on your level of expertise you could hit your first sale in days or months.

If you’re a complete newbie, it’s not unrealistic to aim for your first sale in 2-3 months.

From that point onwards, once you prove to yourself that it works, things become much easier.

If you’re looking for great examples of people making good money on ClickBank, check out Warren Wheeler of AMNinjas. He recently wrote a case study explaining how he was able to bring a brand new affiliate website from $0 to $300+ per day in less than 3 months with ClickBank.

Both of these posts discuss relatively different strategies. I’m actually going to get into both of those strategies as well as my recommended path to follow for beginners (and why I think beginners should follow it).

How to Make Money with ClickBank: The $500+/Day Blueprint

So now on to the nitty-gritty. Here’s the breakdown of what I’ll be covering to help you get your first ClickBank sale.

There are 3 major steps:

• The product/offer
• The funnel
• The traffic

We’ll go into more details regarding each step but let me give you a quick overview of each. The product/offer is the ClickBank product you’ll be promoting.

This might seem like it’s simple enough but screwing up this step could potentially hinder you from earning a single cent because the other steps are built on top of it.

Next up is the funnel. The funnel basically represents the journey a visitor takes from the point they’re exposed to your own website/ad/link down to where they can make a purchase through your affiliate link.

There are many different approaches to this, so experiment and play to your strengths.

Finally, you need the traffic.

You have the product, you’ve set up the “journey” your visitor will go through to finally get to the product, now all that’s left is to actually start driving those visitors to your sales funnel.

1) The Product

So before you choose a product you need to hop on the ClickBank website and sign up for an account on the affiliate network. Creating a Clickbank account is a straightforward process that you can start here.

Once you’re done, it’s time to navigate to the marketplace and start browsing.

The General Exploration Phase

Many people will recommend selecting a niche/category you’re familiar with right off the bat and browsing products inside it. Although I agree with this approach for strong reasons I’ll outline later, I do not think it should be the starting point.

Simply go ahead and hit the “magnifying glass” button next to the search bar without typing anything.

This will allow you to browse an aggregate list of products from all categories. You can use the “sort results by” drop-down menu to sort the results according to different criteria.

For our purposes, we’ll keep it set as “Popularity” for now, although I also encourage you to sort by “Gravity” and browse products that way.

At this point, forget categories, niches and everything else. We simply want to identify what makes a good product.

But what do these terms mean?

High gravity means a lot of affiliates are making money with that product or it’s a “proven” product.

You might be thinking that’s a no-brainer, right? Simply sort by highest gravity and pick a product out of those.

Well, while many advise going that route, it has its issues. The main one being: high gravity = a lot of affiliates = a lot of competition. This isn’t always a bad thing but might not be ideal for people just starting out.

Before we move on to the next section, browse through 10-20 high gravity products. Visit their sales page and their “affiliate tools” page. Notice how they sell the product to both their customers and you as an affiliate.

You'll start to notice all the most successful ClickBank products have traits in common in their offer, their funnel, and their pages. Learning this lets you search for these traits in underperforming products.

You’ll quickly start noticing patterns.

top Traits to look for in ClickBank products

The common traits among the top products usually significantly contribute to their success. We want to understand these traits to spot them in other products that may be less competitive but can sell well.

Here are some things you might notice:

• Video Sales Pages (VSLs)

VSLs are a popular type of sales pages that convert very well because of their dependence on easily digestible, highly engaging videos.

• Strong Affiliate Tools

You’ll find that most top products have dedicated pages that help you get started quickly promoting their products. They often even create ready-to-go paid advertising, content, and templates for you. This shows that the vendor cares about attracting and retaining affiliates.

• Social Proof

Most products will have testimonials/reviews or other types of social proof showing people successfully using and benefiting from that product.

• Strong Copy and Clear Call to Actions

If they have a written sales page, you’ll likely find it very convincing and keeps pulling you in to read more. They’re often story-driven as well.

The buy now button will be impossible to miss, and the whole page will direct your attention to completing the purchase. It leaves no doubt in the visitor’s mind about what to do next.

Choosing a Product on clickbank

At this point, you should have a general idea of what a good product looks like by analyzing top gravity products across all categories.

While many will point out that the most profitable ClickBank niches are health, wealth, and relationships, you should search based on what you're interested in and can promote.

Now it’s time to choose a product to promote.

Here’s a checklist:

• Interest in the niche

Passion/huge interest is a bonus. People underestimate this point. You'll be eating, drinking, and breathing this product/niche for weeks, months, or years to come if it's successful and you start focusing on growing it.

Having an interest in the product makes things much easier and helps you keep going when things get tough.

• Gravity is not a deal breaker

People will tell you to choose a product with at least 30+ gravity. This is not a rule of thumb by any means. I’ve promoted products that had a gravity of 5 and made good money, as long as the product hits other points on this checklist (and the one in the above section), you can give it a go.

• “Wow” factor and solution for niche problem

If your target market sees this and instantly thinks “I need this! How have I been living without it?” Then you’ve got yourself a potential winner. It helps to be knowledgeable in this niche so you can easily judge this point.

• Great sales page

Clean, convincing, and easy to complete checkout using your affiliate link.

• Affiliate tools/support

Try getting in touch with the vendor for affiliate support. Good vendors will be prompt with affiliate support and will show you that they care because they make money when you do.

That’s about it, here’s an example product I’ve chosen:

This product has less than 10 gravity but I’d give it a go because it meets most of the criteria above. Most importantly, it focuses on an aching problem and promises to solve it.

To get your affiliate link simply click “promote” and enter your ClickBank nickname. Click submit and your link will come up.

All you have to do is to copy/paste it and use it during promotions.

2) The Sales Funnel

Once you’ve chosen your product, it’s time to think about the typical journey your visitor would go through until they end up buying your product. Here are some of the most popular “journeys”:

• Direct linking:
  

This means you’ll send people directly to the vendor’s sales page. This used to work well and still does in some rare cases but most of the time, it’s not recommended to go down that route. You need to “warm up” your visitor first before sending them to the offer page. Unfortunately, because this is the lazy man’s route, a lot of people choose it.

• Lander > Offer:
  

This is a much better approach than the above. A lander or landing page is a web page that you create and that acts as a middleman between the offer and the visitor. This could be a review of the offer, a video, an article…etc. The visitor would land on it, consume it and then click a link and get redirected to the offer. Warren Wheeler’s case study on AMNinajs.com uses a variation of this funnel.

Want to learn how to get started creating a landing page? Here's a guide on how to create a landing page in WordPress.

• Lander > Opt-in > Offer:
  

This is AuthorityHacker’s approach in the case study referred to above. You basically send your visitor to a landing page and offer them a free gift related to your offer in exchange for their email address. You then send them the offer (among other things) via email.

So What’s the Recommended Approach?

Although the third approach is the most complex setup, it has a major advantage: you’re building your email list. You can get in touch with everyone who filled your form and can promote offers to them again and again.

This is why it’s the recommended approach.

There’s a popular saying among internet marketers, “The money is in the list.” It really is. An email list is a long-term asset you can leverage with a click of a button with negligible cost.

So how do you go about doing this?

• Step 1: Create your landing page.
  

Whether it’s a review, article, video or otherwise, you’ll need web hosting and/or a tool to create. I recommend ThriveThemes for this (works with WordPress).

• Step 2: Create your opt-in forms.
  

These are the forms that will capture your visitor’s email address. This is also doable with a ThriveThemes product called Thrive Leads. You might also want to check out our Thrive Leads tutorial/review.

• Step 3: Next, you’ll need an email marketing platform.
  

This email marketing platform must allow you to manage your email list and send automated email sequences to them (promoting your Clickbank product and other content). For this my recommendation is ConvertKit. (See my full ConvertKit Review here).

If you're interested in getting involved with an email marketing affiliate program, check out this article on the best email marketing affiliate program. 

• Step 4: Done!
  

Now you have the product, a landing page (say it’s an article related to the niche/product) and a lead magnet, which is a free ebook/video…etc you’re giving away for free on the landing page in exchange for an email address.

A visitor reads the article, gets intrigued, subscribes to get the freebie, then you email them the freebie using ConvertKit. A couple of days or so later, you pitch them the affiliate product.

Many vendors will actually prepare email swipes for you. You can browse their affiliate tools page for inspiration.

With the funnel set up, now you’re ready to start running some traffic!

3) Traffic

So how do you drive visitors to your niche website and hence your offer? When driving traffic you could either “pay” by spending effort and time or pay by actually paying for the traffic.

Let me explain this by actually breaking down the recommended traffic sources.

SEO

SEO, in a nutshell, is working on making your website rank high in Google search results when people enter specific search keywords. The big pros of search engine marketing are that it’s a very long-term strategy and could keep bringing you traffic for years with minimal effort.

It's also inexpensive or almost free if you manually do all the work.

The drawback is that it’s slow at first. It could take 2-3+ months to see your first sale if that is your primary traffic source. It’s also tedious because it requires much effort in link building, especially if you’re trying to rank for highly competitive keywords.

For an in-depth SEO blueprint, check out our how to rank in Google guide for beginners.

If you’re looking for a full step-by-step training on how to create a niche website and promote it from scratch, check out our full guide on how to start a blog.

PPC

If you have a budget and are willing to pay for traffic through paid advertising, you might want to explore investing in Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or other PPC ads.

The first advantage is that you can literally start receiving traffic within minutes of starting a campaign. But once you stop running the campaign, the “traffic tap” stops.

You also pay for every visitor/impression. The risks and stakes with paid traffic are higher, but exciting rewards like the ability to scale crazily overnight by launching new campaigns and increasing budgets.

This “on-demand” scaling is not possible with SEO.

You can also opt to use a hybrid approach, which I highly recommend. If you’re on a budget, focus on SEO, and once you start seeing results reinvest everything back into more SEO and content, then start exploring paid traffic.

This is how you prevent your eggs from being in one basket.

Organic Social Media

Creating Facebook pages, attracting followers and publishing content was once a lucrative practice. However, as you may already be well aware, Facebook has significantly decreased its pages’ organic reach.

To the point that it’s almost impossible now to depend on organic traffic as a reliable source of income or visitors.

Most other social media platforms followed suit to promote their own advertising.

Thankfully though, Instagram and YouTube are still big players when it comes to organic reach. Many affiliates make a lot of money promoting products organically on these platforms.

YouTube

There are a number of different approaches here. You can record a video review of the product and leave its purchase link in the description.

You can create a video giving free value related to your niche and recommend the product as an “upgrade.”

If you can’t do this yourself, you can always hire someone on Fiverr for a very affordable price.

We’ve recorded and published a coaching call outlining an interesting YouTube marketing strategy. Check it out if you want to go that route.

Instagram

Even though Facebook’s organic reach decreased significantly, Instagram is still going strong. This works especially well for visual niches like food, pets, and sports.

Lots of interesting content out there to post in these niches and gain a huge following.

The basic strategy is this: Post interesting content consistently with relevant hashtags on your Instagram account. Follow users in your niche and engage with their posts.

I also know a couple of people who grew their Instagram accounts quickly solely depending on “shout outs” from influencers.

You can use a service like ShoutCart for that or contact influencers directly (most of them list their email addresses in their bios).

How To Use Clickbank Affiliate Marketing To Make $500 Per Day

I know the information in here may be overwhelming and you might be looking for an exact formula to start making money with ClickBank. The truth is, every single “option” I’ve mentioned here can make money.

If in doubt, follow this step-by-step Clickbank formula:

• Pick a product that solves a problem, has high commissions and that you believe in its potential and importance to your audience.
• Create an article related to that product. It should add value. Do some keyword research and find some low competition long tail keywords to write about.
• At the end of the article, give away a free guide containing more dog training tips or “8 Dangerous Foods for Dogs You Didn’t Know About,” you get the idea. Something to get your reader curious and wanting more.
• When they subscribe to your list, send them a couple of emails linking them to more articles or useful pieces of content, then pitch your dog training product after you’ve built some trust.
• Repeat this process and do some link building. If you have the budget, you can actually start running Facebook Ads and/or Adwords campaigns to the articles in parallel. Make sure your website is 15+ pages to maximize your chances of getting good traffic from Google.

The above is the basic, long-term strategy I recommend. It’s a lot of work but it pays off.

You can always go the shorter route of just slapping together an opt-in page and driving paid traffic to it.

While they tend to convert well, these pages are much less likely to rank in search engines or bring you organic traffic.

Going the “valuable content creation” route allows you to utilize virtually any traffic source sequentially or in parallel and bring a strong, long-term asset that consistently brings in leads, traffic, and sales.

Making Money on Clickbank FAQ

Q: How can I make money on ClickBank fast?

If you already have a strong e-mail list, high traffic website, or large social following then this is easy. You use those resources with a promotion that matches your audience to make money online.

However, the product should always match. If you don't have these things then it will likely take time. Make your plan for driving traffic and execute it – it's worth the work!

Q: How much money can you make from ClickBank?

This is hard to say. There are products that sell thousands of copies a month and give a major commission. There are plenty of ClickBank affiliates who make five figures in a month.

This isn't easy but it is absolutely possible with the affiliate network!

Q: How long does it take to make money from ClickBank?

This is going to vary from affiliate to affiliate. If you have a website and email list it may happen from day one of your sales funnel. On the other hand, if you're a newbie to all affiliate marketing then it will take time. If you have prior experience with another affiliate program, you'll learn about ClickBank quicker than most.

There's no reason a hard working newbie marketer can't make money online within a year. An experienced affiliate marketer should make money from ClickBank in much less time. And there are a lot of courses on ClickBank, you may be interested in checking out our Commission Hero Review.

Q: How to make money with ClickBank without a website?

The best way to do this is with an existing email list if you have it. If not, then social media and paid advertising are your only two options.

it's Time to Get Your ClickBank Affiliate Empire Started!

I hope this has been helpful, especially for beginners. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to post them in the comments section below!

Want to learn more about building a sales funnel?  Read my Clickfunnels review here.