Clickbank Affiliates: How to Make Money with Clickbank Website Programs
If you are searching Internet to find ways to make money online from your websites and blogs, you will end up seeing hundreds of ways. Some of them may be legit, but most of them will be just scam. Here on Bloggers Passion, I’m just going to share ways that actually helped me make money or I have confidence that they will help my blog readers make money from their websites. Today article is about how one can use Clickbank affiliate program to make money from their websites and blogs (Free as well as self hosted blogs). I himself had some success in making money while selling Clickbank products from my blogs. Now first of all, let me introduce you some basic stuff around this article.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
With this kind of marketing, we sell other people’s product and get commission for each sale generated through our affiliate link. Suppose I’m promoting a make money online guide through my blog and the cost for that guide is $50. Its vendor is giving away a commission of 50% to its affiliates. So for each sale for this guide though my affiliate link, I will be making $25.
What is Clickbank?
Clickbank is a retail marketplace for selling digital products. They have thousands of ebooks available in various categories. Some of popular categories available in Clickbank marketplace are Arts & Entertainment, Business/Investing, Computers/Internet, Cooking/Foods, Games, Health & Fitness, Parenting, Politics and Software’s & Services etc. Mostly ebooks will be focused around how to fix a particular problem like how to walk your dog, how to lose weight, how to repair your xbox etc.Ways to Make Money With Clickbank
You can make money in two ways with Clickbank. Firstly you can create your own products and sell them using Clickbank marketplace. You need to create a vendor account in order to list your product into their marketplace. With vendor account, you can set your product pricing and how much you ready to pay to affiliate for selling your product copies. Clickbank team handles most of technical challenges in that case. Suppose your product is sold via an affiliate, Clickbank will automatically credit the decided amount into respective affiliate account and rest will be credited into your account.
Second way to make money with Clickbank is working as an affiliate to promote products that are listed in its marketplace. There can be lots of reasons why you decided to go for second option like you don’t have the expertise to create a killer ebook or you don’t have the time or resources required to manage everything at vendor level. It’s better to go for affiliate option to start making money with Clickbank. So to start making money as affiliate with Clickbank affiliate program, you need to sign up for affiliate account with them.
Sign Up As Affiliate With Clickbank
Go to Clickbank.com website and create an affiliate link by clicking the Sign Up link shown in Affiliates Section. Fill in all required information and click the Submit Button. Once they approve your affiliate account, you are eligible for making money with their affiliate program.
Things to Keep in Mind As An Affiliate
You need to have a website or blog at least to make decent earnings with Clickbank affiliate program. If you don’t have a blog even, start creating one today around the topics you are most interested in and are most knowledgeable about. Once you have a blog running in active mode, go to Clickbank marketplace and choose some products matching your blog content. Suppose I thought of selling Clickbank products on Bloggers Passion, I would mostly look for products related to making money online, blogging and WordPress. Our chances of getting success with products that are not matching our blog theme are very rare. So we should choose products from Clickbank marketplace that are matching our blog niche. Steps that I’m mentioning in this guide will be applicable on stand alone websites, blogs, discussion forums, Squidoo Lenses, Hub Pages, Blogger free blogs (Blogspot), WordPress Based Blogs etc.
Apart from product relevance matching, there are some key factors you should take into consideration while choosing a product to promote on your website and blog. With each Clickbank product there are some statistics mentioned, let me explain them:
Initial $/sale: This is the average amount you will be earning for selling a product.
Avg $/sale: This is the average percentage you will make selling a product in lifetime.
Avg Rebill Total: This applies to those products only where vendor charge its customers recurring amount. Recurring payment systems are generally seen in membership and subscription based websites. So this is the amount you will be making on products that are re-billed.
Avg %/rebill: Again, this applies to products where some recurring charged occurs. So this is the average percentage you will be making on re-billed products only.
Grav: Gravity indicates numbers related to product popularity in Clickbank marketplace. Products with high gravity are those that are most promoted and where affiliates are making lots of income. But higher gravity means lots of competition for that keyword.
So I would suggest you to choose those products only:
- That are related to your website/blog niche
- You end up making $20 at least per sale
- Go for products having gravity in the range of 50 to 120 only
- Go for products that offers at least 50% commission. There are some products available in Clickbank marketplace that help you 75% commissions even
- Now its time to look at the products websites you are thinking of promoting. If yourself are not satisfied with their landing pages, it will be difficult for you to convince your website readers to buy those products. You should go for products whose sales copies are well written and you are sure they will help your website readers to solve the problems for whom they are looking for solutions from your website.
So you should go for such products only that match the above shared criteria. Believe me there are lots of products available in this range in Clickbank marketplace and in your website categories.
How to Create HopLinks
By this time you have decided the products you want to sell through your online properties. Now its time to add affiliate links for various products you want to sell. For this, you need to create HopLinks for each product and add them into related articles and prominent positions on your website. To create a Hop Link for a product click on the Promote button as shown below and enter your Nickname in the next window available. Now copy your affiliate link and now you are ready to add this link into your website.
Google does not love thin content affiliate websites. So you should make sure, you are adding high quality content on your website. Apart from this, you should use nofollow attribute and Tiny URL’s etc to hide your affiliate links. Once you have added affiliate links and banners in your websites and blogs, its time to look for ways to bring lots of targeted traffic on your websites so that you can make good sales selling Clickbank products as an affiliate.
How to Promote Clickbank Based Websites
If you have created special websites around Clickbank products, you should make sure you are using seo optimized titles, URL’s and contents within your website pages. Once you have added some articles in the form of reviews and features around the product you are promoting, now its time to look for ways to get traffic to these Clickbank based websites.
On your website, you should write content that gives your website readers some sold reasons to buy those products. Apart from this, links and banners should be easily accessible to your website readers that they can use to buy products of their choice. If there are some offers, testimonials, reviews or money back guarantee (Which is available with most of Clickbank products) available with the product you are selling, please mention that in your website product content copy.
Here I’m sharing some methods one can use to promote their normal and affiliate websites (Clickbank, Amazon, LinkShare etc) and blogs:
1. Paid Advertising
If you have budget, you can try Google Adwords kind of pay per click programs to drive traffic to your affiliate websites. But the negative side to this promotion method is that you may end up losing some money if you are enable to get enough sales from the products you are selling through your website. I would recommend trying paid advertising methods when you have some numbers in hand like how many hops you require to get a sale. And how many clicks on your website will create a single hop. So you need to do all calculations around ROI. If you think paid advertising will help you get more sales. Go for it. But initially at least, I would recommend going for free traffic generation methods I’m sharing below.
2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is such a powerful technique for driving targeted traffic to a website that lots of Internet marketers use it only. To get article marketing to its fullest, we should write some interesting articles around the affiliate products we are selling though our website. I would recommend writing 15-20 articles at least for each product you are thinking of getting sales though your Clickbank based websites. Once you have some articles ready, start publishing them on top 10 article publishing websites. You should write your articles in a way that they actually clicks for your websites links available in article content and Author Bio section. People will not visit your website if they don’t find your articles interesting. You should include seo optimized anchors to link back to your website from article publishing websites. Having seo optimized backlinks will help your website rank well in search engines for terms matching your products. Apart from traffic you will be getting from search engines, you will be getting some referral traffic as there will be some user who will be visiting these article websites and will be visiting your website to know more details about the product you are promoting. Most of article websites does not allow affiliate links. So you should include links for your website targeted pages only in ezine publishing websites.
3. Guest Post Submissions
Write some interesting guest post around the products or topics related to your products and get them publish on top blogs matching your products niche. If your targeted products are related tomaking money online, you should go to blogs like Bloggers Passion to submit your guest post. You should link back to your website product pages with their respective anchor texts in your guest posts. Most of blog owners would allow you addition of one or two links in your guest post body or Author section.
4. Social Bookmarking Submissions
You should submit some interesting pages from your Clickbank based websites on top social bookmarking websites. Some of popular social bookmarking websites where you can submit your website and article pages are Digg.com, Delicious.com, Reddit.com, Google Buzz, HumSurfer.com etc.
5. Social Media Websites
Spread words about the product you are selling on popular social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, Google +1 etc. Create a strong Fan Page on Facebook and use that to drive additional traffic to targeted pages on your website.
6. Do Some Blog Commenting
Create a list of some blogs in your niche that are matching with your product categories and start writing comments on them with a link to your website. Blog commenting will help you get some targeted traffic to your website and will also give you additional links that you require to get your website into top 10 listing on Google and other search engines for their targeted terms.
7. Discussion Forums
Find some discussion forums matching your website niche and share your knowledge by answering the thread you are most knowledgeable about. Please don’t spam discussion forums with self-promotional links. With most of discussion forums, you are allowed to add few links in the signature sections.
Keep Track of Your Clickbank Earnings
After doing all the hard work, its time to check your Clickbank earnings. You should check how much money you are actually able to make from your websites and blogs though Clickbank products sales on weekly basis type. You should keep track of number of hops you are able to get for various products and look at ways to maximize them. I himself had some success selling 4-5 Clickbank products. When I was active on Clickbank, was able to make $100 plus dollar every month. I never gave too much effort for the promotion of Clickbank products. But I have seen lots of Internet marketers are bloggers are making their living through Clickbank products sales only.
How is your experience with Clickbank and what killer techniques you are using to get sales for your Clickbank products, please share your success stories in the comments section below so that other members in blogosphere can also help and motivation from you?
