How to Make Money with ClickBank: Step-by-Step Guide
ClickBank may seem like easy money when you first sign up. Many products boast a 70% commission, potentially making you up to hundreds of dollars per referred sale.
But if you’ve already tried promoting a few products, you’ll know that it’s not that easy.
Without a plan, you could spend weeks, months, or even years creating a ClickBank-focused website without making a single sale.
In this article, we’ll give you a step-by-step walkthrough of four different ways of making money on ClickBank with different target markets and traffic generation strategies.
Use the links below to jump to the section or tactic you’re most interested in.
Note: This article assumes you already have chosen a niche, signed up as a ClickBank affiliate, and are eligible to promote products.
How ClickBank Works & Why It’s a Great Way to Start Making Money Online
ClickBank is an affiliate network with affiliate programs for thousands of different digital products.
As an affiliate, you can make money promoting offers from a ClickBank vendor who lists their products on ClickBank.
ClickBank affiliate marketing is a great way to start making money online because of its high commissions — often 70% or even higher.
A single sale of a digital product can make you anywhere from $20 to $200 or more. So to generate significant income, you only need to refer a couple of sales per day.
In contrast, if you tried promoting headphones with Amazon Associates, you will get a 3% commission. So for a $200 sale, you would get a measly $6 (and Amazon is still high compared to some affiliate programs).
How to Find a ClickBank Product That Will Sell Like Hotcakes
Once you’ve signed up for a ClickBank account, you need to create a sub-account to promote affiliate products.
(Source: ClickBank)
Select the “Affiliate (Promote products)” option when creating your new account.
After you’ve created this account, head to the ClickBank marketplace. It lists all the available products that you can promote with your new affiliate account.
From here, choose a product category related to your chosen niche.
(Source: ClickBank)
For example, if you have a blog about improving your career, you could find relevant products in both the “education” and “employment & jobs” categories.
If you write or make videos about cooking, you can find courses and books to promote in the “cooking, food & wine” category.
With thousands of products, there’s always something that suits your niche.
But don’t just pick any old product.
ClickBank Gravity Score and Average $/Sale
To figure out which products are already selling, you should arrange the products by the gravity score.
The gravity score shows the number of affiliates that sell at least one product per month. So with a gravity score of 50, at least 50 separate affiliates sold the product over the last month.
It’s not a perfect metric, but it indicates that the product is still relevant and easy to sell.
(Source: ClickBank)
The listings show the average value of a sale, which is the other metric you should consider.
You can also order the products after average sale value, and examine the most expensive products. This will boost your potential earnings even with a smaller audience.
Product Relevance
Of course, you can’t just pick the most expensive product that sells the most and hope to get rich.
The product needs to be relevant to your niche and audience. You shouldn’t stray too far.
Not only are you unlikely to make many sales, but it can also hurt your credibility with your audience to promote unrelated products.
For example, if your blog is all about careers and job seeking in software development, don’t promote a video course on baking.
Instead, focus on products that are directly related to some part of job seeking. For example, a course on mastering job interviews is a much better choice.
It will have higher sales potential and is right in line with your audience’s expectations. If the product helps them, it will only boost your relationship with them.
(Source: ClickBank)
If you can’t find directly related products, you could promote peripherally related products. For example, products related to making money, like the “Earn From Your Photos” product.
Landing Page Quality
Unless you want to invest your own money and time into developing a high-quality landing page, the product you promote needs a good one.
Otherwise, you are wasting your time sending qualified traffic to their landing page.
The interview guide product has a pretty good LP, so it wouldn’t be an issue.
(Source: Interview Questions and Answers)
Once you’ve chosen your product, all you need is a strategy to promote and sell it. We’ve highlighted four of the best strategies for ClickBank products below.
Step 1 – Use SEO to Attract Targeted Traffic and Promote the Product Directly
If you want to generate sales without spending on advertising, SEO and organic search is the way to go. It’s the best source of free traffic.
On average, SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than organic social media for businesses. Not to mention, you can attract relevant visitors that are already ready to buy.
By focusing on keywords that show a level of commercial intent, you can convert people with ease.
The first strategy is to use SEO to attract potential customers straight to a relevant page on your site for free.
Evaluate Your Competition
With an SEO tool like Ahrefs, you can easily spy on your competition and see which pages are linking directly to the affiliate offer.
In the good old days, you could use the Google “link:” search parameter, but now there are no good free options.
The product URL is usually product.hop.clickbank.net. Anything that comes before the product name is the affiliate’s username or ID.
(Source: Ahrefs)
If you get some authoritative results, see which keywords they target with their pages.
Unfortunately, most experienced affiliates “prettify” their links. That means they hide them behind a redirect like “mydomain.com/out/interview” rather than keeping the original URL.
That means it’s not enough to just explore the backlink profile. You also need to explore relevant keywords directly. For example, “top interview questions” is a perfect keyword for this niche.
(Source: Ahrefs)
But the topic is a little too general. The stats show that it’s an incredibly competitive keyword that you’re unlikely to be able to compete for in the short or even long term.
Focus on more niche keywords with a lower volume that are more specific.
Find Keyword Opportunities: Low Competition, Decent volume, Highly Targeted
(Source: Ahrefs)
In Ahrefs, aim for a keyword difficulty of medium or below, between 0–25. You also want a search volume of 1,000+ per month.
Pay attention to the average CPC. A high CPC is usually a good indicator of “commercial intent” (whether or not a visitor is likely to buy something).
In the case of “machine learning interview questions,” it has a CPC 60 times higher than the general keyword “top interview questions” did.
That usually means the searchers are, on average, a lot more likely to take valuable action.
If exploring all relevant keywords with a decent search volume (1,000+) are too competitive, you may want to target another niche.
Implement On-Page SEO Basics
Implement all on-page SEO basics in your content, like:
- Use the exact match keyword in your meta title and description.
- Use the exact match keyword in the first 100 words (introduction).
- Use the keyword in an H1 tag (automatically happens for WordPress and other CMS).
- Use related keywords and questions in H2 and H3 subheadings.
- Cover related topics in detail and vary your use of semantically related keywords.
But make sure that you don’t go overboard. You still need to write for humans. Write clickable titles and headlines to get a higher CTR in Google SERPs.
Use introductions that draw people in by using a formula like PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution).
How many people click on your article, and how long they stay and read it on average, will also affect your rankings.
Not only that, how can you engage an audience and sell products if your content falls flat because it’s written for robots?
Instead of relying solely on SEO, you can expand your strategy with email marketing. The ROI of email marketing was over $42 for every dollar invested in 2019.
Does that sound like an investment you can afford to miss out on?
Email marketing, when done right, helps you capitalize on all the visitors that aren’t quite ready to buy a product.
And often, that’s most of them. Just think of how often you visit a page like “best running shoes” without buying anything.
That’s one of the harsh realities of being an affiliate marketer. Email marketing helps you bridge that gap.
You can build a relationship with potential customers over time, and promote an affiliate product at the right time.
Target Low-Competition High-Volume Top-Of Funnel Keywords
Instead of only targeting low-volume bottom-of-the funnel keywords, you can target broader top-of-the-funnel keywords related to your business.
For example, Systeme.io, an email marketing platform, targets keywords related to lesser-known entrepreneurs famous in the “make money online” or “side hustle” space.
They’re not gunning for Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to compete with Forbes and other established magazines or newspapers.
They target a handpicked selection of businesspeople that mostly aspiring digital entrepreneurs look up to.
(Source: Ahrefs)
Pages on Alex Becker, Dan Lok, Robert Kiyosaki, and more, are driving a large portion of their organic search traffic.
Of course, they understand that directly pushing an affiliate product or their own email marketing suite isn’t likely to lead to a lot of sales.
That’s why systeme.io does something different.
Capture Leads with Relevant Lead Magnets
Systeme.io’s most popular blog post is about Robert Kiyosaki’s net worth.
(Source: systeme.io)
He’s the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” and is an inspiration for many up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
The systeme.io marketing team understands this.
Instead of trying to capture leads by offering a free trial to its email marketing platform, they offer a relevant lead magnet all about making money online.
(Source: systeme.io)
Take your dream of starting an online business, and make it into a reality. That’s what it offers the visitors.
And what will they need if they do start an online business? That’s right, an email marketing tool.
It’s a great example of a long-term marketing strategy that can pay serious dividends.
Promote Relevant ClickBank Offers to Your Subscribers
Once you have a list of engaged email subscribers, the world is your oyster.
All you need to do is promote relevant affiliate offers that will actually deliver value to your subscribers.
(Source: Gmail)
For example, here Aurelian from systeme.io promotes a webinar and product about launching a digital product.
It’s 100% in line with the lead magnet and content he used to get people to sign up in the first place.
In your case, you would just need to promote a relevant ClickBank offer instead.
Set up a Multi-Stage Drip Campaign
To make automatic sales, use an email marketing platform to set up an automated drip campaign.
(Source: automizy)
Typically, you want to welcome people to your newsletter, and then offer at least one or two emails of pure value before you start selling.
If you used the same lead magnet as systeme.io, you could create a sequence like this:
- Day 1: Thanks for signing up!
- Day 5: The 5 Principles for starting your first online business right (Value)
- Day 12: 9 completely free tools we use to grow our online business (Value)
- Day 19: Don’t know where to start? Get a complete roadmap (First sales pitch)
- Day 26: How 3 students made $3,000+ in under 30 days! (Follow up)
For your follow-up emails, you can’t just reword your messaging from your first sales email. You need to overcome their objections.
One of the best ways to do this is to offer social proof. Show your audience that other people have had success with the product before. Your goal is to create an irresistible sales funnel.
Step 3 – Drive Traffic and Nurture Leads with a Facebook Group
(Source: NicheHacks Facebook group)
The vast majority of people who visit your site won’t be ready to buy a product right away. Most of them won’t even click your affiliate link.
They don’t know anything about who you are or what you have to offer yet.
This is still true when it comes to affiliate marketing. Unless you’re targeting commercial keywords, they’re probably still considering their options.
Email marketing isn’t the only way to nurture an audience. With a dedicated Facebook Group, you can nurture leads and drive more traffic to your blog and your ClickBank affiliate links.
The benefit here is that it has an inherent viral component. People will want to share the group, and invite their friends.
Plus, senior members will create valuable content and give advice without you needing to invest your own time or money.
Promote Your Facebook Group Actively on Your Blog
For example, you could set up a custom footer for all your blog posts and pages that invites people to join.
Just take a look at the footer from NicheHacks. We’re using the social proof of our 80,000 overall social media followers and group members to attract more members.
If you’re starting from 0, use power-words like “exclusive” to make your community seem like a highly valuable mastermind.
You can also promote it in emails to increase engagement. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
(Source: Travis Hubbard)
Once you start getting members, you can start leveraging your new group.
Make sure that you always work to deliver value. Answer the most important questions and engage with your audience.
If you don’t do that, you won’t be able to build an engaged Facebook group to leverage.
The first and most basic way to use a group for promotion is to share your new posts and videos in the group.
To do this sustainably, create content that directly answers frequently asked questions by group members. You can even tag them when you share a post that answers their questions in-depth.
There’s often an overlap between frequently asked questions in a group and question-based search terms. With a little optimization, you can please both your group members and the search engines.
Promote Affiliate Offers with Live Webinars (and JV Guests)
Of course, the power of the Facebook group goes beyond just sharing posts.
Once you start establishing a presence with the Facebook group, you may even be able to invite the ClickBank product creator to join you as a live guest for a quick webinar in your group.
You can use this tactic to convert a lot more group members to buy a product. But on the surface, you will only seem like you are working to deliver more value to the group.
(Source: Facebook Ads Agency Scaling Secrets group)
Once you’ve got a few thousand members, you may even be able to find JV partners beyond ClickBank.
Step 4 – Retarget Potential Buyers with Remarketing Ad Campaigns
When a visitor finds your website, especially through highly targeted organic keywords, they’re already a valuable potential lead.
The problem is that only a small percentage of them will sign up for any free offer, and an even smaller percentage will buy on the first visit.
On average, 97.89% of visitors don’t convert at all. You need to get potential customers back to your website as many times as it takes.
Remarking is the perfect medium for driving return visits to your site and building relationships with your audience.
Create a Custom Audience on Facebook Ads
There are a lot of remarking platforms out there, but Facebook Ads is one of the best options.
It’s easy to get started with, and you can use images and video on both Facebook and Instagram to reconnect with your visitors.
But before you can create a campaign, you must create a custom Facebook audience based on visitors to your site.
If you haven’t already done so, create and install a Facebook pixel on your website. It will allow you to track visitors and match them with Facebook users to create an audience.
Head to the Audiences page and click the “Create Audience” button in the top right corner. Choose “Custom Audience” from the drop-down menu, and “Website” as your source.
Next, all you need to do is fill the settings out like this:
(Source: Facebook Ads Manager)
If you have some low-quality (unrelated) content on your site, you can exclude visitors to those pages from the audience. If you use subdomains for different categories of content, you can create multiple audiences, one for each subdomain.
Save your audience and move on. You can now target it with feature campaigns (after it reaches 100 members).
Develop a Varied Set of Remarketing Ads
Next, it’s time to create your first Facebook ad for remarketing.
One idea is to use your existing lead magnets as a basis to come up with a varied set of remarketing ads.
HubSpot is a master of this:
(Source: Hubspot & Facebook)
To succeed with social media ads, you need to focus on offers with genuine value to your audience.
For example, you can use webinars or live chats as the carrot to attract previous visitors back to engage with you once more.
(Source: Hubspot & Facebook)
You can also leverage customer success stories and other social proof to help anyone on the fence make a decision.
YouTube and YouTube ads are another strong method for further nurturing your audience in the same way.
Critical Considerations
- Before you start marketing, spend time finding the right product for your niche. You can’t force someone to buy something they’re not interested in.
- Use SEO to attract organic traffic, as it’s over 1,000% more effective than organic social, on average.
- Use a mix of Facebook groups, email marketing campaigns, and remarketing to nurture your leads and sell as many ClickBank products as possible.
- By developing an email list and a social media community, you can even promote your own product further down the line.
Final thoughts
Making passive income with ClickBank is very possible, but you won’t make a cent unless you use the right approach.
You need to learn from other companies successfully leveraging digital channels to make millions (like HubSpot or Systeme), as well as top affiliates.
If you want insider information, directly from the source (experienced, high-earning affiliates), join our community of niche marketers.
And, if you have any further questions about making money with ClickBank, please let us know.