For many affiliate marketers, ClickBank is the network of choice. However, ‘network’ is not really the right word – ClickBank is more like the eBay of information products, where you can navigate through thousands of offers and be as specific as you want in your search for the perfect product to promote. Given the ease of signing up and joining this marketplace, there’s little wonder that ClickBank has a huge number of affiliates.
But do they all make a lot of money? Not really. There is a significant gap between the top earners and those who barely make some pocket money with ClickBank. The system works the same for everyone: there are no premium or lower grade members. So, why doesn’t everyone earn similar revenues?
This is exactly what we will be talking about today – how to make money online as a ClickBank affiliate consistently and in sufficient amounts to be considered a secondary source of income. It is a great internet home business. The difference between the top earners and everyone else is the strategy they apply in selecting and promoting offers. We’re aiming to make you a top earner, so continue reading.
1. Selecting the Right Products
As we specified at the beginning of this article, ClickBank is a huge marketplace of informational products. If you are new to affiliate marketing, it can be quite intimidating finding yourself in the position of selecting just a few offers to promote.
The first rule of the thumb is that you should find products which fit your niche – your area of specialty that you write about on your website or blog and, ultimately, what you’re good at and can give an informed opinion of.
- After you’ve applied the niche filter, you should take a good look at the individual offer statistics and select those which have:
- Average Gravity – this represents the number of affiliates who make money by promoting this product (20 to 50 is a good level of gravity)
- Good Avg %/Sale – this is the percentage that affiliates make per sale of the product
- Little or no negative ratings and refunds
2. Promoting the Product
Everybody will select the easy way, which is to insert a banner ad into a related blog post or another piece of content. Everybody who does this makes very little money from ClickBank product promotion.You should focus on building true and relevant context for your banner ad or link. Writing a review is a good option, as long as you do not go overboard with the praise for the product. Another option is preparing an unbiased and helpful article that discusses the problem solved by the product you promote and inserting a link at a critical point, after you’ve won the reader’s confidence.3. Email Marketing
Yes, affiliate marketing and email marketing go hand in hand. You can promote an affiliate banner or link through emails sent to your subscribers. You could start by giving out a freebie in a squeeze page and promoting the ClickBank product to your subscriber base through a series of emails which should follow the general pattern of your regular email marketing campaign: promoting benefits, creating emotions, and inducing the idea of scarcity.
4. Use the Power of Social Media
You certainly won’t post a sales link to your Facebook or a banner ad on Pinterest, but you certainly can promote the blog post and the squeeze pages which are meant to create a context and build confidence in the product you promote. You can also send your social media followers to an opt-in squeeze page offering them a freebie and thus getting more subscribers for your auto-responder emails.
As you can see, making money as a ClickBank affiliate is not as simple as posting a banner on your website and waiting. You have to actively promote your links and banners and leave nothing to chance. This is what top earners on ClickBank do, and now you know what you have to do as well.