If you’ve been studying online marketing or looking for the best ways to make money online, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of ClickBank.
With over 100,000 active affiliates and US$ 6.1 billion paid in commissions as of 2023, it’s one of the largest affiliate marketing networks in the world, helping both product vendors and affiliates succeed.
But how exactly does ClickBank work? And, most importantly, what are the steps you must take to start making money with it?
Whether you’re searching for ways to boost your products’ sales or want to make money as an affiliate marketer, we’ve got you covered.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- How to succeed with ClickBank affiliate marketing
- How to use ClickBank to make sales for your products
- ClickBank pros and cons
- Frequently asked questions [FAQ]
What is ClickBank?
ClickBank is an online platform and affiliate marketplace that’s been around since 1998.
In a nutshell, it connects product creators (vendors) with affiliates who promote and sell products and services in exchange for commissions. That includes offers of several types and categories, from e-books and online courses to survival kits and supplements.
For sellers, ClickBank enables them to outsource their marketing and lead generation efforts while paying only for completed sales.
And, for affiliates, it provides them access to thousands of affiliate offers with commissions ranging from a small percentage to a significant portion of the product’s price.
ClickBank also offers several tools and services to support both ends, such as payment processing, sales tracking & analytics, and affiliate management. In addition, it provides many free resources on its site, such as courses, reports, and events.
How do I start earning on ClickBank as an affiliate?
Part I: Affiliate marketing basics
If you’re already familiar with how affiliate marketing and sales funnels work, you can skip to the next section (ClickBank basics). But, in case you’re not, this section will highlight the key things to have in mind before wondering how to make money on ClickBank.
Step #1: Picking a niche
A niche defines the area of interest, industry, or topic you’ll focus on when promoting affiliate products or services. It narrows your scope and helps you create more relevant content for a particular group of people, boosting authority and conversions.
Some examples of great affiliate niches include technology, financial products, health & fitness, and travel.
To pick a niche, consider factors like market demand, competition level, profitability, and long-term viability and trends.
Also, bear in mind your passion and expertise. Choosing a niche you’re familiar with and enjoy working with enables you to work harder and provide better recommendations to your audience, augmenting credibility and trust.
There’s no need to overthink your niche choice in the beginning. You can refine it or explore alternatives as you navigate the ClickBank marketplace down the road.
Further reading: The 8 Best Affiliate Marketing Niches for Massive Profits
Step #2: Generating traffic
Having a consistent and profitable source of potential customers for your offers is probably the most critical aspect of affiliate marketing success.
There are two main ways of generating traffic:
- Free (aka organic): That includes strategies like blog posts, social media posts, YouTube videos, and newsletters. Despite being free, they’re very time-consuming, and it may take months for you to see any meaningful outcomes. When leveraging these strategies, you’ll also need to learn techniques to make your content rank high on search engines and other platforms.
- Paid: That includes any form of advertisement that generates traffic for your affiliate links, such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and YouTube Ads. While they require money upfront, they can generate outcomes almost immediately.
Each one is ideal for different cases. To determine the right fit for you, ask yourself which you have more: time or money.
Later on, you can combine both approaches. For instance, you can use ads to bring potential customers and a newsletter to keep them engaged and make them buy multiple times down the road.
You can also scale your organic traffic efforts by hiring freelancers to create content.
Finally, many affiliate offers come with restrictions on the traffic sources you can use to promote them. For instance, many vendors prohibit the use of brand-related keywords in paid search campaigns.
Always review the terms and conditions of each offer and program to ensure you’re compliant with their policies. Violating these can lead to account suspension, loss of commissions, and even removal from the affiliate program.
Further reading:
- What is SEO: A Clear Explanation for Beginners
- DIY SEO Software: Your Key to Digital Marketing Excellence
Step #3: Selecting products
The most critical thing when evaluating offers is to make sure the product is high-quality. Providing bad recommendations may lead to a loss of trust from your audience and severe reputation damage.
Always investigate the product and brand’s reputation. Check user reviews and consider trying the product yourself if possible to ensure it meets your standards.
Here are other important tips when picking offers:
- Analyze the Commission Structure: Examine the commission rates and structures of affiliate offers. While higher commissions are attractive, you must also consider the overall potential earnings and conversion rates.
- Look for Recurring Commissions: Consider promoting products that offer recurring commissions, such as subscription-based services. These can provide consistent, long-term income.
- Evaluate the Sales Funnel: Understand the product’s sales funnel, including the quality of the landing page, sales copy, and follow-up sequences, as that’ll directly impact your conversion rates.
- Check for Affiliate Resources: Determine if the affiliate program provides helpful resources such as banners, text links, email templates, and other marketing materials. These can make your promotional efforts easier and more effective.
- Assess the Cookie Duration: Pay attention to the cookie duration, which is the time length a customer’s actions are tracked after clicking your affiliate link. Longer cookie durations provide more opportunities for commissions.
- Read and Understand the Terms and Conditions: Finally, review the affiliate program’s terms and conditions carefully to ensure they’re reasonable and become aware of compliance requirements.
As you gain insights into your target audience and hone your marketing strategies, you’ll become better at selecting profitable offers and products to promote.
Part II: ClickBank basics
Step #1: Joining ClickBank as an affiliate
ClickBank is free for affiliates to join. Signing up for a ClickBank account is pretty easy, allowing you to start promoting affiliate links in just a few minutes.
When joining, you’ll be asked a few questions, such as your experience level, and fill in a signup form with some basic info, such as your name, contact information, and country.
After agreeing to the terms and conditions, you’ll be able to join a free Discord community with thousands of ClickBank affiliates. There, you can learn what’s working for others, have your questions answered, and even have your sales funnels reviewed by ClickBank experts.
At this point, you’ll be successfully logged into your ClickBank affiliate account.
Before activating it, you’ll still need to create an Account Nickname. That’s your account’s ID, which will be displayed in the Memo of all payments made by ClickBank and will be visible to customers during the order process. Keep in mind that you can’t change it later.
Finally, you can finish the process by adding your tax ID to your nickname and confirming your email address.
Step #2: Searching and evaluating offers
After setting up your account, you’ll gain access to the ClickBank affiliate marketplace, where you’ll find thousands of ClickBank products to promote ranked by popularity.
You can filter them in several ways, such as by category, payouts, billing type, affiliate resources available, whether or not it requires approval, and much more. Or, you can use the search bar to look for a specific product on ClickBank by name or keyword.
In each offer, you’ll find a brief description, the average commission per sale, and other important metrics.
One of them is the Gravity Score, which is based on the number of affiliates who’ve earned a commission in the last 12 weeks promoting the offer. While a lower score might mean lower conversion rates, it might also mean less competition, making it easier to stand out.
Each product listing will also come with an affiliate page and the seller’s contact.
The affiliate page is a great starting point for promoting a product. It provides resources like top converting email templates, ad resources, commission details, and everything else you need to start selling.
And if you still have questions, you can always reach out to the seller for more information. That’ll also enable you to discover how responsive they are, helping you determine the level of support they provide to affiliates.
Finally, once you select a product, it’s time to create your unique affiliate links and promote your ClickBank offers. Each tracking link is encrypted to ensure that whenever a customer purchases after clicking on it, you’ll take the credit and get your commission.
Step #3: Getting paid
In the account settings tab, you can add all your payment info, including your:
- Payment Threshold: It tells ClickBank when to pay you after you’ve reached a certain dollar amount. For instance, if you select $100, ClickBank won’t pay you until you reach $100 in commissions.
- Payment Method: You can choose Direct Deposit, Check, Wire Transfer (for countries where direct deposit isn’t available), or Payoneer.
- Payment Frequency: You can opt between weekly or every two weeks.
ClickBank doesn’t charge any payment fees from affiliates.
However, it charges a fee from accounts with a positive balance but no earnings over an extended period (pay period equals the chosen payment frequency):
- $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings
- $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings
- $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings
This can become quite expensive over time, so make sure to retrieve your balance if you stop selling on ClickBank.
Other tools and resources for affiliates
ClickBank provides several free resources to affiliates, such as courses, guides, and a help center.
It also offers dozens of tools and integrations to help affiliates with customer relations, email marketing, analytics & tracking, sales funnels, membership management, and web hosting. Some examples include tools like Shopify, ClickFunnels, Bluehost, AWeber, and more.
Finally, ClickBank offers the Platinum Program to those who’ve achieved $250,000 or more in gross sales in a calendar year. It provides access to exclusive networking opportunities, a dedicated account manager, and industry recognition, among other perks.
How to make money with ClickBank as a product creator
Step #1: Joining and uploading products
Signing up for ClickBank as a vendor is quite similar to as an affiliate. You’ll answer some questions, fill in the signup form, and create an account nickname.
As a ClickBank vendor, you’ll also have to upload some contact information that customers and affiliates can use to reach you.
There are several product types you can offer on ClickBank, split into four key categories:
- Digital Products
- Physical Products
- Consumable Products
- CBD Products
There’s a lot that goes with uploading products that we can’t cover here, such as creating your product profile, adding your sales funnel, and providing documentation. You can find all the resources you need on ClickBank’s site.
Once you’re done, you can submit your first product for approval.
ClickBank charges a one-time fee of $49.95 after your first product approval, as well as $1 + 7.5% per sale.
A great tip if you already promote your products on other platforms is to duplicate your landing page and leave a separate URL for ClickBank, as that’ll make it easier to track where each sale is coming from.
Step #2: Creating your offers
Once you’ve uploaded your product, you want to create an offer that attracts both customers and affiliates.
When determining its pricing, consider how much others are charging for similar products and how much value your offer can aggregate to consumers.
ClickBank also lets you adjust your pricing and add multiple product versions at different costs. You can use this to try different price tags and see what’s best for your revenue.
Next, it’s time to determine your commissions. ClickBank allows you to choose between two commission types:
- Revenue Share: A percentage-based commission
- CPA (Cost per Action): A flat fee per sale
For both models, you’ll only pay commissions for actual sales sales rather than per click or lead.
You can also create Commission Groups to offer custom commission rates for specific affiliates. That allows you to meet their individual needs and incentivize performance.
For instance, you can offer higher commission rates for affiliates using promotional methods with higher ad spend or create tiered commission rates in groups that they’ll be moved to when they reach a certain sales threshold.
There are then two ways of going about filtering or vetting affiliates:
- Allowing Everybody: Ideal for growing your affiliate base.
- Hand Selecting: This is ideal if you have a lot of affiliate leads from your form and want to select only those who meet specific standards.
Other tips to compel more affiliates to market your products include:
- Developing high-quality marketing materials
- Providing clear and transparent terms
- Offering excellent support and communication
Finally, if you have a variety of products to sell and are leveraging tactics like email and social media marketing to build loyalty, don’t be afraid of trying higher commission rates.
While that may kill your profits initially, you’ll attract more affiliates and sales, enabling you to grow your audience faster and generate more revenue through upsells.
Step #3: Getting paid
Vendors get paid quite similarly to affiliates.
You can choose Direct Deposit, Check, Wire Transfer (for countries where direct deposit isn’t available), or Payoneer as your payment method. You can also receive through PayPal for purchases that were made using this method.
Additionally, you can select a payment threshold (minimum amount to get paid) and frequency (weekly or every two weeks).
ClickBank charges sellers a $2.50 fee per transaction, and, like affiliates, they must pay a fee when they have a positive balance but haven’t generated earnings over an extended period (pay period equals your chosen payment frequency):
- $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings
- $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings
- $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings
To avoid those fees, make sure to retrieve your balance if you stop selling on ClickBank.
Other tools and resources for vendors
ClickBank offers several tools to help product creators, including:
- Integrated Payments: It handles payment processing and taxes and offers integrations like PayPal.
- Data & Analytics: ClickBank provides a reporting dashboard that enables users to see quality, conversion and subscription rates, LTV, retention, fraud, and more.
- Compliance & Risk: ClickBank monitors financial fraud and KYC with industry-best fraud prevention technology. In addition, on-staff compliance experts review products for FTC and FDA compliance.
There are also many free vendor resources on ClickBank’s site, including a seller launch checklist, courses, guides, and a help center.
Finally, vendors can also get into the Platinum Program, which provides several perks to those who generate $250,000+ in sales in a year, such as exclusive networking opportunities and a dedicated account manager.
ClickBank pros and cons
Here’s the good and ugly we can share with affiliates and vendors based on our experience and ClickBank reviews from users:
Pros
- Solid reputation (it’s the oldest affiliate network primarily focused on digital products)
- High commission rates
- Offers recurring commissions
- User-friendly platform
- No approval is needed to promote most products
- Vast network with thousands of products and over 100,000 affiliates
- Frequent and timely payments
Cons
- Many low-quality products compared to other networks
- Slow customer service
- High competition (because of the low entry barriers for affiliates)
- High fees for dormant accounts (of up to $50 per week)
Frequently asked questions [FAQ]
Is ClickBank legit?
Yes, ClickBank is a legitimate and well-established online marketplace for digital products and affiliate marketing. It has been operating since 1998 and has paid over US$ 6.1 billion in commissions as of 2023.
Is ClickBank worth doing?
ClickBank is one of the largest and most reputable affiliate marketplaces in the world.
For affiliate marketers, it offers a wide range of offers, high commissions, and timely payments.
And, for product vendors, it provides access to a large network of affiliate marketers and the chance to generate sales through performance-based marketing, making it a cost-effective marketing strategy.
For those willing to put in the work, ClickBank is definitely worth doing.
Is ClickBank good for beginners?
It’s easy to get started with ClickBank, with a straightforward signup process, and, most of the time, no approval is needed for affiliates to promote ClickBank products.
Furthermore, it provides a user-friendly platform that allows beginners to build momentum quickly.
So yeah, ClickBank is a great place to learn how to make money online.
How fast does ClickBank pay?
Both for vendors and affiliates, ClickBank offers two payment frequency options: weekly or every two weeks. That enables users to start making money online almost as soon as they start selling.
How much does ClickBank cost?
ClickBank is free for affiliates to join and receive commissions.
For sellers, it charges $49.95 one-time after their first product approval (they only pay if the product is approved). In addition, they charge $1+ 7.5% per sale and $2.50 per payment.
Finally, it charges a fee from both affiliates and vendors who have a positive balance and no earnings over an extended period (pay period equals the chosen payment frequency):
- $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings
- $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings
- $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings
What are the most profitable niches in ClickBank?
According to ClickBank’s data, the most profitable niches in the platform are Dietary Supplements; Diet & Weight Loss; Dental Health; Survival; Women’s Health; Spirituality, New Age, & Alternative Beliefs; Marriage & Relationships; Green Products & Alternative Energy; E-business & E-marketing; and Home & Garden.
How much can I make a month with ClickBank?
Obviously, there’s no right answer for this, as the amount of money you earn is proportional to the work you put in.
However, by putting dedication and effort into mastering the right principles, there’s no doubt it’s possible to make money online with ClickBank and affiliate marketing, and many affiliates make a living out of it, some eventually reaching six figures.
In a nutshell
ClickBank presents amazing opportunities for those seeking to earn money online.
For affiliate marketers, it offers a gateway to thousands of products with the potential to generate high commissions. And for product vendors, it provides access to a network of skilled affiliates who can promote their products and services and ultimately drive revenue.
By carefully selecting the right products and affiliates, targeting the appropriate audience, and employing effective affiliate marketing strategies, success is well within reach.
To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the following posts:
- Reality Check! How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
- Unraveling the Truth: Is Affiliate Marketing a Pyramid Scheme?
- How to Create a Website for Affiliate Marketing in 5 Easy Steps [UPDATED]
- Begin Affiliate Marketing Without Investment: Path to Financial Freedom
- Affiliate Marketing Scams to Avoid Online