How To Make Money From ClickBank – Step By Step Guide

Do you want to be a successful affiliate marketer by learning how to make money from ClickBank?

If so then you have landed at the right place as I have curated an extensive step by step guide with proven methods to succeed in your ClickBank affiliate marketing endeavors.

If you don’t know it or haven’t realized it yet, affiliate marketing is at its pinnacle point.

Every digital marketer, new or experienced is using affiliate marketing to earn a healthy income. It’s high time, you do it too.

Even I’ve been doing this for over 3 years now –

And, with my 6 years of affiliate marketing experience, I too have managed to create a steady flow of income. Here’s my latest ClickBank sales report –

But in all honesty, that’s easier said than done…

With high competition in the area of ClickBank affiliate marketing, it gets disheartening to see no progress or growth in your earnings. Consequently, a major share of ClickBank affiliate marketers quit in a short span of time.

Moreover, employing wrong promotional strategies and bad investments could make you abandon ClickBank even sooner.

But I won’t let this happen to you..!!

With the help of this guide, you will be able to learn 100% successful strategies (that I personally use) on how to make money with ClickBank.

Unlike other marketers who have failed with ClickBank, this guide ensures that you succeed..!!

Now, before jumping on to the guide, allow me to briefly talk about –

What Is ClickBank And How Does It Work?

ClickBank is one of the top online global retailers that allow you to sell, promote, and buy physical as well as digital goods.

It was founded by Tim and Eileen Barber in the year 1998. And, with its 20+ years of experience, ClickBank has become the leading marketplace and affiliate network of the world.

Meaning, not only you could promote any offers and products (as an affiliate), you could also sell it as a vendor and directly purchase it as a buyer.

You could estimate the power of its affiliate network when I tell you that over 6+ million sellers and affiliates have registered on this platform. Talking about the money, ClickBank has an astonishing figure of settling $4.2+ billion commissions between sellers and affiliates.

In addition to this, it has managed to grow a customer base of over 200 million customers that register 30,000 daily purchases.

You could clearly see that the potential to earn a revenue stream from ClickBank is pretty high.

Hence, this invites a question –

How Does ClickBank Work?

The first step in learning how to make money from ClickBank involves you knowing how it works.

As mentioned earlier, ClickBank is an affiliate network and a marketplace.

This means that you can launch your products and offers as a seller. After this, interested affiliates may promote your newly launched offer. And, lastly, buyers purchase the promoted product.

Talking about the Seller’s perspective, you can sell almost all kinds of digital as well as physical products. It can be anything like software, audiobooks, PDFs, graphics bundle, SaaS applications, eBooks, etc.

All they have to do is launch an offer that allows buyers to purchase these goods.

Now, as a seller, you can market or promote your offers directly. Or you can organically invite affiliates to promote your products.

Hence, after carefully studying your products, affiliates will sign up to get their affiliate links (Hoplink) that will help ClickBank to register their sales. These affiliate sales will ultimately help them earn affiliate commissions.

Apart from this, there’s a ClickBank marketplace that allows any buyer to browse and purchase the required product. Since this guide is all about learning how to make money on ClickBank, I will not be covering the buyer’s perspective in detail.

There are other frequently asked questions about ClickBank that I have mentioned at the end of this guide. Don’t forget to check them out too..!!

For now, allow me to educate you about –

Pros & Cons Of ClickBank (Personal Opinions)

The reason why ClickBank is one of the popular choices of affiliate networks is because of its advantages and benefits.

However, there are some negative points or drawbacks of ClickBank too that makes new affiliates and sellers to stop using it altogether.

Pros –

• Getting started with ClickBank is very easy.
• There are no prerequisites or criteria that you must fulfill to use ClickBank.
• For sellers, it is an easy method of globalizing their business and earning a good clientele.
• For affiliates, you can earn up to 75% commission for top products & offers.
• The ability to sell with different billing cycles ensures healthy passive income.

Cons –

• The competition on ClickBank is significantly high.
• In order to sell on ClickBank, you must pay a one-time seller’s activation fee.
• Among some good products, there are several crappy products on ClickBank.
• In the initial phase, It becomes somewhat difficult to figure out which niche or offers will work for you.

Now that we have covered the basics, it’s time for us to dive straight to –

Step By Step Guide On How To Make Money From ClickBank

Before we skin down each of the steps involved in this guide, here’s a general outline of what we will be learning –

Step 1 – Signing up on ClickBank

Step 2 – Important ClickBank metrics that you should know

Step 3 – Finding the right product on ClickBank

Step 4 – Different marketing strategies for ClickBank product promotion

Step 5 – Promotion via an optimized sales funnel

Step 6 – How & when to scale up your affiliate marketing strategies

If you are thinking that these are just 6 simple steps required to make money with ClickBank then you are totally mistaken.

Each of these 6 steps has multiple comprehensive internal levels that will be discussed as we further move along.

For now, let’s start with –

1. Signing Up On ClickBank

This guide is all about knowing how to make money by ClickBank. As you can tell, it heavily relies on the platform.

But there’s nothing to worry about as ClickBank offers two different ways to make money from it.

These two ways include using ClickBank for selling your own products i.e. Seller or promoting the products available on ClickBank’s marketplace and earning commissions as an Affiliate.

Either way, in order to get started and opt for any of the two methods, you would have to sign up on ClickBank.

1.1 Sign Up Process For Seller

The sign-up procedure of the ClickBank seller is pretty simple. All you have to do is click the “Sign Up” button available on the top-right corner of its home page.

After that, you will be redirected to the sign up page where you must enter the name and password (along with other details) for your account. Keep in mind that upon signing up, you will be accepting its terms & conditions.

Upon joining ClickBank, you will be provided with a quick onboarding session to know the ins & outs of the platform.

After that, you must complete your ClickBank profile. It is highly mandatory as it proves that you are here for genuine business purposes. It also builds a sense of trust in the eyes of your affiliates.

At the bottom of your profile section, you will find a “Let’s Optimize Your Performance” section that asks you about the purpose of signing up on ClickBank. Here are the given choices –

• Sell physical products
• Sell digital products
• Promote products as an affiliate
• Promote products as an influencer
• Do market research

Choose the one that suits your purpose. You also have to tell them about your annual revenue. Since you are just starting out, you can choose the $0 – $25K option.

Now, click on “Save”.

This will unlock the ClickBank dashboard area for you. But this isn’t the end of the sign up process..!!

1.1 Creating A Seller Account

You have to create a Seller’s account after signing up and updating your ClickBank account.

In order to do so, you must click on the “Create Account” button available on your ClickBank dashboard.

Now, you will have to again confirm the role of your account. The available options are –

• Vendor
• Affiliate
• Combination
• Custom
• Test

In addition to this, you will be required to enter a unique Nickname. This nickname will be regarded as your unique account ID.

After completing this step, your newly created Seller’s account will be added to your ClickBank account that you can access from the dashboard.

If you click this account (displayed with your Nickname), a new window will open. This will redirect you to your seller’s dashboard that will list all the stats and vendor details.

To start selling your products, you must first complete your “My Site” settings that are available in the “Vendor Settings” tab.

Post this, you can add your products and offers, set its launch date, and prepare yourself for the income. 

However, you should know that –

ClickBank charges you a one-time Seller’s activation fee of $49.95 so that you can start selling your products without any hassle.

Now, since you are a seller, it is evident that you must be having a website. Hence, if you are here to learn about how to make money in ClickBank with the help of a website, this is where you start.

With that being said, if you want to know how to make money from ClickBank without a website, you should sign up for the Affiliate account.

1.2 Sign Up Process For Affiliate

One of the best characteristics of signing up as an affiliate on ClickBank is that you are exempted from the one-time activation free.

In other words, the question – “How to make money on ClickBank for free” finally has an answer i.e. by signing up and promoting products as affiliates.

Coming to the sign up procedure, it is the same as that of Seller. There are no additional steps required.

Although, while choosing the role of your account, you should either select “Affiliate” or “Combination (Vendor & Affiliate)”.

Other than this, be sure to opt for a unique Nickname for your affiliate account too.

2. Important ClickBank Metrics To Remember

After creating your affiliate or seller accounts, you know the important metrics and terminologies used in ClickBank.

These metrics hold significant importance as some of them are the prime factors in choosing the right product for affiliate promotion.

ClickBank Terminologies –

• Offer – The offer in ClickBank constitutes a package of multiple products or the same products but with different versions. The offer is presented to the buyers at different levels i.e at front-end, upsell, or downsell.
• Affiliate Page – The affiliate page is similar to a landing page but on this page, the vendor mentions all the details about his product or offer. Also, this page encourages affiliates to sign up for the affiliate promotion of the corresponding offer.
• Affiliate Support Contact – If you are a seller, you must provide a support contact so that affiliates can get in touch with you for resources or more details about the offer.
• Initial $/sale – This metric will tell you how much affiliate commission you will earn in dollars if you manage to sell the front-end product of an offer.
• Avg $/sale – It represents the average commission earned by the affiliate if he manages to sell all the products (front-end, upsells, downsells, etc.) of an offer or a sales funnel.
• Avg %/sale – The metric tells you about the average commission percentage set by the vendor for his offer.
• Avg Rebill Total – This metric is applicable only for products with recurring billing cycle. It tells you about the average commission earned by an affiliate from the recurring billing of his affiliate sales.
• Avg %/Rebill – Just like Avg %/sale this metric indicates the average commission percentage offered by the vendor but for the recurring billing of his products or offer.
• Grav – It tells you about a rough number of affiliates that have managed to successfully promote the product or offer.
• Cat – It is a short form of the word Category and it resembles the category of the offer or products.

Now that you know the ClickBank lingo, it’s time for us to –

3. Finding The Right Product On ClickBank

Until now, all the blogs that I have come across that teach you how to make money using ClickBank leaves an important aspect of the guide.

That is, learning how to find the right product on ClickBank for your affiliate promotion.

You might be wondering why does this factor hold any significance?

Well, you’d be surprised to know that over 78% of the new affiliates fail in their affiliate marketing endeavors with ClickBank. One of the prime reasons behind such a steeping number is the inability to pick the right product for promotion.

Lucky for you, you won’t have to make any bad decisions as this guide will educate you about all the necessary steps, starting with the product selection process.

Before we find the product you must thoroughly research the market to know the trending niches. Getting to know the trending topics, product niches, etc. will provide extreme benefits and sales boost.

Tools like SEMrush offer the best marketing research capabilities.

Now, with the data available at your fingertips, you can proceed towards finding the products.

3.1 Steps Involved In Finding Products On ClickBank

All the products and offers listed by sellers are available on the ClickBank marketplace.

To reach the ClickBank marketplace, you can click the “Marketplace” tab in the primary menu.

After this, the marketplace will open up and display sections of the affiliate marketing guide and also some top categories of ClickBank offers.

You have the option to either search for the ideal product via categories or enter a keyword in the search box provided.

Just to give you an example, my customers like video editor tools. So, I would search for “video editor“.

This would populate the search result with some of the products and offers that are sold as video editors.

But wait, you don’t have to haphazardly pick any random product. This is only going to cause negative effects on your overall affiliate campaign.

What you have to do now is sort the product results on the basis of Gravity.

This would arrange and list the offers with the highest gravity at the top. The higher score of Gravity is a signal that a lot of affiliates have managed to successfully sell this offer.

To further back this assumption, you can check other details like Initial $/sale, Avg %/sale, etc. Also, don’t forget to glance over the affiliate page of that offer to know more about it.

And, when you are sure that the offer will suit your selling style, you can click the “Promote” button of the corresponding offer.

3.2 Generating Affiliate Links

After clicking the Promote button, a new window will pop up. It will mention your affiliate account’s Nickname. If you have multiple accounts, choose the one that you’d want for this promotion.

Once you have verified and entered the correct nickname, you’d have to press the “Generate Hoplinks” button. This Hoplink will be regarded as your affiliate link for that offer and all the sales and commissions will be accounted for it.

Save this Hoplink in your Notepad for future use.

That’s it..!!

You have completed all the steps required to set up, find, and choose the perfect affiliate offer for your campaigns.

Next comes the tough part of promoting it efficiently.

4. Different Marketing Strategies Used For ClickBank Product Promotion

This section of this guide can be considered as the gem in a crown..!! It is of such great importance.

Talking about digital marketing strategies, the sole purpose of them is to drive traffic to a particular destination like landing page, sales page, pricing page, etc.

And, from there, you encourage them to take the necessary action like product purchase, sign up, etc.

Now, there are two kinds of marketing or promotional strategies (based on investing money) you can use –

• Free Marketing Strategies – It includes SEO, video marketing, influencer marketing, etc.
• Paid Marketing Strategies – It includes promotion via a custom landing page, social media marketing, search engine marketing, PPC, etc.

Let’s explore the free promotion tactics in detail and answer your question – How to make money with ClickBank for free?

4.1 Search Engine Optimization or SEO

Most of the experienced affiliate marketers have started their journey by creating search engine optimized blogs on their affiliate products.

I am assuming that you already have a website before we start to explore this strategy. If not then check out my guide on starting a website with WordPress.

Now, before jumping in and start writing the blog, I would advise you to find out long tail keywords with low SEO competition. This ensures that you start getting traction in a short period of time.

For keyword research, I would recommend you to use a forever free tool like Serpstat. Also, if you do not want to compromise with the research, you can use SEMrush.

Coming back to the strategy, with the relevant keywords available at your disposal, you can begin your blog drafting process.

Here, you can create different types of blogs like –

• List-based articles – This type of blog allows you to add multiple affiliate products in a single blog. For example, 10 best video editing software & tools.
• Alternative to articles – In this type of blog, you can pick a general popular product and list its alternatives. Again, it also permits you to add multiple affiliate products. For example, 10 cheaper alternatives to Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Review based articles – This version of the blog allows you to pick just a single affiliate product and write an in-depth review article on it. For instance, Adobe Premier Pro Review.
• Tutorial or Guides – You can also write the step by step process required to efficiently use a particular product. For instance, How to use Adobe Premier Pro.

After this, you’d have to patiently wait for these blogs to grow on SERPs and start yielding profits for you. Don’t forget to add your affiliate links in your blogs.

4.2 Video Marketing

If you want to know how to make money from ClickBank without a website then using the video marketing strategy could be your best bet.

There are plenty of video marketing channels available on the internet that doesn’t require you to have a website. It includes platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.

All it asks from you is to record a video and publish it. To help you get started, there are some free online video editor software for YouTube.

You’d be now wondering what type of videos would work for your affiliate marketing. The answer is pretty simple…

You can use the same content of your blogs in your videos too. That is, you can create videos about the best video editors, video tutorials on how to use that software, software review, etc.

Since videos are the most consumed type of content, the chances of this growing rapidly is quite high.

And, of course, you can always shorten your affiliate links and add it in your video description.

4.3 Podcast Marketing

If you consider yourself to be camera-shy, you can, of course, try promoting your affiliate offers with the help of Podcasts.

In all honesty, not many affiliate marketers use podcasts in their affiliate marketing strategy. This gives you an edge over your competitors by allowing you to access the uncharted audience base.

Again, you don’t have to worry about the content. You can use the same content approach as you’d use for your blogs.

Lastly, you can use some of the popular podcast platforms and applications like PodBean, Spotify, etc.

4.4 Pinterest Marketing

The Pinterest marketing strategy is yet another tactic that can allow you to learn how to make money with ClickBank for free.

As you’d know, Pinterest is an image sharing platform that allows you to post & publish various kinds of images. These images could relate to infographics, photography, artwork, etc.

Having said that, I would like to tell you that the best results from Pinterest come if you post images that have been already published on your website.

Doing this will enable you to leverage Pinterest referral traffic for your website. And, from your website, this traffic could indulge with your affiliate products.

You could also add your affiliate link directly on your Pinterest images but that is not considered as a good practice.

4.5 Influencer Marketing

This marketing or promotional strategy has been trending these days..!!

Not only affiliate marketers, but everyone over social platforms is opting for this marketing practice to earn a passive income.

The influencer promotion strategy works best if you have a significant fan following on platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

All you have to do is provide them valuable content in the form of images, videos, or audio, and influence them towards purchasing your affiliate products.

If you opt for this strategy, I would suggest that instead of directly pitching them your products, you must provide them with benefits and decent offers. This encourages to actually take the required action.

That’s it..!! These are the best free marketing strategies that would help you understand how to make money from ClickBank.

But we are far from being done here…

Now, I would like to educate you with some of the top paid marketing strategies that are known to boost your affiliate sales and traffic.

4.6 Promotion via Custom Landing Page or Sales Page

I agree that using blogs and articles has its own benefits but if you want to reap maximum output from your affiliate marketing campaigns then you must set up a landing or sales page for your affiliate offer.

This landing page has a couple of very important advantages –

• Landing pages can contain all types of elements for affiliate promotion like video, customer review, features, benefits, etc.
• You can also include a lead capture module to capture contact details of the incoming traffic.

With so much information available at a single place, your page visitors are bound to take action.

However, there is a chance that visitors may not be interested in your affiliate offer or simply procrastinate in purchasing your offer.

Hence, to combat this issue, you can include a scarcity timer (or countdown timer) to incept an idea of fear of losing out. Or you can add a discount to make the purchase even faster.

Either way, the final nail in the coffin from you must come to offering this discount (or even a simple purchase) after collecting their contact details via a lead capture module. This also permits you to store these email addresses and get in touch with them directly for other affiliate offers.

Check out the review of FastPages, a new landing page with all the essential features.

4.7 Email Marketing

This is by far the most used premium marketing strategy used by the affiliate marketers.

The lead capture added on your landing pages and website allows you to build an email list. And, this list then allows you to send personalized email campaigns for your affiliate offers.

But beware..!! A lot of email marketing services do not allow affiliates to send promotional offers from them.

However, if you have a website, you are shown leniency as the email marketing software considers your promotional campaigns to be valid and not spam.

Some of the top email marketing services for affiliates are AWeber, GetResponse, and SendX.

Now, coming to the strategies used in email marketing, sending just a single email campaign won’t yield any profit. Rather, you need a series of email campaigns that persuade you to purchase the product.

To better understand this strategy, let’s assume that you are my customer and I am sending you a series of emails –

• Presell – In this email campaign, I would like to let you know that in the coming days, I will be offering you a new product.
• Launch – This email campaign marks the launch of my affiliate product promotion. The email will talk about the product and what features it has to offer you. Adding a discount coupon will invoke better conversion results.
• Reminder – After a day or two, I would again send you an email to remind you about the product and its discount offer.
• Scarcity/Closing – This could be the final email campaign of your series that would alert you about the discount offer being expired after a specific period of time.

And, not to forget that if at any stage (in between email campaigns) you decide to purchase the product, the rest of the email campaigns automatically stops for you.

4.8 Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & PPC Ads

If you’d ask me how to make money with ClickBank fast, I would suggest you employ SEM and PPC ad campaigns strategy.

This marketing strategy is known to create a healthy flow of targeted visitors from search engine result pages. And, since these visitors are targeted and interested, converting them into a customer is relatively easy.

You must research PPC keywords, their volume, and the competition before starting your SEM campaign. Tools like SEMrush do a very good job of providing all the necessary data.

After this, you can use Google Adwords to bid on a particular keyword so that you can acquire an advertisement space on SERPs.

Other than this, using other tactics like Google AdSense, display ads, pre-roll YouTube ads, etc. will also improve your traffic and sales conversion.

4.9 Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Do you know that at the start of the year 2022, there are over 5.5 billion users on social media?

If you’d ask me, that’s a whole lot of untapped traffic and business opportunities you can use for your affiliate marketing campaigns.

As the name suggests, social media marketing allows you to promote your affiliate products with the help of advertisements on social media platforms.

The platforms that allow you to conduct SMM are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.

Now, you have the option to either target the new set of audiences on the basis of their interests, behavior, locations, etc. Or you can retarget the visitors on social media who have previously visited your website/landing page via blogs, videos, Pinterest images, etc.

Ultimately, social media marketing is regarded as the cherry on top of your overall affiliate marketing strategies.

With that being said, you can use these promotion strategies separately or as a whole.

This invites us to explore a more refined approach to make money from ClickBank…

5. Promotion Via An Optimized Sales Funnel

Using all the above-mentioned strategies will assure good returns for your affiliate campaigns.

But why settle at just the “good”? Why not go for a better, more optimized strategy?

I guess there’s no reason for you to not consider this optimized strategy unless you want to stay at the mediocre level.

Anyways, this promotion strategy utilizes all the marketing strategies you have learned in this blog. It is referred to as selling with the help of an optimized sales funnel.

The first objective of a sales funnel is to leverage traffic from all the channels. This could be anything like blogs, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, social media ads, PPC ads, Quora promotion, emails, etc.

This traffic is directed to a dedicated custom landing or sales page that introduces your visitors to the product and its benefits. On this landing page, you should add a countdown timer and a discount offer to tempt your visitors from purchasing the affiliate offer.

However, just before your visitors decide to purchase, your lead capture module should kick in to capture their contact details in return for discount codes or additional bonuses.

Once your visitor enters their email address, they are automatically redirected to the checkout page for the purchasing process.

Although, a few portions of this traffic will neither sign up nor purchase the product. For them, you can launch a retargeting social media ad campaign to keep them reminded about the offer that they have missed.

This will ultimately persuade them to buy your affiliate product.

6. How & When To Scale Up?

At the start of your affiliate marketing campaign, I would advise you to stick to just a single offer.

This ensures that you know what’s working for you and how to eliminate the weaker aspects of your overall campaign.

Once you start generating a good sum of money, you can invest a little more in your existing campaign (social media or PPC ads) to increase the traffic. Or you can start saving for your new campaigns.

Also, if you think that your affiliate campaign and the sales funnel are providing a steady flow of income then you are ready to launch new affiliate offers.

For this, you can publish new blogs, shoot new videos, create new images, launch a new social media ad campaign, and more.

Lastly, follow the same marketing strategies that you have used for the first campaign and you are guaranteed success.

Final Thoughts

Now that you have learned how to make money from ClickBank, it’s time for you to get going.

I sincerely hope this guide has provided you with all the tips & tricks and insights that you were intending to learn.

However, if you are still unclear about some strategies and how to implement them, feel free to get in touch with me. Or drop them in the comments section.

I would love to help you out..!!

Meanwhile, check out some of the best alternatives to Payoneer that you can use to receive money from ClickBank or any of your clients.

Also, don’t forget to share this guide on social media or other channels so that just like you, many others could grow as a successful affiliate marketer.

Lastly, check out some –

Frequently Asked Question About ClickBank