In this comprehensive Clickbank review, I’ll outline everything you need to know about an affiliate platform that’s famous as much for its high payouts as it is for its vast array of products.
Ranking highly in my guide to the top affiliate networks, the platform has paid over $5 billion to bloggers, content creators, and professional affiliate marketers over its impressive 24 years in operation.
Yet despite being one of the oldest affiliate marketplaces on the web, Clickbank is by no means outdated. The company specializes in digital and tech products and even pays up to $150 in sales for some products.
So how do you go about getting a piece of that action?
Simple:
You follow this guide.
Clickbank has been a major component in my blog monetization strategy over the years, helping me to generate over a million dollars in revenue from my portfolio of content websites.
Below, I’ll draw on my own personal experience to share with you the step-by-step process for making money with Clickbank.
Clickbank Review 2022: Everything You Need to Know About the Affiliate Network
What is Clickbank?
One of the world’s largest and longest-serving affiliate marketing platforms, Clickbank connects product vendors wanting to sell more products with content creators and marketers who want to make money.
It’s a mutually-beneficial relationship.
As a content creator, signing up to Clickbank allows you to browse through thousands of vendors to find physical and digital products that are relevant to your audience.
When you link to those products from your blog, readers can click through and make a purchase. Every time they do, you earn a commission fee.
The more traffic you drive to that blog, the greater the potential for more clicks and, thus, more sales.
What Products Does Clickbank Offer?
Like most good affiliate networks, Clickbank offers many products, from books and DVDs to fitness equipment, health supplements, and more.
That said, the platform has earned a reputation as one of the top affiliate marketplaces for digital products.
The thousands of SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, apps, and marketing tools make it the perfect choice for content creators who choose a blog niche in the tech, digital, or online marketing space.
That said, you’ll also find scores of eBooks, subscription services, and other products that will fit perfectly with your brand no matter what niche you choose to write about.
How Much Money Can You Make With Clickbank?
One of the things I love most about Clickbank is that it offers some of the best commission fees of any affiliate platform out there.
As I mentioned earlier, some vendors pay as much as $150 per sale, though even at the bottom end of the scale, $15 per sale is still significantly higher than most other platforms offer.
Combine this with the fact that -if you’ve got the resources to cope with such a large volume- you can actively promote up to 500 products simultaneously and manage the whole thing within one Clickbank dashboard.
In other words, there’s plenty of earning potential here. If you choose reasonable product offers and have some substantial web traffic coming your way, then making $150 – $250 per day from just a few sales isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
The best part is that you can choose one of two different ways to earn money.
1. Sales Percentage
You can choose to earn a percentage of each sale that happens when someone clicks your affiliate link. This may be the ideal option for those big-ticket products with high price tags, though it does come with the disadvantage that how much you earn may frequently vary, making it harder to keep track of your income.
2. Flat Fee
Alternatively, you can choose to be paid a flat fee for every sale you generate. While this gives you a more concrete idea of your expected earnings, you may find that taking a percentage pays you more per sale.
A Word of Advice About Generating Recurring Income With Clickbank
Another thing I really like about Clickbank is that it provides the opportunity to become an affiliate for membership sites, subscription services, premium content (podcasts, video series, etc.), and SaaS solutions with monthly recurring payments.
If you want my advice, I’d consider incorporating at least a few of these services into your affiliate marketing strategy.
Why?
Simple:
When a blog reader clicks your affiliate link and signs up for a service with a monthly recurring charge, you get paid every time they renew their subscription or membership.
That means that even if you only drive one sale for a software platform that offers a $15 commission, you could earn as much as $180 from that one sale if the reader keeps using the service for an entire year.
Multiply that by several more sales, and, again, there’s the potential to make some serious money.
What are the Eligibility Requirements for Clickbank?
Like the Amazon Associates affiliate program, there’s no barrier to entry stopping you from signing up with Clickbank, nor are there any special requirements to meet.
As long as you have an online platform you can use to promote the vendors you choose to work with, you can usually dive right in and get started.
The one exception is that some individual vendors require you to be approved by them before you can become one of their affiliates. If this is the case, you’ll see this information listed in the product details.
How to Make Money With ClickBank: A Step-by-Step Guide
Another crucial factor working in Clickbank’s favor is that it’s relatively easy to get started, meaning there’s no need to acquire special skills to make money from affiliate marketing.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Create a Clickbank Account
A. Point your browser to Clickbank.com and click the blue ‘Start Here’ button
B. On the following pop-up screen, select option B: I want to promote Clickbank products as an affiliate. Then click ‘OK.’
C. The site then wants to ask you some questions as part of their onboarding process, so on the next screen, simply press enter or click ‘Sounds Good.’
The first question will ask you about your experience. Here, you simply need to state whether you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, brand new to Clickbank, or an experienced Clickbank user.
From there, tell Clickbank how much money you make in annual affiliate commissions.
…And the type of products you want to promote.
The frustrating thing here is that you can only select one category. So, if you were blogging in the personal health niche, for example, and you wanted to promote both health/fitness and diet products, you can’t do that here.
Don’t let that put you off, however. Selecting one product category just means that those are the products you’ll first see when you go to the Clickbank marketplace, which we’ll look at later.
Once there, you can always search through any of the many other categories to find the right products.
D. Continue onboarding
From there, you’ll next be asked about the success of your website or whatever platform you prefer to use. This helps Clickbank to match you up with vendors who want to work with creators at your level.
If you’re just starting and haven’t achieved any of Clickbank’s suggested milestones, don’t worry too much about it. You’ll still be able to proceed, and you’ll still find lots of suitable opportunities.
With that out of the way, the onboarding process finishes with questions about how you plan to drive traffic to your promoting products.
Again, it’s frustrating that you can only pick one option here, so I recommend picking the one platform that you’ll be using the most.
E. Finish Creating Your Account
Finally, you’ll be asked to enter an email address to create your account.
2. Decide Whether to Sign Up for Spark
As a new user, Clickbank wants you to sign up for their affiliate marketing training program, Spark.
Charged at a recurring monthly cost of $23.50 per month, Spark provides access to a wealth of features designed to help you turbocharge your affiliate marketing business.
This includes
- Weekly group coaching
- New monthly courses
- Access to a private affiliate marketing community
- Discount VIP access to events
- Course archives.
If you choose to opt-in, Clickbank will navigate you through to the sales page before directing you back to its regular sign-up page.
If you decide it’s not for you right now, you can scroll down to the orange box and click the hyperlink that starts with ‘No Thanks’ to turn down the offer.
Whichever option you choose, you’ll end up on the following page:
3. Finish Creating Your Account
On the next screen, you’ll be asked for your name, contact details, and country of origin, as well as a password.
Accept the terms and conditions and then click ‘Join Clickbank!‘ to continue.
On the next screen, you’ll be invited to join a free community. This simply takes you to another Spark upsell, so you can skip this for now.
4. Download the Suppression List
The first time you land on your dashboard, you’ll be asked to download a suppression list. This is essentially a list of domain names owned and operated by a Utah-based Internet company called XMission LLC.
This is a result of an anti-spam lawsuit filed by XMission against Click Sales Inc., Clickbank’s parent company.
The popup warns you not to send any unsolicited emails to the domains on the list.
If you are planning to use email and want to learn how to do it safely, legitimately, and effectively, check out my guide to the top email marketing services to use in 2022.
5. Complete Your Profile
Once you’ve downloaded the suppression list, hit the back button on your browser, then select ‘Complete my Profile.’
You’ll have to enter your name and full physical address on the next page. US residents will also have to answer their Tax ID or Social Security Number.
Finally, you can finish your profile by selecting ‘promote products as an affiliate in the ‘I want to’ drop-down menu, selecting your annual revenue, and clicking ‘save.’
6. Create a Nickname
Once your profile is complete, you’ll be taken to Clickbank’s Getting started page.
Here, all you have to do is click the ‘Create a Nickname’ button, as you’ll need a nickname so that you can start promoting products.
Creating a nickname is as easy as setting your account type to ‘Affiliate (promote products)’ and choosing a unique name.
7. Visit the Clickbank Marketplace
Once you’ve chosen your nickname, you can return to the main dashboard. It will look a little empty at first as you haven’t yet started to promote any products, but we can soon change that.
From the left-hand menu, select ‘Affiliate Marketplace.’
Here, you can browse through categories or look at the current top offers to browse millions of products.
Alternatively, you can simply use the search function if you know the exact type of products you want.
8. Choose a Product
For the sake of this tutorial, I looked up products under the category of E-Business and E-Marketing and the sub-category of SEM & SEO.
This brings up scores of different products, and there are a few important things to notice with each one.
A. Average $/Conversion
The first key thing to notice is the blue box to the side of each product which is labeled ‘Avg $/Conversion.’
As you may have gathered, this figure denotes how much, on average, an affiliate can make for each customer they drive to the vendor’s product. This includes not just initial sales, but also things like upsells and recurring charges.
B. Initial $/Conversion
You’ll see this piece of information for products that come with recurring subscription charges. It outlines the average commission you’ll initially earn for signing up a new customer to the subscription service via your affiliate link.
C. Gravity Score
Gravity Score is a concept that’s unique to Clickbank.
It’s determined by the number of affiliates who earned a commission from that product over the previous 12 weeks, with the most recent transactions being given a higher score than those from weeks earlier.
The higher the gravity score, the more popular that product is.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it gives you an idea of what products are proving popular right now so that you can, if you choose, jump on the proverbial bandwagon and hopefully get a piece of the action for yourself.
On the other hand, the more popular a product is, the more people will want to promote it, and thus the more competition you’ll face.
Recurring $/Rebill
Another key detail you’ll see with recurring services is this one, which tells you how much, on average, you’ll make per customer each time they renew their service.
Elsewhere, you’ll also see a brief description of the product in question, along with other key details such as:
- Whether there are upsell opportunities
- Whether the vendor needs to approve you as an affiliate
- Whether affiliate tools are provided to help you promote the product in question.
Take some time to explore all the different options and pick one product that fits your niche or the particular subject you’re aiming to tackle.
For example, if I wanted to write a post on how to improve your WordPress SEO, I might want to include an affiliate link for an SEO plugin.
This would make the affiliate opportunity presented by SEOPRessor Connect a perfect fit for my post, so I’d select this offer by clicking the blue button labeled ‘promote.’
9. Grab Your Affiliate Link
When you click ‘promote’ on the product you wish to earn from, you’ll trigger a pop-up that invites you to create a hoplink.
A hoplink is the URL that you’ll use to refer sales to the vendor. It requires you to add the nickname you created earlier and an optional tracking ID so that sales you generate can be tracked back to your account and paid accordingly.
When you’ve done that, the link will be created. Copy it, and keep it somewhere safe because now it’s time for the fun part.
10. Create Valuable Content
Now that you’ve got your link, it’s time to weave it into your content in a way that’s natural, relevant, and appropriate.
I recommend using a leading keyword research tool like SEMRush to find the most popular search terms relating to your niche and/or your product.
Sticking with my earlier idea, I typed ‘improve WordPress SEO’ into SEMRush and found that there are plenty of people out there searching for terms such as ‘how to improve SEO on WordPress.’
So, I might take that as the title and main keyword for my article, then write the best article I can on that subject.
How do you do that?
Here are a few top tips:
A. Use SEO-optimized formatting.
Use strategically placed headings, internal and outgoing links, and optimized images in terms of size and alt-tags.
If you’re not sure how to do this, here’s my complete guide to writing the best blog posts possible.
B. Keep it Relevant
Remember, the goal here is to get the product you’re promoting in front of the kind of audience who is going to be interested in buying that product, so your content has to be based on a topic that is relevant to that particular audience.
If you’re promoting one of the many weight-loss products that are available on Clickbank, then it goes without saying that your content should be around weight loss.
C. Offer Something New
The chances are that if you’ve chosen a particularly hot topic, there’s going to be lots of other people all competing for ranking positions for that particular keyword.
If you’re going to stand out from that crowd, it pays to offer something new that readers can’t get anywhere else.
That may mean new data, information, or insights, it may be a fresh, new perspective, or simply that you present information in a new and enticing way.
11. Promote Your Article
If you’ve followed the 10 steps above, you’ll have created your Clickbank account, picked an affiliate link (hoplink) for a product you wanted to promote, and naturally included that link in a quality blog post.
So far, so good, but if nobody knows that post exists, you’re not going to make a lot of money, which means your next step is to get out there and start driving traffic to your content.
Whether you post on social media, use a top email marketing tool to send a post out to your subscribers, or do something completely different, you have many options available for getting readers to check out your content.
I’ve got you covered if you need a little help with this. Here’s my complete guide on the best ways to promote your blog.
Clickbank Pros and Cons
[elementor-template id=”17725″]Frequently Asked Questions About Making Money With Clickbank
What are the best alternatives to Clickbank?
CJ (formerly Commission Junction), ShareASale, and Rakuten Advertising are the best Clickbank alternatives for affiliate marketers looking to work with multiple vendors.
Is Clickbank safe and legit?
Yes, absolutely. Clickbank is a 100% legitimate way to make money online and has a 4.3 Excellent rating with over 3,000 positive reviews on Trustpilot.
How do you get paid by Clickbank?
Clickbank currently offers checks, direct deposits, wire transfers, and Payoneer as its main payment options.
How to Make Money With Clickbank: A Final Word of Advice
At the start of this Clickbank review, I promised to teach you everything you need to know to make money with one of the world’s most popular affiliate networks.
If you’ve reached this far, I hope you’ll agree that I’ve done just that.
You’ve learned how to create a Clickbank account, what to look for when choosing products to promote as an affiliate, and how to promote them.
That’s a good start, but if I could offer you one final piece of advice, it would be this:
Keep going.
If you’re planning to use affiliate marketing to achieve your goal of becoming a full-time blogger or even just to make a significant side-hustle income, you’re unlikely to do it with just one product.
So keep researching relevant keywords, writing quality posts around those keywords, and naturally including relevant affiliate links in those posts to maximize your chances of success.
And if you don’t find the products you want on Clickbank? You may find them on the other platforms featured in my guide to the best affiliate networks of 2022.