How To Make Money With ClickBank

I’m back again with another post and today I wanted to talk about How To Make Money With ClickBank. So, kick off your shoes, get comfortable on the couch with your laptop and get your legal pad ready to take some notes. I’m gonna spill the beans on making money online with clickbank. Whew. I set the bar high for this post. Well, I’ll have to leave it up to you whether this post is worthy of any kind of prizes, but I am going to share with you what I know and hope that it helps you figure out exactly what strategy works best for you. I chose to talk about clickbank because I don’t really see to many “clickbank gurus” out there. For making money with adsense, you’ve got Griz, our hero, and Court and Mark at the Keyword Academy and of course the friends of theirs. But, nobody, I have ran across yet has really risen to the level and fame that they have within the make money online community that most of us that I know “hang” with. Maybe that’s my niche. Maybe I can become a guru in some area.

However, I am a guru already. Of another sort though. And that is of checking my adsense stats. If you want to know the best practices of checking your account numerous times a day. I’ve got that one down pat…lol.

OK. Back to the subject matter at hand. Believe it or not there are actually five ways to make your living from the clickbank marketplace. I’m not saying that they are all good ways. But, there are five main ways. They are:

1. Be an affiliate for clickbank
2. Become a clickbank affiliate by promoting other people’s products
3. Make your own clickbank products and sell them on your own
4. Offer your product through clickbank affiliates
5. Offer all the clickbank products through some sort of clickbank storefront

Be An Affiliate For ClickBank

While the thought hadn’t occurred to me at first, I guess that you can actually send people to clickbank. Now, this is how this works. You get paid for people who sign up to sell — not for people who sign up to be an affiliate. Let’s say my friend over a Seniors Learn Adsense decides that he wants to make a clickbank product. Let’s also say that he is clueless and knows nothing about making money with clickbank (he’s not) and then let’s he isn’t a member of clickbank and wants to join.

I could give him this link to sign up for clickbank.

Once he does that, he has to pay a $49.95 activation fee to get an clickbank account. I would then get 20% of that fee or my take would be $9.99.  After that once he sells some clickbank products I would then get a small piece of those sales. Here is the schedule of how that works. For every product he sells on clickbank, this is how much clickbank charges to sell a product. They take $1.00 plus 7.5% of each product sale. Of that you would get to keep 5% of it. You would get anywhere from a minimum of $.09 to $.99. Not much, but it’s better than nothing. Here’s the schedule:

• For a $10 sale you get paid $.09
• For a $20 sale you get paid $.13
• For a $30 sale you get paid $.16
• For a $40 sale you get paid $.20
• For a $50 sale you get paid $.24
• The max is $.99 for a $250 sale

You can find more complete details by reading the Clickbank FAQ Referral Program. One of the things you’ll read in there is that the amount of money clickbank pays when a product sold is only paid through the first calendar year. After that, there is no more commission paid to you for sales. I’d look at mainly getting your $9.99. Anything above that would probably be a small amount.

The most important thing is how to set up your link. You’ve got to put together an affiliate link. It looks like this:

http://AFFILIATE.reseller.hop.clickbank.net

The blue AFFILIATE is your clickbank id. You insert that and if people clickthrough it, then if someone does actually does that and they actually pay the fee, then you get paid.

This is a lot like buying a product about how to make money online and then making money selling the product you got online to make your fortune. Yeah, you can do it, but wouldn’t it be great to make money following the instructions they give you to sell something else? Well, that’s the harder part.

To me, the best way to make money from this program would be to create a bonus product that had a perceived value of $50 and something that was related to clickbank to use as an offer to induce them to buy it now through your link. If they activate their clickbank account now through your link, you’ll give them the bonus.

Become A Clickbank Affiliate By Promoting Other People’s Products

Now here is where it starts to get interesting. You can actually get paid a commission for directing people to a clickbank seller’s sales page IF they buy. I remember the first time I bought a clickbank ebook. It was like yesterday. I have such fond memories of it. I got an email from a guy from England, I think it was, who promoted several products to me. How I got on his list I am not really sure. Probably from another book I bought from clickbank. Anyway, the link he gave me in the email was what was called a hoplink. Like the one above. Each clickbank product has a special hoplink. If yours is the LAST one that’s clicked through when they buy the ebook, you’ll receive a commission from anywhere between 1% and 75% for the most part. The most common commission split is 50%.

From the looks of it, there are a lot of people working this method. First of all, it’s easy, you do not have to create an elaborate book to sell. You can just go look at the clickbank marketplace. There you’ll find a slew of products to promote. You’ll find that the interface isn’t really that “user friendly”. I does the job, but it could be a lot better. When you search for products, you’ll find terms like gravity (not the Isaac Newton kind) and the like. I’ve learned that these numbers, while helpful, can be skewed just like any other statistic. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Have a look. One number that is important is the commission you’ll be paid for promoting it. You’ll obviously want to know what that is. It’s a good idea to try and make at least $25 bucks a sale if you can.

The thing that irks me the most about some of the programs is that these products are used as loss leaders to get people in the door, so to speak, to buy larger ticket items like memberships and larger programs that you DON’T share commission in. I think that what that means is that most products that you’ll see while they might be informative, still leave important questions unanswered that the “back end” products answer. Back end is a term for the extra products that people can buy after they walk in the door to learn more. While this is an effective method for the sellers, this does mean that many of the clickbank guides people buy won’t do the job because that is the way the system is designed. Many programs offer so many bonus items if you buy now, that a lot of people, myself included are overloaded with so much information, we don’t know where to start. And, we don’t get a chance to read all of the stuff they give us.

The best advice I can give you is this.

• Only promote products you have experience but realize this;
• If you want to make money, promote products you don’t have experience with as well

You can purchase every product you promote if you wish, but that will get expensive. You can ask for review copies but as we have discovered, that isn’t always provided. There are plenty of people willing to sell it site unseen. I suppose if you are a mega affiliate you might have a shot or if you run across someone who believes there product should be seen before it’s recommended then you might get lucky too.

Once you decide what product to promote, the next step is to figure out the way to promote it. Here you have two options.

1. Buy ads on a network like Google Adwords
2. Write articles on your own blog or other sites with your link in it.

Google adwords or pay per click (PPC) is the preferred method of promotion for many affiliates. It works immediately to get your ad in prime position. But it does come at a cost. There is a learning curve and you’ll be going up against others as well who might be better at optimizing there ads.

The second option of being found in the search engines is free but takes longer. This is a good method if you know search engine optimization. This won’t work for products that close shorty after they launch which is an irritation for this affiliate where they say, let’s let our friends sell it. You’ll want to find products that are always available. It makes no sense to get to number one and one day later, it’s closed.

The key here once you find the product you promote is setting up your clickbank affiliate link. Under the product description is a link called create hoplink. Then you just paste it in as your html link.

The most common method is to do a review of the product as an end user and give your experience with it. It’s best if you give both positives and negatives because it provides a balanced opinion and seems more real. Like the first method of making money with clickbank, being an affiliate for someone else, will work a lot better if you offer an inducement to buy through your link. A bonus of some sort that makes the product better in some way. Anything you can create or find to offer will help. And, you only give it to them if they buy through your link.

Actually succeeding with this method will take trial and error but can be worth it if you practice and monitor your results. But for now, let’s move on to the next method.

Make Your Own Clickbank Products And Sell Them On Your Own

This, in my estimation, is a harder route. But potentially, the road to more lucrative earnings. By creating your own products for sale on clickbank, by becoming a clickbank vendor, you get to control everything. Creating products is the hardest part. That’s why there are so many more people choosing to be affiliates than sellers.

Once you’ve written the content for your ebook, the mechanics of making the actual book are a breeze. You need two things to make one:

1. A word processor to write it up with
2. A way to print to a Adobe pdf file

If you want to create some images, then you’ll need some clipart or photos and some image software, but frankly it’s not necessary. It’s window dressing. What people really want is content that they can sink their teeth in. Not a pretty photo.

After you create your product, you upload it to clickbank and get your link. Before they’ll approve your product, you’ll have to have a sales page and a thank you page. Clickbank has to know that the product will be delivered instantly or nearly instantly to the buyer.

I guess that I am getting a little tired here, because I don’t feel like going through a lot of details. Suffice to say, if you create an outstanding product, that’s not enough, you have to promote it just like you do your website. And, just like an affiliate, you can choose to do that with PPC or with your own seo promotion.

The key here is the control factor. You can offer your product any way you wish, at any price you wish. And no one can close it down but you. The other thing that is great about creating your own product is that you can really ramp up your promotion by using the next method to make money with the clickbank affiliate program.

Offer Your Product Through Clickbank Affiliates

This can be the big leagues of clickbank affiliate marketing, if you can tap into it. For every product you create, you can offer a commission to affiliates by setting up an affiliate program to help them sell if for you. Just the offering of the commission is enough to put the process in place. The part you’ll need help with is getting the word out about your product. This is why about every product you buy through clickbank offers you the opportunity to sell it.

There is a lot of money to be made here. So, much so, that I don’t think it’s possible to win this game just by offering great products and getting the word out. The thing about clickbank is that anyone can buy your product, which also means that they can copy it. This is also why, I think, that most of the really good stuff, if it’s there, is sold in the backend. They don’t want anyone to buy it for $97 and go off, rewrite it, and compete against them.

I don’t know, but I am willing to guess that the people who you think might help you, those guys with the big lists. Are also the guys who will cut you out if given the chance. So this option, while lucrative, will take a more planned attack. One that you’ll definitely want to put into your arsenal because let’s face it, you’ll make a ton more money with clickbank with other people helping you promote it.

I’ve heard though that even with a bunch of affiliate marketers signed up, most will be lackluster in sales with a few superstars. This is where I think the “mailing list” concept would come in handy. By creating your own list of people, you won’t have to rely on others to find buyers if you have a huge people already interested in what you are offering. Your readers, once you captured them, if you keep in contact with them and provide value that they cannot get anywhere else, will want to buy your stuff from clickbank or anywhere else they can get it.

Let’s talk about the final way to make money with clickbank.

Offer All The Clickbank Products Through Some Sort Of Clickbank Storefront

The last way, is to offer some sort of storefront, similar to Amazon.com, that allows you to search all of the products offered through clickbank, to find what you want. I’m not to in love with the idea. But I guess that you could create your own branded storefront with popular items and build traffic to it.

If you didn’t want to do a full-fledged storefront, you could just take a niche site and have a product page with your recommended products. I’m not going to spend any more time on that except to say that it is an option you can give a go if you want to try it.

Will You Make Money With Clickbank Or Just Watch Me Do It?

Now, that you know how to make money selling clickbank products, what will you do? Will you take action? The whole point of figuring out how to make money online is actually figuring it out and doing it. That’s why I am going to lay out a preliminary action plan to make money with all the methods I have outlined above. Over the next several months, I am going to put my plan into action and let you see how it plays out. I will take action. It won’t be major action, but it will be steps each day to get to the final destination. Here is the big picture road map:

1. I will create a product to offer affiliates I sign up through my clickbank link to get my $10 commission.
2. I will find 100 products to promote through my affiliate link
3. I will then create my first product to sell on clickbank
4. I will create a list of customers to make future sales easier
5. I will set up an affiliate program to sell my products through
6. And, finally, if I feel like it, I will set up a storefront.

During the time, I do that, will you do anything to further your progress to making more money online with clickbank. Let’s hope so because I will need a network of future affiliates to work with. So get busy!

Other Articles Related To This One:

1. The Clickbank Startup
2. Clickbank Affiliate
3. Clickbank Marketplace
4. Adsense Alternatives
5. Making Money With Adsense