ClickBank is often named one of the most beginner-friendly marketplace on the web but has also a lot to offer to more seasoned marketers. Focusing on digital-only offers, it is a go-to place for quality offers with high commission rates.
In this article today we’ll discuss how to promote ClickBank affiliate products, and moreover, how to do it for free.
No banner with provided ID foundWhat is ClickBank?
If you’re looking to get your feet wet in the sea of affiliate marketing – you’re in the right place.
ClickBank is an affiliate network marketplace which means this is the place you go, as an affiliate marketer, to find the offers you want to promote. It’s been around since 1998 – the early ages of affiliate marketing.
Signing up to ClickBank is pretty simple, all you need to start is: name, email, phone number. Once you’re in, with over 4000 ClickBank products available to promote, you can easily find something interesting and profitable for you.
A low barrier to entry and an enormous selection of ClickBank products makes this the ideal affiliate network for beginners. It’s useful for everyone along the spectrum, but in the industry, it is truly valued for its newbie-friendly approach and the huge variety in its marketplace.
First and foremost, ClickBank offers digital products – but they also have many “physical” products from the entertainment, lifestyle and gaming verticals. And one of the best parts about ClickBank is that their products are especially good for promoting for free!
This article will guide you through the best strategies for getting traffic organically.
Can you really make money with ClickBank?
If you’re very fresh to affiliate marketing, or just a cynic, you may wonder: is this all legit? Well, we’re here to prove that with just enough effort and knowledge, it most certainly is.
Before we get into how to promote ClickBank products, we’ll cover the pros of their platform. After all, it’s important to know how to use their assets to your advantage. And of course, you should know why it’s beneficial to invest your time in this given affiliate network to make money.
- ClickBank products tend to have exceptionally high commissions – even rates up to 90%. This is usually because most of their products are digital and thus don’t cost a lot to make so those ClickBank products can afford higher payouts.
- Available in over 200 countries, ClickBank is one of the most international affiliate networks out there. This is of course an essential consideration for anyone who has global affiliate strategies in mind, or simply doesn’t want to be limited to certain geos.
- ClickBank offers a 60 day cookie policy which means that you will still get a commission from anyone who’s checked out your affiliate offer and makes a purchase within 60 days. Compared to let’s say a program like Amazon Associates which only gives affiliates 24 hours, this cookie policy is amazing.
- One of the few networks providing recurring commissions; and recurring commissions on ClickBank products means an ongoing passive income for you. And this is any and every affiliate’s dream 😉
- Loads of digital products, and as I said, they’re good to promote because with minimal manufacturing costs, come exponentially higher commissions than physical products. Also, the sales funnel is shortened (shipping and handling). This makes delivery, download, usage and satisfaction that much easier and faster for customers. However, this can cause higher refund rates.
How to make money with ClickBank for Beginners
Like I mentioned, ClickBank is ideal for beginners because they have a very low barrier to entry and a plethora of products. These are some of the most important considerations for newbies when getting into the affiliate marketing industry.
But there are a couple more features that make ClickBank especially attractive for newbies…
Promoting ClickBank products without a website
One of the trickiest parts of getting started in affiliate marketing: building, setting up, and launching your own website. Want to hear the amazing news? 🙂
ClickBank is one of the few affiliate networks that doesn’t require a website to get started! In other words, you don’t need any landing pages to start promoting ClickBank products.
Though you should eventually consider creating a website and using landers in your affiliate marketing strategies, it’s always nice to have an easy start with networks like ClickBank where you don’t need a website. Read this article to learn more about affiliate marketing without a website.
Resources for beginner affiliate marketers
Where can ClickBank beginners go to learn about the industry? Well, there are heaps of options – it’s almost scary. To start, stick with the few I suggest here so you can stay focused and avoid getting overwhelmed.
First of all, this ultimate guide for affiliate beginners from our Voluum blog covers every basic, newbie aspect.
Secondly, ClickBank has their own blog full of articles that you can check out. Maybe you’ve heard of their “ClickBank University” series of affiliate marketing courses – however, that is no longer active.
ClickBank, CB University was started in 2014, but since then, ClickBank has implemented a new educational center: Spark by ClickBank. This third resource is paid but provides hours of video tutorials and more.
ClickBank and Voluum work very closely together – integration between the two platforms is seamless. Using the two platforms together will make your affiliate marketing experience all the more smooth and successful.
ClickBank Best Practices
With a low barrier to entry can come low quality as well. Unfortunately you may have to filter through lots of second rate products and sales pages that might not be relevant to you.
Thankfully, their search feature is quite advanced making it easier to find the products you want to sell.
Another challenge that comes with a low barrier to entry and a thriving network: all the more competition – especially for some of their more popular products.
Though competition is a sign of a healthy and profitable offer, you don’t want to get stuck promoting alongside hundreds of other affiliates. Use ClickBank’s various product metrics to find a suitable offer for you.
While they have plenty of metrics available before you actually start promoting an offer, it is still quite hard to tell how the offer will perform.
Usually you will only be able to measure conversion rates performance after investing time or money with traffic. This is where a tracker comes in handy. Don’t let an ounce of data go to waste, make sure you are tracking everything.
Now that we’ve covered some of the basic and preemptive aspects of ClickBank affiliate marketing, let’s move on to the next most important step: deciding on which offer or ClickBank to start promoting.
How to pick the best ClickBank products
Follow these simple steps to find the best ClickBank products to promote that will be strong enough to bring traffic organically and make money.
Finding a Good Product from the Affiliate Marketplace
One of the most decisive steps to making money on ClickBank products: choosing an offer.
With a slew of metrics available to predict and compare the performance of all offers and products on ClickBank, make sure to use them wisely.
Here are the ClickBank metrics to find a product that will make money:
- Average $/Conversion: Average commission that an affiliate earns for each conversion of the given offer, including earnings from all sales (initial sales, upsells, and rebills).
- Initial $/Conversion: Average commission an affiliate initially earns for each conversion of the given offer, including the commission from any upsells or order bumps from the first sale. Doesn’t include affiliate earnings from any rebill payments of subscription products. Only appears if the vendor offers recurring products, like memberships and subscriptions that regularly bill customers over time.
- Recurring $/Rebill: Average commission an affiliate earns for each rebill payment of the vendor’s product or products. Only appears if the vendor offers recurring products.
- Average Rebill total: Average amount of money that an affiliate takes as a commission resulting from rebills.
- Grav: “Gravity” performance statistic. This number represents a unique calculation by ClickBank that takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the past 12 weeks. Since more recent transactions get a higher value, this number can give you an idea of what products are “hot” at the moment – as in the amount of affiliates promoting and sales made. However, high gravity can also indicate that there’s a lot of competition for promoting this product.
- Cat: “category” This section provides information about the ClickBank Marketplace category and subcategory of the product.
Choosing a profitable vertical
Just a quick search for “ClickBank products” will bring up a whole bunch of rankings of products from their marketplace. Affiliate marketers sharing their insight on what products convert the best.
However, a lot of these rankings come from affiliates who have a lot of experience, as well as lots of time, dedication, resources, and blogs.
In other words, they aren’t just focused on one vertical and finding a few of the best ClickBank products to promote. Rather, they have the luxury to explore lots of verticals and products simultaneously.
As a beginner, or someone who isn’t dedicating 100% of their time and efforts to affiliate marketing – don’t make that mistake! You must zero in on one vertical, niche.
Though ClickBank has a whole lot of high-commission, popular products, stick to one category. The good news is, there are a few exceptionally profitable categories with great products.
Below are 3 of the top categories for ClickBank products; these are some of the most conversion-friendly categories. Additionally, I’ve provided some examples of specific ClickBank products that are popular among ClickBank affiliates. The indicated commission rates are subject to change.
E-Business & E-Marketing
Subcategories: Affiliate Marketing, General, Video Marketing
Live Marketing HQ (E-business – starting commission 75%)
Videly (Video Marketing – starting commission 50%)
IM Jetset (Affiliate Marketing – starting commission 50%)
Self-Help
Subcategories: Marriage & Relationships, Survival
Text Chemistry (Marriage & Relationships – starting commission 75%)
Patriot Powered Gear (Survival – starting commission 75%)
Shyness and Social Anxiety System (Marriage & Relationships – starting commission 75%)
Health & Fitness
Subcategories: Dietary Supplements, Diets & Weight Loss, General, Remedies, Women’s Health
Okinawa Flat Belly Tonic (Diet & Weight Loss Products – starting commission 75%)
Carbofix (Dietary Supplements – starting commission 70%)
The Lost Book of Remedies (Remedies – starting commission 75%)
Check out the ClickBank Affiliate Resources
Most ClickBank products provide you with affiliate resources supplied by the vendor or product owner themselves.
Below are some of the affiliate marketing tools product owners may provide, making your job a lot easier (if they are good quality and fit your image / voice!).
I’ve included screenshots of sales pages and more from multiple ClickBank vendors for affiliate tools. Of course, this will look different for every ClickBank product so keep in mind that these are just examples.
To start, here are two sample ClickBank vendor Affiliate Tools pages:
This one is a Dietary Supplement and weight loss product from the Health & Fitness category – Organifi.
This is a Dating product from the Self-Help category – His Secret Obsession.
I gathered some of the affiliate tools that as a ClickBank affiliate you can access through these two ClickBank products:
- Access to a Hoplink (referral tracking URL for ClickBank affiliates)
- Prebuilt HTML5 Banners, sales pages
- Campaign specific content: variety of tailored images, text and video – sometimes specially designed for A/B testing
- Social media content: Facebook ads, Youtube banners and other media, Reddit, Digg
- Email swipe: campaign-specific ad copy
- Sample video embed links: video links and video thumbnail images for unboxing, ad copy and testimonial videos
- Coupons
- Active contests / promotions
- Commission descriptions
- Restrictions notice
Tracking Organic Traffic
While you have plenty of advantageous factors to think about when choosing a ClickBank product to promote, you will really only know how well it will perform once it is put in practice.
As a rule, your best bet to finding the optimal offer (one that has a solid, active market but not too much competition) is to try and test. What does testing entail exactly?
It means meticulously counting clicks, bounce rates, conversions, upsells, time spent on your website or landing page – and much more. Once you analyze these metrics for a given affiliate offer (or ClickBank product in this case) you then have to compare its performance to other offers or products to find the best along with the optimal approach.
How to do all that? That’s where your affiliate tracking software will shine; Voluum Tracker can do all that more and help you grow, scale, and succeed as an affiliate marketer.
And like I mentioned, ClickBank and Voluum and seamlessly integrated. This means tracking your ClickBank offers couldn’t be easier… you have both the instructions to integrate the two platforms as well as a video tutorial at your fingertips.
Promoting ClickBank Products for Free
The big question of the day of course is how to generate traffic to the affiliate links of these carefully-selected ClickBank products. For free.
Naturally, as is life, nothing worthwhile comes completely free.
Bringing free traffic (as opposed to paid traffic) is a time-consuming job. Granted, you don’t have to spend a cent. But, to really get started you will have to write at least around 50 articles, publish videos minimum weekly, post quality content regularly or spend time active in groups and forums.
Here are the top 5 ways to generate free traffic for your ClickBank products to get the conversion rates you need:
1. Write a Blog
This is one of the most tried and true approaches to getting organic traffic in the affiliate industry. Focusing on your niche, write a variety of articles and blog posts to build up credibility in your vertical and get views and reads as internet users stumble upon your posts and click on the links to your ClickBank products.
The most popular article formats: reviews of products, product comparisons, product ratings or rankings. These blog formats are most conducive to inserting affiliate links naturally – ie. without being too salesy. By discussing products honestly and naturally, readers will enjoy your content more, producing higher Click Through Rates (CTR) and a higher likelihood of sharing your content (which means more traffic).
Of course, before you start writing up a storm about your ClickBank products (I’m picturing some sort of movie montage) you’re going to need a strategy.
SEO tips
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term you’ve heard of and should be very familiar with. SEO is the main source of organic traffic to your website and should dictate most of your writing strategy. First and foremost are keywords; these are the search terms that you want to optimize your content for.
Short tail keywords are more general terms and long tail keywords are longer and more specific. For beginners especially, it’s much easier to rank an article for a long tail keyword because there is much less competition.
It’s best if your entire blog is focused on ranking for one or a couple of short tail keywords; it’s much harder to rank here, so you must stay focused on your niche.
Your blog should have an “pillar article” – this is your main article that the rest of your content, or a cluster of your content, links to. This pillar article will be the longest, most in depth post on a certain topic.
Let’s say your niche is luxury pet products, the articles that link to this pillar topic could be “luxury products for cats”, “pamper your puppy”, “the best pet foods on the market” etc. This strategy is preferred by the Google algorithm because it maximizes satisfying user intent.
One of the most important factors in SEO ranking is backlinking – when other sites link your article as reference. To build backlinks for free you can either do this through content exchanges with other sites, or naturally.
By naturally, I mean that your content should be valuable and shareable – that means all your articles shouldn’t be just 2k+ word sales pitches. When collaborating with others, you can have guest writers post on your blog or write content for another site, including links to your posts.
2. Start a ClickBank YouTube channel
Promoting your ClickBank products on YouTube is another great way to drive free traffic to your affiliate links. If you’re into making videos, vlogging, and have some decent equipment you can get started right away. It doesn’t take any money and minimal technical setup to get a YouTube channel running.
YouTube is nice because, in contrast to blogs, the competition is not usually as high; there simply aren’t as many affiliate vloggers as there are bloggers. Though some industries like beauty are quite saturated, most niches have significantly less competition when compared to search engine traffic.
Speaking of which, there are SEO tips for YouTube as well (after all, YouTube is one of the biggest search engines out there). Optimize your video title, description, tags, snippet to drive organic traffic.
For promoting ClickBank products on YouTube there is another set of popular video formats: unboxing, reviews, rankings, product comparisons, collabs with guests/experts.
Always remember to include a Call To Action (CTA) and remind viewers what to do and where to click. You can flash CTAs during your video or you can direct users to links in your description – but either way, always remind them to increase your chances of a sale.
If starting a YouTube channel interests you, read more about the best practices, insider tips and more details in our YouTube guide.
3. Promote ClickBank products on Facebook Groups and Forums
Another effective way to bring organic traffic to your ClickBank product links is interacting with your followers or people interested in that niche.
On a blog, that usually means replying to comments or social media activity if your content is shared. On YouTube this works similarly: reply to comments, encourage users to subscribe or follow your channel, and collab with vloggers in your niche.
However, you can also branch out – check out Facebook groups and forums. Make sure to spot especially active ones and get posting and commenting. Create social mediapages and forum profiles on multiple channels to maximize your online presence. Look to platforms like Quora too to answer / ask questions and grow your reputation.
Of course, it’s essential to find a balance here: do not be spammy. Try not to engage in spammy threads, conversations or groups either; those won’t bring you a lot of useful organic traffic to your ClickBank products.
The articles or resources you decide to post or share there also should not be too salesy; in fact, it should be shareable, valuable content that viewers will want to pass on. This content should then lead to another article/video with a sales pitch.
4. Instagram and Pinterest
And now we move onto some of the more visually oriented social media platforms; here, it’s quite easy to get some engaged traffic. In Facebook groups and forums, you’ll be more focused on the verbal side of content rather than photos.
After all, your photo/meme/video can only contribute so much to a conversation or thread 🙂
If you’re into photography, curating content, or the world of influencing, then Instagram and Pinterest could be a great option for you. Most of us are pretty familiar with how to make an account on either – if you haven’t, it’s free, easy and fast.
Instagram for ClickBank products
On Instagram, the more interested followers you have, the more clicks you’ll get on your ClickBank product affiliate links. And the more commissions 😉 To get big on Insta, choose a niche, stick to it, create quality and varied content regularly, engage with followers, use hashtags strategically.
These are just some of the strategies outlined in my 2021 Guide to Instagram affiliate marketing – find out how to place your affiliate links, how to curate your feed, and how to make attractive content.
Pinterest for ClickBank products
For Pinterest, the basics remain the same: choose a profitable niche and ClickBank product that you’re interested in. Here, you simply make your pin and include your affiliate link along with a catchy photo to attract commissions.
Try joining Pinterest Group Boards to really boost your pins and accounts. Connect with other users and especially group founders to get more activity.
Pinterest is great because it’s so easy to get the hang of: all you need to do is keep posting and pinning. There are not a lot of complicated algorithms, SEO, technical knowledge, or fancy content creation is needed.
If you have a website, use Pinterest and Instagram to get free traffic that you then drive organically to your blog. Make attractive, engaging landing pages that will get users buying and you commissions.
5. Clickbank products on Tiktok
TikTok drives a good amount of traffic to eye-catching video posts. Most likely, TikTok is the best current platform where you can grab someone’s attention with interesting content and you can use TikTok videos to drive traffic to your landing page.
There are a few niches that work very well with this platform and those include: investing in spirituality, cooking, weight loss, and workout.
The basics remain the same as with other social media platforms. With TikTok though, you need to remember a few tricks for keeping your viewer hooked like:
- Use transitions and transformations to keep your audience engaged.
- Use open-loop intros, they keep the viewer guessing what’s coming up next and generally work well with affiliates on social media platforms.
- Use hashtags to target the right audience.
- Don’t forget to share your TikTok posts on the rest of your social media for a bigger chance of going viral.
6. Build an email list
With all the fancy forms of communication, social media, and ads that have been developed, email marketing can seem a bit retro – however, it is still very relevant.
Email communications can be some of the personal and active ways to promote your ClickBank products.
As with everything, but with email marketing more importantly – do not be spammy. You have to be careful and find a very fine balance between maintaining communications and not annoying them. Also, a balance between promoting your ClickBank products and not being too salesy.
How to get emails though? Once you drive users to your website or channel, offer them additional, email-only, exclusive content.
For example, if you’re writing a 7-day plan to start the Paleo diet, make the last three days exclusive by sending it out in email. If users value the contents from the first four days, then they will enter their email address in order to get those last three days of tips.
This is how your email flow should look like:
- The first email provides them with a lead magnet and mentions your offer.
- The second one should pitch the offer some more.
- The third and final should play on emotions and scarcity.
Same goes for videos – if you draw in users with quality content and then offer the rest through an email opt-in, you can gather contacts and traffic interested in that niche.
Use retargeting
Retargeting is one of the biggest advantages of digital marketing over a traditional one. Retargeting is marketing to people that have previously engaged with your messaging. In fact, it is not only a good strategy – it is a necessity, since everyone else is already doing it. The reason is simple: it is very profitable.
Think about it for a second: if someone has already reacted to your offer, they are very likely to react to another one. This removes all the uncertainty connected to displaying your message to a broad audience. The list of previously engaged visitors is much more precise than your general assumptions about the audience.
Most bigger ad networks, with Facebook being a prime example, offer flexible retargeting options. Use it wherever you can. If your ad network doesn’t support retargeting, you can use Voluum for that and show different messages to non-unique (returning) visitors.
Affiliate Marketing & ClickBank
So we’ve come to the end of our dive into ClickBank product promotion.
The majority of everything covered in this article can be done for free. However, if you’re having trouble putting in the hours to build up organic traffic or simply want to boost your affiliate offers, you can consider the paid traffic route.
Paid traffic is nothing to be afraid of and can actually be a much stronger tool than you think. It provides you way more options for trying, testing and eventually optimizing your campaigns. With a tool like Voluum Tracker you can even eventually automate those campaigns – basically taking most of the manual work out of the equation.
Either way, tracking is essential to finding the best strategy for promoting your ClickBank and other offers. As a reward for your attentive reading, we’ve brought you an exclusive deal that only ClickBank + Voluum users get!
Try Voluum Tracker today to make the most of your efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Clickbank better than other affiliate networks?
It is hard to compare networks between each other, as most of them contain better and worse offers. Where Clickbank shines is the longevity of the platform, credibility, and the sheer number of offers. You don’t have to be worried if the platforms will pay you your revenue on time or whether it disappears overnight. You have offers from multiple categories that don’t require having an external landing page.
Is it hard to track Clickbank offers?
Voluum has an API-level integration with Clickbank, which makes tracking the performance of Clickbank offers a breeze. API integration is the most reliable one, least prone to errors connected with other tracking methods, such as cookie block.
Do you need to have money to start advertising on Clickbank?
No, you don’t need any money to sign up to Clickbank and get an offer. You may use free traffic that you already have (like a popular blog), use existing traffic on social media or forums, get traffic with lead magnets or video channels. If you want to scale up, you should think about paid advertising and purchase additional traffic from ad networks.
Is Clickbank a good way to start affiliate marketing?
Clickbank offers a lot of digital-only offers. They have high commission rates and are easy to market. Moreover, Clickbank offers don’t require setting up a separate landing page, which may be a hassle for beginners. Lastly, credibility and long track record make Clickbank one of the best places to start doing affiliate marketing with.
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