From over 6 years, I was making a fairly passive income as a Clickbank affiliate and by fairly, I mean well into the 6 figure numbers in certain years (I have the proof of this coming up).
I probably made over 10,000 sales during this 6 year period and that paid me very well. I used that income to pay for tuition and fund some other awesome life activities I had. And I kept that success to myself (until now).
In this post, I want to share the 5 main methods I used to create success as an affiliate marketer for Clickbank and how you can also use these same methods too.
These are the 5 methods I used to create affiliate marketing success with Clickbank:
1) I stuck to promoting just 1 popular Clickbank product I knew a lot about.
2) I created a review of that Clickbank product on a landing page.
3) I used pay per click marketing to drive tons of traffic to my review of that Clickbank product.
4) I wrote blog posts on a single niche website that is related to the Clickbank product I am promoting and drove traffic there too.
5) I created more pay per click ads and drove traffic to those blog posts to get more sales of that 1 Clickbank product. See more info on how to start affiliate marketing with blogging here.
Here is an example of how these 5 methods look when applied correctly:
1) Let’s say I chose a popular selling Clickbank product that deals with stopping insomnia.
2) I review that insomnia solution product on a landing page (and link to it).
3) I create a pay per click ad on places like Bing Ads and drive people to the review (who know what this product is).
4) I make a niche site on stopping insomnia, and write as many articles as I can on this subject, and even linking these pages to my review of that insomnia product. This brings me SEO traffic.
5) I make more pay per click ads for each blog post I write on insomnia, drive extra visitors to those posts, and proportionally make more sales of that insomnia Clickbank product I am promoting.
Each of these methods on their own will probably get you sales, but combined together is where the true potential comes into play as it can really help you build a passive affiliate income from it and a long term affiliate business. And I’ve used all of them, individually as well as together to do that throughout the years I was a successful affiliate for Clickbank.
Proof of much I made with Clickbank when I was a full time affiliate with them:
Why I moved away from Clickbank and onto other affiliate projects:
If you’ve been reading my content so far and thinking that it has a past tense vibe, you’re right, it does and there’s a reason for that.
You see, I used to do Clickbank affiliate marketing full time, but certain events in that world pushed me away from the Clickbank network for awhile and I began looking at promoting other programs in other niches, and I do that today, and my main promotion is the Wealthy Affiliate program.
That eventually became my main promotion and all the time I was applying to promoting that program (using the same exact 5 methods by the way) took me away from Clickbank.
By the time I looked back and considered returning to grow another income stream from Clickbank, I figured it was best for me to stick to continuing my Wealthy Affiliate promotion and so I never really got back into using Clickbank full time like I used to.
- But these 5 methods I am showing you here still work for promoting Clickbank products.
- And that’s because I used these same 5 methods to promote Wealthy Affiliate successfully.
- And frankly, any affiliate promotion you wish to get involved with, will be successful for you if you apply these 5 methods.
Note: If you’d like to see the specific programs I personally promoted on Clickbank as an affiliate marketer when I did it full time, I have a post detailing all of the programs I made money with on Clickbank as their affiliate here (some of them are no longer in business).
Every method of creating affiliate marketing success with Clickbank explained (in detail):
There are a lot of important details hidden in each of the 5 methods I showed you earlier so this section is really going to dive into the intricacies of them so you understand how to fully use them. The better you understand them, the better your affiliate promotions of Clickbank products will be, trust me.
1) Stick to promoting 1 popular Clickbank product you know a lot about:
When I look back at any Clickbank product I promoted successfully and made tons of sales for, there are a couple of commonalities:
1) I knew the niche well that this product was relevant to (mandatory).
2) I even bought the product so I could understand it better (optional).
3) I studied the product I wanted to promote to provide better content when promoting it (mandatory).
4) I was passionate about the product (believed in it) AND the niche it’s connected to (mandatory).
5) I made sure the Clickbank product had a 50 or higher gravity. This meant 50 or more affiliates made sales (optional).
6) I made sure this Clickbank product was a top 5 or top 10 seller in it’s category (mandatory).
When you choose your product to promote from the Clickbank affiliate program, the more of these 6 things you have, the better it’ll be, but make sure the mandatory labels are there at the very least, because they are the most important here.
A lot of people like to go around and promote anything Clickbank offers, especially high ticket programs that could pay them well, so they do have at least 1 or 2 of the criteria down, but are missing the other 3 or 4 and naturally, this will affect your success in promoting it.
I typically don’t promote high ticket programs and in my history with Clickbank, promoted products that paid me $20 or more per sale. In my mind, I can make way more lower ticket sales than few higher ticket ones and that’s how I was able to make over 10,000 of them.
2) Create a review of the Clickbank product you wish to promote:
One of the first things you’re going to want to do after choosing whatever Clickbank product you selected is write an affiliate review of it on a landing page.
It could be a blog post, and it can even be a 1 page website.
If you’re more of a beginner, make it on a blog post, because you’re going to grow that blog as you continue with the other steps below.
If you’re more advanced and understand things like pay per click marketing, you can really drive a lot of paid traffic to that 1 page review using the other methods below.
You can even do both (which is one of the options). For me, I’ve done both things throughout my career on Clickbank.
There may come a time when you’ll need to review products you don’t own to promote your product and if you find yourself in this situation, read this guide on writing affiliate product reviews that you don’t own.
Why you want to write a review of the Clickbank product you chose:
- It’s already a popular product so it gets searches on Google.
- A well written review will likely lead to organic traffic coming to that review so you can make sales.
- If you’re going to do affiliate marketing successfully, knowing how to write product reviews is essential for your success.
Note: You can even create YouTube videos reviewing that Clickbank product.
This is not something I did a lot back in the day, but video reviews are something to consider as being just as important as written reviews. If you read my tutorial on doing affiliate marketing through YouTube, I explain that very in-depth there.
And just like your blog post, if the product is popular, it’ll get views on YouTube and also lead to sales. I also recommend reading my tutorial on doing keyword research on YouTube so you get more views and likely more affiliate sales from it.
And here a great post on making product reviews on YouTube if you need help getting started.
Just as well, you can add that video review and/or link it to your blog post or 1 page website that reviews the same product to get extra clicks and backlinks to grow the organic traffic all around.
3) You can use pay per click marketing to drive tons of traffic to the review:
This is an advanced strategy and it requires money, experience and understanding affiliate marketing well in order to do, but it works. I used pay per click affiliate marketing methods to create ads to link to my review page of the Clickbank product.
Doing this, I must have gotten at least 500,000 visits to my reviews on their own. In order for this for to work, you have to create an awesome review that will sell and make you more in Clickbank sales than you’ll spend for the ad. If you can make this work, then you will be a pay per click success story.
One of the major PPC networks I used throughout my time promoting Clickbank products is Bing Ads and I still recommend using them today. They are way easier to deal with than YouTube Ads or Google Ads and no, I don’t use Facebook Ads (yet) to promote Clickbank products. If I ever do, I’ll write a tutorial on that.
4) Write blog posts on a niche site that’s related to the Clickbank product you’re promoting:
Do you remember how in method 2 you wrote a review and I said that beginners should stick to writing a blog post reviewing the Clickbank product they chose?
Well with this method, you are adding to it and writing blog posts that are relevant to your promotion.
Let’s take for instance the insomnia product I used as an example above and let’s suppose I wrote a review of a Clickbank product that stops insomnia. Now my first review is up.
What I’ll do for this particular method is start looking for keywords related to insomnia and write blog posts on them. For example:
- Foods that stop insomnia.
- How to stop insomnia.
- Top 5 ways to stop insomnia.
- Exercises to stop insomnia.
- And I’ll also review other popular insomnia products on the market too (including other products I find on Clickbank).
Note: Click here to see a full tutorial on finding keywords for your blog.
Anyway, I will literally look for anything and everything related to insomnia and write blog posts on the most popular keyword terms I find. And every blog post I’ll write this on will link back to my main review of the insomnia product I am promoting (the Clickbank one).
By following this method, I can grow a successful blog in a seriously good niche (insomnia) and get organic traffic from it. The more blog posts I can write using this method, the more free traffic I can get and the more sales I can make for that Clickbank insomnia product.
This is why I said it’s better for beginners to use this method over pay per click, it’s because it’s free and you won’t risk losing money this way. You will have to spend a few months on writing the blog posts though, but this is well worth it.
And if you can find other awesome affiliate marketing niches, then you can replicate this formula in way more than just one niche like insomnia.
5) Create more pay per click ads and drive extra traffic to the blog posts you write:
With this strategy, we are moving back into the pay per click realm and all we’re doing is that for every keyword we find in method 4 to write blog posts on, we will also create ads linking people to these posts so we can get extra traffic out of it.
The more traffic we have coming to our posts (in this case on stopping insomnia), the more traffic we can get to our Clickbank promotion and make more sales.
Note: You can promote your Clickbank product on the blog posts you write. I just recommend you do that scarcely because it can turn into a huge bridge site and your page can suffer in organic rankings for it. If you do pay per click marketing, then it doesn’t matter, but for SEO, it does.
Using this strategy is basically an express way to get faster traffic and faster Clickbank sales. Think about a major keyword like “Stop insomnia”. If I were blogging, targeting that term and wanting to rank on page 1 of Google, I probably wouldn’t.
Making a PPC ad for it though is a different story and I can get an ad up on page one on say the Bing network and drive quick visitors to my site. And if I did, I’d probably just promote the product on the blog post I’m targeting that term for to save money and keep the online sales funnel shorter.
Again, this whole thing about pay per click marketing is advanced, so be careful. I’m just sharing my approach to making Clickbank sales.
Putting together all 5 methods and creating a passive income with Clickbank:
Again, all of these methods are designed to either work individually or together and once more, the more of them you combine together, the better it’ll be for your affiliate marketing business.
If you are just starting out, the advice I have is simple:
- Follow methods 1, 2 and 4.
- If you are just getting started, then learn this from Wealthy Affiliate first (it’ll teach you to do it right.
- Don’t just rely on Clickbank. It’s a great network but there’s more out there.
- Don’t get too caught up with promoting the most extravagant affiliate offers on Clickbank if you don’t actually believe in them or know about them. If you make this mistake, none of these methods will actually work well for you.