Clickbank was the first affiliate network that I learned of when I became an affiliate marketer. I am sure that as you got into affiliate marketing, that you were directed to Clickbank and now you are here to learn more about this network and exactly what it is and how it works.

This useful guide will answer every question that you could potentially ask about Clickbank, as well as show you the affiliate marketing strategy that I am using and would recommend that you use too, to promote Clickbank products.

Like all other affiliate products, there is no secret sauce to making Clickbank work for you. All there is, is a strategy that will help you set up your business for sustainability and profitability.

If you are keen to build a strong business for the long term instead of a fly by night business that may only be short-lived, then keep on reading.

Here’s What You Will Learn

• What Clickbank Is?
• How to Pick Products to Promote
• The Most Common Ways to Promote ClickBank Products
• How I Promote Clickbank Products With a Marketing Funnel
• How to Build a Marketing Funnel (Tools Needed + Cost)
• What to Say in Your Email Funnel
• Facebook Ads for Clickbank Offers
• Bing Ads for Clickbank Offers
• Using Tools to Track the Traffic to Clickbank Products

What ClickBank Is?

Before I explain what Clickbank is, I want to make sure that you understand two terms –

Affiliate network and affiliate programs.

An affiliate network is essentially a platform that hosts many different affiliate offers and products for affiliates to choose to promote online.

Affiliate networks connect affiliates (or publishers) with advertisers (affiliate product owners), making it easier for affiliates to select a niche and choose a product that they want to promote.

When affiliates promote the product and a user takes a certain action, such as making a purchase of the affiliate product, submitting their email address or completing an application form, the affiliate is paid a commission.

An affiliate network also takes care of the payment processing ensuring that the affiliate is paid the commission that is due to them.

An affiliate program however is a single product, owned by a merchant, that is promoted by affiliates in exchange for a commission when a sale or action is completed by a user.

Affiliate programs may or may not be part of an affiliate network.

With that said, Clickbank is an affiliate network.

Clickbank defines it’s company as:

So it is a company that allows manufacturers of primarily digital products to host their products on the platform, so affiliates can promote them for a commission.

Unlike other affiliate networks, Clickbank products are promoted on a cost per sale basis. Which means that the affiliate only earns a commission when the sale of a product is made.

How To Pick Products To Promote  

In a previous post I already set out a detailed guide on how to choose products to promote on Clickbank.

The post covered the metrics to consider on Clickbank products when promoting it. If you would like to check out the post, you can go here, then come back here to continue with the tutorial.

You can also check out Zac Johnson’s Clickbank tips for finding interesting products to promote. Pay attention to what he says on trust points. 

Whilst Clickbank metrics are a start to uncovering some of the best products to promote, I always go a bit further and do competitor research.

Competitor research involves studying competitor affiliates who are promoting these products and observing if they could be making money from it.

Whilst you will not know for certain that a competitor affiliate is making money from a product, there are key indicators that you can study to determine whether that affiliate is likely successful with his marketing efforts.

In the video below, I am going to show you how I do my research and the type of information I am looking for, to help me decide whether a Clickbank product is worth my time and money.

The Most Common Ways To Promote Clickbank Products

Most affiliates, especially beginners try to make quick money when promoting Clickbank products.

Instead of taking the time to design an A-one strategy, they take shortcuts and waste money and time.

Some may get lucky and make a few sales here and there, but when considering the profit margins of these affiliates and the methods they are using, it’s safe to say that their business strategy is not viable at all.

If you are guilty of using the below methods, I would recommend that you adopt a different strategy that will help you achieve long-term sustainability in your business.

What I mean by that is, instead of looking for ways to make quick money, take the time to build out a Clickbank affiliate marketing campaign which includes building a niche using efficient funnels, nurturing your audience that you gain through traffic campaigns and then monetising them with affiliate products.

All of this I will dive deeper into, in this tutorial.

Onto the common ways that most affiliates promote Clickbank products:

>Social Media Posts

Posting your Clickbank affiliate link on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter is not a good way to promote Clickbank products at all.

First of all the actual Clickbank affiliate link looks long and ugly and can be viewed as spam by other Facebook users.

Here is an example of a Clickbank affiliate link that has been posted on Facebook.

You can see that the affiliate has made a post in an English Language learning group. There is no cloaking of the affiliate link. The actual raw link is used. He tries to convince people to click on the link by calling out a solution to their problem – speaking the language without attending language classes.

The problem with this, is that whilst you may have some curious people who want to know more, chances are they will click on the affiliate link, land on the Clickbank product landing page, read what it is about and then leave.

The affiliate has therefore wasted time because he knows nothing about the people who have clicked on his link.

Neither has he captured the interested person’s contact details (name and email address), to follow up with them later on and remind them about the product.

If you have heard about the follow up rule before, the fortune is in the follow up, it means that you are more than likely to convince someone to buy a product when you follow up with them more than once.

This method is not a good strategy and if you are using it, you should stop now.

>Blogging

This method of promoting Clickbank products is worthwhile and I do recommend it.

With blogging, if you have gained a loyal readership you can get really great referrals to the Clickbank product because you are pre-selling the product with valuable content.

Just like with this blog, there are many products that I promote here and my clickthrough rates are decent because I have built trust with my following.

The same way with Clickbank products or any products for that matter, a blog offers insight and education to people who are searching for a solution to their problem.

Even if you created a brand new blog and are promoting Clickbank products, I do believe you can convert cold traffic from it but the conversion rate may be lower.

The conversion rate may be lower because no trust has been built but I have been able to make a good profit from this method when promoting affiliate products.

So don’t let conversion rates deter you.

Here is what blogging looks like when you are promoting a Clickbank affiliate product.

If I were this author I would have gone a step further and added a lead page within the content of the blog to collect email addresses and build an email list for remarketing purposes.

But all in all, if a lot of traffic is landing on this blog and even if a conservative 1% converts into sales then the author of this blog can make a lot of money from it.

>Video Reviews

Video reviews are really great for promoting Clickbank products.

Check out this review of the Red Tea Detox Clickbank product and take a look at the number of video views he has.

It’s a small number and in my search for more video reviews just like it, I realise that unless you are promoting a product that is being searched for a lot, to make video reviews work for you, you probably have to do many of them.

When I looked at the comments section I can see that many people have actually used the affiliate’s affiliate link and he was smart to add a bonus with this offer.

This is a really great strategy that affiliates use when promoting Clickbank products.

They offer bonuses to help customers make a decision whether to buy the product. This often works out quite well and as you read further into this post I am going to show you how I incorporate bonuses into my Clickbank affiliate marketing funnel.

Video reviews work best if you have actually tried the product and you are recommending it.

Other types of reviews that work well are:

• Demonstration video reviews where you show how a product is used
• Walk through video reviews where you show the inside of the product, such as a back office or dashboard. Useful for digital products.
• Tutorial video reviews where you show how to do something using the product.

>Direct Link On PPC Advertising

If you are spending money on advertising, such as with Google Ads or Bing Ads, please do not do this!

You are seriously wasting advertising dollars and this type of work tells me it is the doing of a beginner affiliate marketer.

If you are reading this blog post, take the time to understand the different marketing strategies that you can use to get more profit for your advertising dollars.

What’s wrong with this affiliate’s ad?

He is sending traffic directly to the affiliate offer. When I click through to the offer I come to a landing page where a name and email address is being collected.

Had this been a custom landing page where the affiliate built the landing page himself, this would have been acceptable.

But because he is not building his own email list and is relying on the Clickbank product owner to follow up with and convert the lead, he is giving full control to the product owner to do his marketing for him.

Another thing that’s wrong is that he has used the raw Clickbank affiliate link in his ad.

Do you see how ugly the link looks. Would you click on this link if you were a potential customer or would you think the link looks spammy and could lead to a dangerous site?

If the affiliate is using his raw Clickbank affiliate link, this tells me that he is also not using tracking tools, like Clickmagick, to track his traffic and conversions.

This affiliate is pretty much throwing money down the drain.

Don’t do this. I will show you a better way in a minute.

In summary here are the dos and don’ts of promoting Clickbank products based on the above examples.

How I Promote Clickbank Products With A Marketing Funnel

Now that I have shown you the most common ways of promoting Clickbank products, I’d like to show you an approach that will help you stand out against the competition and increase the life time value of your affiliate customer.

This approach will help you build a viable, long term business asset instead of jumping through hoops to potentially make fast money which does not last long.

Whilst this approach has a lot of moving parts with it, you will see how it is worth mastering and will help you to scale your business to increase profits.

Let’s dive right into it.

When promoting Clickbank products I use a marketing funnel that includes paid ads, lead generation funnels and email funnels.

A snapshot of this campaign looks something like this.

Let’s break this down further.

How To Build A Marketing Funnel (Tools Needed + Cost)

Your marketing funnel consists of a sales funnel, an email funnel and an ad funnel.

>Sales Funnel (Tools: LeadPages; Cost from $37/month)

A sales funnel is a series of pages that a lead lands on that takes them from awareness of your product to consideration and then purchase.

Sales funnel builders like Clickfunnels or LeadPages are really great for designing sales funnels.

I like LeadPages and use it in my business. You can read my review of LeadPages here.

The sales funnel can be a simple funnel that consists of just three pages – the lead page, the pre-sell page and the sales page to a complicated funnel that consists of many upsells and downsells.

The sales funnel is what you will send your traffic to.

Your sales funnel can be posted on social media, in your ad campaigns or even in your videos or blogs.

When building a sales funnel for your Clickbank product, to encourage a lead to provide their name and email address for the opt in, give away a complimentary product that will help the user.

This complimentary product should be of a high perceived value and something that you won’t mind trading your email address for.

Examples of complimentary products:

How To Create A Complimentary Product

Complimentary products can be eBooks, worksheets or an email series in your autoresponder.

To create these products I use Canva and PicMonkey. For the email course I simply create an email series in an autoresponder like GetResponse or Aweber.

When you create your document you can upload it to hosting sites like WordPress (if you have your own blog) or Amazon so that you can generate a downloadable link for the lead.

Once the lead hands over their name and email address, direct them to a pre-sell page where you speak to the lead in a video or with text.

The purpose of the pre-sell page is to educate the lead on the Clickbank product. A review on this page is a good idea or you can simply provide a customer testimonial or walk-through of the product.

Next under your video or exit you can provide a call to action to the lead that takes them to the sales page of the Clickbank product where hopefully they convert into a sale.

>Email Funnel (Tools: Aweber; Cost From $19/month)

When the lead opts in you are probably wondering where they go. You will see on the above diagram that the lead is taken to an email funnel of 5 or 7 emails.

Email funnels are created with email marketing tools like Aweber or GetResponse.

These tools are integrated with your chosen sales funnel builder (eg. LeadPages) so when the lead opts in, they are automatically added to the email list you created.

The lead will then receive 5-7 pre-written emails that continue to sell the Clickbank product. If you want you can make this series shorter but I recommend a minimum of 5 emails. 

The great thing about an email funnel is that you now have contact details of someone that you can follow up with over and over until you convert them to a sale.

Why this is important?

Because you can sell products to this person over and over. Think about if you did not have an email funnel in place.

Instead of someone seeing the Clickbank product once because you sent them directly to the offer, they’re now going to see the product multiple times which increases your chances of them making a sale.

The sale may not happen right away but eventually it can.

Industry standards say that email has an average return on investment of 122% and is 4x higher than social media marketing, direct marketing and paid search (source).

>Ad Funnel (Tools: Facebook ads, Bing ads; Cost: You Decide)

For your ad campaigns I recommend using Facebook ads or Bing ads.

Both are affordable if you know how to use it.

I will describe how to set up your ad campaigns in a later section.

When using paid traffic sources and building out an ad funnel, keep in mind that you will be using marketing to your funnel and then re-marketing to bring people back to your funnel who have not taken the desired action the first time.

It is therefore important that you use the ad platform’s pixel to help you re-market to visitors to your funnel.

What To Say In Your Email Funnel 

When writing your emails, you want to write compelling content that will help your leads click through to the Clickbank affiliate product.

The average click through rate for marketers is between 3% and 8% (source) so use this as a benchmark to determine how effective your email copy is.

Here are some ideas that you can use to include in your email series:

Day 1: Welcome Email

Thank the lead for opting in and deliver the lead magnet. Go a step further and introduce yourself and why they should listen to you.

Day 2: Value Email

Provide valuable content that teaches the lead something in the niche.

For example if the Clickbank product that you’re promoting is Doggy Dan’s Online Dog Trainer, a video that teaches the lead how to walk their dog on a leash is great content.

If you know nothing about this niche, don’t worry. It is perfectly acceptable to find video from YouTube and link directly to it. Just remember to give credit to the owner. 

To accomplish this, I would create a custom landing page that has the video embedded on it and then a call to action button below the video to visit the Clickbank product’s sales page.

This helps keep the lead in front of your content as well and does not distract them by sending them directly to YouTube.

Day 3: Value Email

Provide more valuable content here and a soft pitch promoting the Clickbank product.

Day 4: Value Email

By day 4 the lead will be warmed up having had three days’ of content that will help them understand why they need the Clickbank product.

In your day 4 email you can mention the Clickbank product and do a review.

Day 5: Hard Pitch Email

Sell the Clickbank product to the lead by outlining its uses, features and benefits. If you would like to add some bonuses to convince the lead to use your affiliate link, this is a good idea.

Make sure that you use urgency tactics (eg. Time limit offer) to encourage the lead to take action.

Day 6 and 7: Final Warning Email

Use urgency tactics to encourage the lead to take action today. Send reminders about the offer ending.

Facebook Ads For Clickbank Offers

Facebook ads are powerful because Facebook captures so many data points on its users that make it very easy for marketers to target their ideal audience.

For example if you are promoting the Ted’s Woodworking Clickbank product you can target people who are interested in wood working projects.

To start using Facebook ads make sure that you have a business manager and business ad account.

With those created you can then go on to create your Facebook Ads.

When creating Facebook ads take note of the following tips:

• Create more than one adset that targets a different interest
• Target one interest per adset so you can see which interest is performing better
• Split test different creatives, headlines and text in your ads.
• Monitor your ads for 3 days and see which one is producing the cheapest results
• Turn off the ads that are too expensive
• Let ads run for at least 5-7 days to see if you get any conversions

Bing Ads For Clickbank Offers

Bing ads rely on keywords to help you target people who are searching for a particular word or phrase.

To set up your Bing ads think about keywords that people might be searching for to help them find your ads.

Here are some keyword ideas for different Clickbank products

To start using Bing ads you need to create an account. Once that is created you can create your first Bing ad campaign.

When creating your Bing ads here are some tips to take note of:

• 10-15 keywords in your ad campaign are more than sufficient
• Make sure and track your keywords with a tracking tool like Clickmagick
• Split test different ad variations (3 ads per campaign is sufficient)
• Run your ad campaigns for at least 7 days to see which keywords are getting the most clicks
• Start your keywords on broad match
• Narrow down your keywords that get the most clicks by creating an exact match campaign

Using Tools To Track The Traffic To Clickbank Products

It goes without saying that when promoting Clickbank products, always use a tracking tool like Clickmagick to measure the performance of your ads.

This is crucial as it will help you save money as you can determine which traffic source is generating the most sales conversions.

When you know this you can put more effort into that traffic source and stop the ad campaign that is not producing results.

The tracking tool that is easy for beginners is Clickmagick.

Clickmagick starts from $12/month and is pretty easy to set up and start using in your traffic campaigns. They also offer a 14 day free trial which you can claim here.

Wrapping Up

The marketing strategy that I have outlined in this post is the strategy that I use when promoting any Clickbank product.

Even if I write a blog post I make sure that there is somewhere on that blog, a place where leads can opt in and provide their contact details to join a marketing funnel.

This helps me build an email list to re-market to and achieve a greater return on investment in the long run.

If you are reading this as a beginner, think about ways that you can build a profitable asset by spending a bit more time in your marketing effort and building these funnels.

Even though the idea of making fast money is appealing, it is not going to be sustainable.

On another note, remember that affiliate marketing networks are not under your control. Products can be discontinued at any time and it is a good idea that you join more than one affiliate network so you can replace your product.

Other reputable affiliate networks include:

• FlexOffers
• ShareASale
• Above All Offers
• MaxBounty

If you have any questions leave them in the comments. This was a super long post where I tried to give as much information as I can about the strategy that I use for Clickbank products.

Give me some love in the comments. Have you used this strategy and what have I forgotten?

Cheers

Additional Resources: 

• Start a Money Making Blog Course (free)
• How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Course (free)
• How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Huge Blog or Website Ebook ($7)
• Email Marketing For Marketers 
• Automated Sales Funnels
• Facebook Ads for Affiliate Marketing