How To Make Money with Clickbank 2021 in 5 EASY Steps

Clickbank is an affiliate product website that has a lot of great products that you can sell as an affiliate.

In this blog post, I am going to show you a 5 step process for how to make money with clickbank in 2021.

The reason I like Clickbank so much, is that it’s so easy to get started with it and it’s a great starting point if you’re brand new to affiliate marketing.

I’ve used clickbank for years now.

They’ve been in business since about 1998 and in that time they’ve paid out over $4BN dollars in affiliate commissions to those who promote their products.

Yes, you read that right, $4 Billion, with a B.

They pay me every week like clockwork, I’ve used Clickbank for nearly a decade and they’ve never missed a payment.

Here’s what you’re going to learn:

How to create a Clickbank account
How to Choose a Niche
How To Choose The Best Products to promote as an affiliate
How to set up your website
How to get traffic (visitors) to your website

How Does Clickbank Work?

Clickbank is a website with a huge inventory of products that anyone who signs up can promote.

Clickbank is completely free to join.

This is a birds-eye view of how clickbank works:

You create a free clickbank account
choose a product to promote from the clickbank marketplace
Use your unique clickbank affiliate link to promote that product
You get paid every time someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link.

Your affiliate link is unique to you and it contains your unique affiliate ID.

This is how Clickbank knows who to pay when a referral is made.

This is how Clickbank effectively works:

Every time somebody clicks your affiliate link and buys the product, Clickbank will pay you a percentage of every sale.

This is known as a commission.

You’ll earn around 50%-75% of every sale referred by you.

So if you sell a product for $100, you’ll earn between $50 – $75 on every sale.

So as you can see, it’s relatively simple.

The hardest part of the entire process is creating the website itself, but I’ll show you exactly how to do that in this blog post.

It’s easier than you think.

And that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing with clickbank.

And it’s exactly how I got started way back in 2012 and I’ve made a full time income with clickbank ever since.

Here’s My Complete Guide On How To Make Money With Clickbank Products Step By Step…

Step 1: Create an Account On Clickbank

Anyone can create an account on Clickbank and it’s completely free to do it.

To create an account on Clickbank, all you need to do, is simply head over to clickbank.com and click “sign up”:

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see this page:

Just simply fill out all the information and click submit.

You’ll then receive a confirmation email from clickbank that will look like this:

Once you’ve received that email, go back to your clickbank account and follow the set-up procedure.

First you’ll enter in your personal information:

Make sure you enter this correctly, this is your personal information.

Getting Paid

Next. you’ll enter in your bank account details:

Don’t worry, Clickbank is a completely legitimate company and they need this information so that they can pay you your Affiliate commissions that you earn.

Clickbank pay out every week by direct deposit into your bank account or Paypal account.

I usually get paid on a Wednesday.

As far as I’m aware, you can still also get paid with a physical check.

You can select how you want to be paid and how often directly inside your clickbank account.

Make sure the information you provide clickbank is correct, because this is how clickbank will pay you, if you enter your information incorrectly, it’s not going to get to you or even worse, it could get paid into somebody else’s bank account and some random person will profit from all your hard work. ouch!

So make sure it is correct and once you’re happy, move onto the next step…

Next. Enter in your Clickbank account information:

This is arguably one of the most important steps in the entire process.

This is where you’ll choose your clickbank user id or Clickbank ‘Nickname’.

This is your personal unique identifier to clickbank.

This is how clickbank will know who to correctly pay the commission to.

This ‘nickname’ is unique to you and once you’ve chosen it, you cannot change your clickbank nickname.

So choose wisely.

It can be anything up to 8 characters.

Once you’ve done these 3 steps, click “CREATE ACCOUNT”.

And that’s it, you’re now officially an affiliate on the clickbank product network!

Let’s move on to Step 2:

Step 2: Choose a Product To Promote

Clickbank has hundreds of products that you can promote for free as an affiliate.

When you choose a product, you’ll then promote it using your unique affiliate tracking link that clickbank gives you called a hoplink.

More on that in a moment.

But for now, let’s choose a good product to promote as an affiliate.

To do this head over to the clickbank marketplace:

https://clickbank.com/marketplace

You’ll know when you’re in the clickbank product marketplace because you”ll see a red index column in the left hand side:

These are all categories or Niche markets, that contain products within those categories, that you can promote as an affiliate marketer.

Choose a category that interests you.

Tip: The most profitable types of products I’ve found, fall into one of these 3 Niche markets:

Health eg: Nutrition, Weight loss, Bodybuilding.
Wealth eg: Making money online, Business, Investing, Stock Market.
Relationships eg: Dating, Marriage, Divorce.

You can download a full list of my most profitable markets/Niches here.

Once you’ve chosen a category or market you’re interested in, try to stick to one of the 3 topics I listed above.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to match up a good product to promote.

Choosing the right product to promote as an affiliate, is the most important step to make money with clickbank.

Get this wrong, and you’re doomed to failure.

Here’s how to do it…

When you first arrive at the clickbank marketplace you’ll see a red column with categories in the left hand side.

Choose one of the categories (as per instructions above).

For this example I’m going to choose Health& Fitness then ===> Diets and Weight Loss:

I can’t stress this enough, it’s critically important you choose a good product to promote as an affiliate.

Once you click into one of the product groups you’ll see the clickbank product directory list open up.

Here’s a filter trick, that not many newbie affiliates know about.

You’ll see on the left hand side some filters that clickbank give you, to narrow down on a good product to promote.

This is how you find the best products to promote as an affiliate.

You should apply the following filters or selection criteria, like this:

As you can see, we’ve assorted by:

Gravity and selected between 20-80.
Selected “Upsells” This means there are upgrades to this product to increase your affiliate commissions.
Made sure we’ve selected “affiliate tools page” – this means the vendor has provided affiliate tools that we can use directly as an affiliate OR get ideas from for how best to promote the product.

A quick word about Gravity…

Clickbank Gravity is Clickbank’s term for how popular a product is in their marketplace.

Gravity is the number of sales affiliates have made in the last 12 weeks.

The higher the number, the more popular it is.

The lower the number is least popular.

You can sort the product list in order of gravity:

Keep in mind we’ve set our filters to a minimum gravity of 20 and a maximum gravity of 80.

The reason for this is, I personally wouldn’t promote any product as a beginner in affiliate marketing with a gravity over 80.

It’s going to be far too competitive.

Anything over a gravity of 80, is where all the big super affiliates swim.

Choosing to promote a product over a clickbank gravity of 80 as a beginner, would be like jumping into a pool full of sharks.

And the reason I’ve got the minimum to a gravity of 20, is the product needs to have made at least some sales.

The sweet spot I’ve found, especially if you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing on clickbank is a gravity between 30 -50.

I’ve set it at 20-80 to that we have more variety to choose from.

And straight away, I can see an interesting product to promote:

Let’s take a closer look at some of the information we can see in this product listing, this is going to be valuable information to understand:

The product: The Cinderella Solution

It’s a weight loss program for women who want to lose weight or get in shape.

Average commission per sale: $51. This means, that if you promoted this product as an affiliate you’d make on average $51 per sale. Not bad.
Gravity is 65. Which exactly within our range. Remember, it has to be UNDER 80.
It has upsells. This means there are further opportunity to make affiliate sales and get paid for it.

It also has an affiliates Tools page.

This is where you’ll find banners and emails that you can use to send people who may be interested in this product:

To get your affiliate link for this product, you’d simply click the “promote” button on the listing and your affiliate link (or ‘hoplink’ as clickbank calls it) would look something like this:

This is UNIQUE to you.

All sales made through this link will be credited to you so that you get paid.

It’s very important that you use this link whenever you promote a product on clickbank, if you don’t, you won’t get paid.

So far, you’ve learned:

How to create an account on clickbank
How to choose a profitable product to promote.

Now it’s time for the next step:

Step 3: How To Promote Clickbank Affiliate Products

The beauty of clickbank, is you can choose how you want to promote your affiliate links.

You can do this with or without a website.

If you want to use your affiliates links without a website of your own, your best bet is leveraging social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Where the basic idea is, you share useful helpful information about your topic of interest and occasionally share your affiliate link.

When you do this, a certain amount of people you engage with on social media will click on your affiliate link and buy the product.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this method, I much prefer to have my own website.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, but here are the 2 main ones:

With my own website, I can leverage google traffic. Google is a search engine that get’s billions of searches per day. Hundreds of thousands of people search a wide range of topics every single day. And google traffic, via the search engines (known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short) is usually very profitable.
Having my own website, means I can build an email list. This means, I can follow up with them via email and make more affiliate sales.

Step 4: How To Create A Website For Affiliate Marketing

To create your own affiliate website, I recommend you use WordPress.

You’ll also need a domain name and web hosting to host your website.

What is a Domain Name?

A Domain name is the address of your website that people type in the browser URL bar to visit your website. In simple terms, if your website was a house, then your domain name will be its address.

You can buy a domain name for your website from a variety of places, but I recommend Namecheap, as the name suggests, they are cheap and very reliable.

I’ve used them for years.

You can pick up a domain name for about $8 dollars per year.

For web hosting, if you’re just starting out, I recommend Hostgator:

best web hosting for affiliate niche web sites

What is web hosting?

Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live.

Hostgator offer web hosting with a free website and your own installation of wordpress for just $2.75 per month.

You can use any web hosting you like, but if you’re an affiliate marketing beginner, I highly recommend them.

The important thing is, whatever web host you choose, you need to make sure they have 1-click WordPress install.

Hostgator have this and that’s why I recommend them.

You then need to choose a theme for your website.

For Affiliate Niche sites I recommend you choose something simple, clean and Search engine friendly (important).

I recommend this one. It’s called “Generate Press Theme” and it’s fantastic and fairly newbie friendly.

It has everything you need to create a good Niche affiliate website.

I’ve used it many times myself, so I can vouch for how good it is.

Once you’ve got your web hosting and you’ve installed WordPress and chosen a theme, you need to add the following pages to your website:

5-10 pages of informative content
An ‘about’ page
A contact page
A website privacy policy page
A website disclaimer page

Once you have these pages set up on your website, you’ll end up with a website that’s around 14 pages.

This is a good foundation for an affiliate site.

How to create 5-10 pages of content for Affiliate sites

There is an expression in internet marketing:

“Content is King”

And it’s true.

Content is going to be the driving force behind your clickbank commissions.

Here’s how to create the content…

Sticking with the weight loss affiliate product we chose on clickbank above, the Cinderella solution, I’d create 5 – 10 pages of informative content around keywords that somebody would type into google if they were looking for this product or looking to lose weight.

To find these keywords, I use a tool called Semrush:

You can get a free trial here.

Once you’ve signed up to Semrush, follow the steps below to find the keywords somebody might type into Google to find your website.

Semrush makes Keyword research really easy for Affiliate Marketers.

This is an overview of how you would find keywords related to weight loss and the product we are promoting using Semrush.

I could start with a term like “Weight Loss”.

But that’s too broad.

I like to start my keyword research that’s as close to the product I’m going to be promoting as an affiliate as possible.

So for this example, I’d probably open Semrush and select the “keyword magic” tool and from there, I would type in:

“Cinderella diet”

And see what sort of results came back.

I would then browse through the list of keywords that Semrush give me and pick out 5-10 good keywords.

Immediately here, I can 5 good enough keywords to write articles for:

I would write [one] 1,000 – 1,500 word article for each of the keywords I selected.

Pro tip: You don’t have to write these articles yourself, you can outsource this to a site like Fiverr.com. This is a freelancing website, where you can find pretty good writers that will write articles on just about every topic you can imagine, starting from just $5 bucks.

Once you’ve got your articles finished, you should strategically place your affiliate links within those articles, so that when somebody clicks on it and buys the product, you get a commission.

So far, we’ve:

Signed up to the Clickbank affiliate website and created an account.
Chosen a good Affiliate product to promote
Signed up to a good webhosting service and set up our website and pages.
Chosen some good keywords related to the product and created the articles.

Step 5: How To Get Visitors To Your New Affiliate Website and Make Money

In the online world, Visitors are called “traffic”.

So whenever you see me use the word ‘traffic’, I’m talking about visitors.

There are 2 main ways to get traffic to your website and affiliate links:

Free

Paid

Free traffic is things like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and social media, things like Twitter and Facebook.

I like SEO, which means ranking my website highly in Google, so that when someone types in certain keywords, my website shows up.

The image below is a basic overview how SEO for affiliate marketing generally works:

Another way to get traffic to your affiliate website so that you can make money is through Paid Ads:

This could be things like:

Banner Advertising
Google Search Ads
Google Display Ads
Facebook Ads

The concept here is, you pay for traffic.

Every time someone clicks your ad, you’ll pay for the click.

This is known as PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPC (Cost Per Click).

Both mean the same thing – you’re paying for a click.

The benefit of paying for traffic is, you can get traffic much faster than free traffic.

Here’s the basic concept of paid traffic:

affiliate marketing clickbank google ads

Conclusion…

In this article, I’ve shown you a few ideas for how to make money with clickbank as an affiliate marketer.

Clickbank is a great platform to get started making money as an affiliate marketer online.

I started affiliate marketing way back in 2012 using clickbank and I still use Clickbank to this day and I always recommend that if you’re new to affiliate marketing, it’s the best place to start.

Hopefully with some of the ideas I’ve opened up to you, you can now go and get started with very little overhead costs.

Just follow the 5 simple steps I’ve outlined in this article above.

Here’s the truth, achieving success as an affiliate marketer doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact most people who start affiliate marketing over complicate it and because of this, they just constantly spin their wheels and go nowhere.

The reality is, all you need is a good product to promote, a simple website and visitors.