When we first heard about ClickBank, we thought it sounded kind of like a scam – boy were we wrong.
It was hard to believe that anyone could make an income linking to products in this huge marketplace. But it’s true – people do make money doing just that.
Even we have started adding some ClickBank sites to our online assets portfolio, and we’re pleased to say that it’s going well. Because of this, we’re going to tell you how to make your first ClickBank sale.
We’ll jump right in by telling you more about our experience with ClickBank.
Don’t have time to read the article? You can watch us talk about ClickBank instead by clicking the thumbnail below.
Our ClickBank Story
A Modest Beginning
We started years ago with a ClickBank offer for a dog training course. It was the very first offer we ever chose.
At the time, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We had purchased a digital marketing course that taught us how to make a landing page and thought that was enough. So we set up the landing page, starting using paid Facebook ads, and wrote emails in an effort to get people to buy this dog training course.
This first attempt, as you might have guessed, was a failure. We spent all this time and money, only to get zero sales.
Obviously, we couldn’t keep doing that, because we were paying for traffic and getting absolutely nothing in return. Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot since then, and our second attempt has been way more successful.
Trying Again (and Succeeding This Time)
As we mentioned, we made a second ClickBank site, now that we know a lot more about how to make it work. We’re pleased to report that it’s been going extremely well.
Every week now, we’ve been checking our ClickBank numbers, and they keep rising. We recently hit over $350 in one month.
There are a few things that are different this time around. Aside from having a better understanding of how to put together sites people will visit, we’re partnered with someone else on this project.
Our partner was a former talented writer of ours. She left for another job opportunity, but we didn’t want to lose contact completely because she was so good at what she did. Because of this, we reached out to her and asked if she’d like to work with us on this project.
Fortunately, she agreed to partner with us, so we set up the website. Then we set her up with a Canva account and gave her a list of keywords to write about. She writes for the site for free, but gets half of the profits in return.
We’ve realized that ClickBank is very easy. It provides you with an abundant market of offers to choose from, but it’s up to you to figure out how you’ll get people to buy them.
Now that we’ve had success with ClickBank, we’ll share with you in more detail the steps that we followed and the changes that we made.
How to Make Your First ClickBank Sale
Choose your product on ClickBank.
The core of your business model as a ClickBank affiliate is marketing promotions from ClickBank. That means you’ll have to start on ClickBank.com.
Once you’ve created an account and logged into it, you’ll see a bunch of red categories on the left side. These are what you’ll go through to look for your promotions.
Deciding which products to promote is up to you, but we do have some guidelines. We recommend sticking to products where you won’t make less than $20 on a sale, for starters.
Whether or not a promotion has an average rebill cost is worth considering, too. If you see a product with an average rebill cost, it means it’s something buyers enroll in and pay renewal costs for. You’ll get portions of these renewal costs each time the customer pays them.
Last, make sure you take time to look at the websites for your potential products. Stay away from those with sloppy sites that don’t look like they took a lot of effort to make. As a rule of thumb, try to imagine whether or not you’d ever buy the product when you look at it.
If you look at their site and it repels you, it’s safe to assume it would repel your readers, too.
We get really in-depth on the topic of choosing a promotion in our beginner’s ClickBank guide here. (Link to ClickBank affiliate beginner guide – hasn’t been published yet)
Conduct some keyword research.
With a product in mind, you’re going to need to start thinking of how you’re going to get people to your site. Of course, you’ll have articles on your site, but how do you decide what exactly to write about?
That comes from key words. Your keywords will serve basically as prompts that will shape the article you write.
You should find problem-centered keywords that your product could be the answer to. You can think of it as reverse engineering.
Instead of sitting there and thinking of problems first, you’re choosing a product or the solution to the problem. Then you think about the problems that your product would solve.
That’s where ClickBank affiliate sites really differ from Amazon affiliate ones. When you’re an Amazon affiliate, you search for keywords related to products, and not for questions your product could be the answer for. You can learn more about that particular business model here.
As a root to your keyword, we recommend using the phrases “how to” and “why won’t.” Your article will form around the key words that grow from these roots.
You can also combine your research with the keyworld golden ratio (KGR) method. We’ve used this method with a degree of success, as well.
Familiarize yourself with Google’s autocomplete suggestions because that’s where you’ll be doing your research. You’ll find the majority (if not all) of your keywords that way.
As an example, pretend the product you’re marketing is a stain remover. You would go to Google, then type in “how to remove a stain from” and see what pops up.
We usually take it further and type in “how to remove a stain a/b/c” and work down the alphabet one letter at a time, pulling out keywords that seem the most promising.
Build content around the long-tailed keywords you find.
After you’ve identified a list of keywords (we recommend around 20-30), you’re ready to start writing articles. This is the content people will come to your site for.
You’ll sprinkle in links to the product you chose on ClickBank in your articles. You should do so in a way that looks natural and not like you’re spamming your readers.
Another thing you should do is organize your articles so they have headings and subheadings. This breaks them up so your readers aren’t forced to look at giant blocks of text.
At the end of the article, you can include a wrap up section or a conclusion. You can weave in your promotion at this point by saying something to the effect of, “If you’d like to find out more about the most effective way to remove stains, check out this stain remover.” That’s where you’d link to your product.
Aside from that, just write naturally. Organize your articles well and write in a way that feels appropriate.
Following these guidelines, our own ClickBank site has been doing great. We haven’t even built a single link to it yet, and it’s still getting hundreds of visits daily.
Getting free traffic.
One of the biggest issues with our very first ClickBank site (the one about the dog training course) is that we were paying for traffic.
Overall, the profit margins for ClickBank promotions are so low, you won’t want to invest a whole bunch of money into paid traffic. We’ve been there and done that before, and it just doesn’t work out for this business model.
You should be searching for methods that get you traffic for free. This can include social media accounts like Pinterest and writing good, informative articles with your keywords as titles.
Wrap Up
Although it can seem like a massive undertaking at first, building your own assets online is actually fairly simple.
Regardless of which business model you go with, the beginning is usually the same: starting with your offer, finding out how you’re going to get traffic, and then putting the right people in front of your offer. It’s an easy strategy to get sales no matter what your chosen method is.
Still, sometimes you just need a little extra guidance. If you’re feeling stuck, we’ve got a few ways of getting you the help you need.
You can get a membership to our Elite Fleet here. With the membership, you’ll get access to a server with many of our students on it, as well as a private channel with both of us for one-on-one assistance.
Ask us anything you want about ClickBank!
If you’d prefer to look at resources yourself, you can sign up for our free Online Assets Playbook or our detailed Instant eCommerce Assets course.