I typically trash Clickbank as a low-quality garbage bin for discount digital products worth very little money, and even less of your time.
But the company is still alive and well, and in the digital info-product world I live in, people are still touting it as a great place to find things to promote for your affiliate business.
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I decided to investigate further to see not only if it’s still possible to make money on Clickbank, but if it’s actually possible to make honest money there.
- Are there any quality products on Clickbank worth promoting?
- Bad Product Examples
- Good Product Examples
- How much money can you make by promoting stuff from the CB marketplace?
- How to find high converting, high paying items with low return rates
- What does the future of Clickbank look like?
- A look inside my Clickbank earnings
- What Now? (How To Start Making Money With ANY Products Online)
How To Make Money On Clickbank
1) Are there any quality products on Clickbank worth promoting?
Yes, there are actually some good products worth promoting within the Clickbank marketplace.
Be aware though, you really need to dig.
And I mean really dig deep.
There is a lot of crap on Clickbank. How do you tell the good products from the bad? This is a matter of judgment, taste, and personal bias, but here are a few pointers.
- Upfront and honest sales pitch
- Short and to-the-point product description
- Informative with little or no hype
- Up to date information
Here are some examples of good and bad products I found in various niches.
Bad Products Examples
Good Products Examples
2) How much money can you make by promoting stuff from the CB marketplace?
The question of how much money is “possible” to make gets asked the most.
Of course, there’s no real good answer to that, because it depends on a lot of variables. You can make anything from zero dollars, up to tens of thousands of dollars per month.
For me personally, I don’t make that much from Clickbank, and never have. I take in about $100 per month. It isn’t impressive, but I’ll explain more about my stats below.
Other people swear by this marketplace, and a lot of “how to make money” products are based solely on using Clickbank. To them, Clickbank is the foundation of their business despite the fact that there are thousands of other affiliate programs out there.
In this sense, Clickbank is kind of a relic of the past. Affiliate programs are so diverse nowadays, that you are not restricted to only promoting digital products. Physical products are just as easy to buy online these days!
Plus, as more people start shopping online every year, it’ll get easier and easier to convert them to sales.
3) How to find high converting, high paying items with low return rates
You can find this information right in the little blurb about each product.
- Initial $/sale: How much money you make for each sale
- Avg %/sale: The percent commission you make of total cost
- Avg Rebill Total: If there is a recurring payment, the average total of all rebilled commissions
- Avg %/rebill: If there is a recurring payment, the percent commission you make
- Grav: How many affiliates have made commissions in the last 12 days
A high commission, recurring payments, and a high gravity is what you want to look for. Be sure to watch out for that gravity! I found more that one product with HUGE commissions and rebills, but a super low gravity. It was several years old and obviously no longer popular.
This will also depend on your niche of course, and your particular audience. You are the expert, so think about what your audience wants, and find a product to match them. Here is a popular product that can be used for many niches.
Further Product & Niche Research
Even with all these combined factors, you still need to know if this product is worth promoting. You need to investigate a few things.
- The product itself (is it good)
- Keyword ideas & metrics
- Competition from other affiliate websites
Very often you’ll find fake reviews from other affiliates that make a product sound awesome, but it will probably be clear that they never tried it. To find out if a product is worth promoting, you can actually buy it (if you have a budget), or you can look for legit reviews from non-marketers or high-quality marketers.
This research process is a good way to review products without having tried them yourself.
4) What does the future of Clickbank look like?
I think Clickbank is going to be around for a while. Digital information products, membership sites, PDF guides, and other information that can be bought and sold on the internet is only going to grow.
I give CB a hard time because I work in the internet marketing industry so I see hyped and misleading products all the time. Doing research for this post though, I did find a few goodies in the marketplace.
There are other marketplaces out there, but they are in a lot worse shape than CB. Clicksure and JVZoo are two examples. My advice is to avoid Clicksure, but JVZoo has some good stuff as well.
Bonus: A look inside my Clickbank earnings
I don’t actively promote any Clickbank products these days, but when I got started with affiliate marketing, I followed the crowd and promoted some Clickbank stuff. Here are my earnings from that period.
I pulled in about $600 for the first half of 2011 (my first year at CB) and $1500 for the year 2012. For the following year (2013), I earned about $800. These numbers are not impressive, of course, but they are the earnings of a fresh affiliate marketer.
As I got more disillusioned with Clickbank products, I promoted things less and less. For 2014 I pulled in $1,000 for the year, but it was mostly from random sales and not an income I could count on.
I didn’t work on these websites anymore but was happy to take in a random grand for the year. I do absolutely zero work on these websites except to update them, which means I make about $1000 per hour promoting Clickbank products!
Don’t take that as a green light to rush over and start promoting info-products through! Though you can still make money on Clickbank, as I have demonstrated here today, it’s not any easier than any other affiliate marketing setup.
Promote products you like and understand is my main bit of advice. Pick a niche you are interested in, then find products to fit that niche, rather than the other way around. That’s my advice to newbies, at least.
For more experienced marketers, you may find you have the patience and tenacity to see a project through to profitability, even if you’re not passionate about the topic. However, for most people new to making money online, it’s a real struggle to put in the daily hours selling boner pills when you aren’t really sure if this whole “affiliate marketing” thing works or not.
Not sure what to promote? Here are some affiliate program reviews to get you started.
What Now? (How To Start Making Money ANY Products Online)
I know my Clickbank earnings were pretty poor, but I actually make a full-time income promoting other affiliate programs. I just found that most of what was on CB wasn’t my style, and there was too much junk to sort through.
Don’t be limited by what you find in the Clickbank marketplace. There’s a whole other world out there.
There are literally thousands of other affiliate programs out there with physical and/or digital products for you to promote. Clickbank is just one affiliate network and has a very limited number of things to promote.
I started out as a newbie in 2010, and quit my job in 2012. Now I spend my days helping other people on their own businesses. If you want to start a new online business or have an existing one you need help with, you can get 1-on-1 support from ME! All you need to do is join the same online business training center where I learned to build my first business.
Make Money on Clickbank
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Final Review
There are thousands of different side hustles you could do to earn some extra money on the side, and which one "clicks" for you depends on your personality and goals. However, there's one side hustle that makes an insane amount of money and works for anyone.
Starting an affiliate website is an incredible way to earn extra money because you can do it from your home on a laptop, and work on your business in the evenings and on weekends. The income potential is huge, and it's easy to scale
Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
Craigslist + Fiverr Arbitrage – Is This A Legit Online Business Model?
Tanay Kumar Das
The use of a website to promote your affiliate products is a good idea but it is not necessary.
You can use the alternate methods to promote your affiliate products and links.
The most popular among these methods are email marketing, writing to forums, article writing and offline promotion like classified ads.
The main idea is that instead of promoting your website you will directly promote your affiliate links and people will directly go to the merchant website by clicking your affiliate links to purchase the products.
This way you do not have to pay extra for your website creation and maintenance.
Nathaniell
If you are doing email marketing, where are you subscribers coming from? You still need traffic, and if you aren’t going to pay for it, you need free traffic. How are you going to get free traffic? With a website.
And no, you cannot promote affiliate links in blogs, and goooooooooood luck promoting affiliate links in classified ads.
I really don’t know what you’re talking about, not needing a website to run successful affiliate campaigns.
GM
I don’t believe I have ever bought a ClickBank product that provided the information that it promised to provide. Folks do a little bit of research, write an little eBook about it containing a lack of details, very little if any usable information, or just being a light overview while promising to provide “secrets” or a “complete detailed system”, and so on.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought into the hype of some sales page, spent days reading the copy over and over again to ensure I understood what I was supposed to be receiving, read the guarantee to ensure what I was getting into, and then after filling out the order form and clicking the order button found myself in a “sales funnel” being offered another more expensive “add-on” that would somehow make the “complete system” complete and saying without the additional purchase the information I would be receiving would not be effective… then, after clicking “no thank you, I’d rather not get the results I would get if I spent this extra money” malarkey, finding another sales page for another add-on, and so on…, sometimes having to get through a half dozen or more of these additional attempts to get more cash out of my pocket, with each additional sales attempt causing my frustration level to rise even higher, before finally arriving at a page saying my order was complete, and telling me that download information would be send to me soon in an email…
Sometimes the download link wouldn’t be sent or was a bad link and I’d have to contact Clickbank for a refund because of that, which would take like 3 or 4 days to be processed and to finally arrive.
On occasions when I did actually receive a product, rarely, I dare say never has it been what was promised, and has always been a very poorly written ebook or series of ebooks written apparently by some kid in his bedroom, or being general information and nothing special at all, and certainly not fulfilling anything the marketing material claimed it would provide.
Clickbank products for areas and subjects that I have been interested in and purchased have always been very cheap, poor quality products despite their sales pages claiming they were far more substantial, far more detailed, would provide information that was not readily available, and would provide secrets and hard to find information that would provide effective results very quickly. The have never been anything of the sort.
So, it’s no wonder that there are such high refund rates on Clickbank, as most people who create products are certainly not “experts” by any stretch of the meaning of the word, and usually are not very good authors either.
The products on ClickBank are usually produced by people who are just trying to cash in on “information marketing” after buying someone else’s product about the subject and being told “anyone” can be successful selling cheap little ebooks that take about 10 minutes to create and allow you to get paid over and over and over again for years, and get rich for doing very little work.
THAT’s why it’s so hard to find quality products with low refund rates on ClickBank.
Needing to find a way to get some money coming in myself after falling on hard times years ago, I read up a lot on the subject and watched a lot of YouTube videos on affiliate marketing and selling information products online. I also spent a LOT of time searching through the ClickBank Marketplace trying to find something of good quality with a high gravity score, good initial commission, and reasonable rebill rates, and just got burned out from the exhausting, tedious exercise….
Over the years, I’ve signed up as an affiliate on a number of sites, sometimes even for companies with physical products, but the whole process of following the restrictions they would have on where you were allowed to advertise, or their total lack of guidance or support for affiliates made it impossible to deal with trying to figure out how to get traffic without paying a ton of money for Google Ads, Adsense, Facebook Ads, etc. Even the Article Marketing that used to be free started charging to post articles… and putting up a blog or a website without driving traffic to it is as good as having no site at all. Of course, I also became a SEO “expert” at one point, and learned how to analyze other top ranking websites and blogs for keywords and keyword density, backlinks and so on, which was a lot of time and effort, and managed to get the credit card advisor site and blog I was promoting on the first page of Google, and still got $0 in sales…
I also looked into some mentorship programs and found they were ridiculously expensive… not as if they would take a percentage of sales as they started helping you make money or anything… but they wanted their $450 – $2k right up front, granting you “lifetime access and support” but with no guarantee you’d actually ever sell anything or ever make a penny as a result of their course or support. A couple of supposed “mentor” type of programs that I did purchase a few years ago were so slow moving, and written at about the level of a 3rd grader, after weeks they were still talking about very, very basic things and always bragging out how graduates of their course were making thousands of dollars a week to keep dangline the carrot in front of you and keep you enrolled… but at the rate they were providing the information it would probably have taken 2 years before you ever had a site up and any kind of web presence at all… much less products to offer… it was all generalities and look at all the success others are having…
So, to be quite frank, my head just starts spinning now whenever I start reading about affiliate marketing because no matter what I start reading, I always find I’m spending hours and hours reading, and not learning anything that’s actually teaching me anything or that will actually help me get started making any money, and when I search for products to promote it’s always cheap information products that have high refund rates….
What I need to learn about is how to actually advertise physical products that can be drop shipped and advertised on eBay or Amazon. But so far, that information has not been easy to get either. When I sell physical products on eBay or Amazon, I never have any returns and have a 100% feedback rating on both, but sales are sporadic, only the occasional item I have to sell here and there, and that does not pay the bills or provide any kind of additional income, really.
V
agreeeeeeeeed