Can You Still Make Money on Clickbank?

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.

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.

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!