In this Clickbank affiliate review, I am going to look at why the Clickbank platform is so popular, who can sign up and whether it is even worth your time and effort to join.
Whether you are brand new to the world of affiliate marketing or a seasoned expert and running several successful websites, you have most likely heard or read somewhere that using Clickbank’s affiliate program could help you monetize your affiliate marketing business and help you earn more revenue.
Unless you have been under a rock within the affiliate marketing space, you have certainly heard of Clickbank.
What Is The Clickbank Affilaite Program
In the most basic terms, the Clickbank affiliate program is a platform that allows you to earn commissions in return for referring people to Clickbank through your website or some social media.
Clickbank has a global presence as an online retailer, provides secure payment processing, provides tracking and payouts and is a very large affiliate network with a variety of both digital products and physical products.
Vendors can create these products and customers purchase these products through Clickbank’s secure order form. Then through the Clickbanks affiliate program, affiliates can promote vendor’s products and earn commissions at a commission rate that can be as high as u.
Why Is The Clickbank Affiliate Program So Popular
As I mentioned above, if you are in the affiliate marketing space you have certainly heard of clickbank, but what makes it so popular? I believe, the popularity of the Clickbank platform is due to several reasons.
For new affiliate marketers getting approved for an affiliate network can be a bit of a challenge. This is normally because most of these newcomers either have brand new websites that are not receiving a lot of traffic yet, or they don’t even have a website. The good new is, even with little or no traffic, you can get approved to join the Clickbank affiliate program. It is simply a matter of following the Clickbank policies.
The nice thing about Clickbank is you do not need any minimum amount of sales to remain a Clickbank affiliate. This is different from many other affiliate networks, including Amazon.
The application process is very straightforward and simple to follow,
and approval is often granted within 24 hours of application, if not sooner.
There are no requirements such as a fully established website or a minimum of sales generated like other affiliate networks. This is one of the many reasons why Clickbank is so popular.
Another reason Clickbank is so popular is that they have a huge variety of affiliate products to promote. As you can see by the image below, there are 22 different categories to date to select from. Each of these categories has a host of products to choose from. This list keeps growing as new vendors enter the arena as more and more products are created. As I mentioned before, these include both digital products and well as physical products.
Clickbank Does Lack in The Area of Training
Although Clickbank offers a huge variety of digital and physical products for affiliate marketers to promote, they rely on the individual vendors to supply the training to promote their individual programs. Whether that be an ebook, supplement, or video series.
The problem, however, is that the training that is offered by the individual vendors is lacking quite a bit. They may offer you tools like banners, email swipes, or, if they are a really good vendor, they may offer you a free giveaway book or something like that.
But, for the most part the training is bare minimum. They tend to rely on the affiliates own expertise when it comes to marketing. The good news is we offer an excellent step by step guide in affiliate marketing that will teach you how to promote, not only Clickbank products, but any affiliate product as well. It is free training and, all though it is free, it is filled with value.
Click on the image below to get free access to this free step by step guide to in affiliate marketing. This is great training!
Who Can Join The Clickbank Affiliate Program
Clickbank is a top 100 online retailer with about 200 million customers worldwide. Their digital products are created by entrepreneurs worldwide and include anywhere from dating advice, advice for getting in shape to healthy cooking recipes. Plus these digital products are delivered to customers in 190 countries worldwide!
This being said, because Clickbank operates globally, you can join the affiliate program from just about anywhere. Unlike Amazon, there is only one site to sign up from regardless of what country you are in.
There are only four easy steps to become a Clickbank affiliate:
- Set up your Clickbank affiliate account. Signing up as an affiliate is easy. …
- Find a product to market as an affiliate. From the homepage, click on the Marketplace tab. …
- Get your affiliate hoplink. …
- Get paid for any affiliate sales
So, basically, anyone can join the Clickbank Affiliate Program. There is a huge low entry barrier to this affiliate program and, of course it’s free.
Can You Really Make Money With the Clickbank Affiliate Program?
So, can you really make money with Clickbank. Heck yeah!
Unlike the Amazon Associates program, which only pays between 4 to 10%, Clickbanks pays up to u percent commissions on their digital products. The profit margin in huge.
Not only that, but many of the programs are membership based, which means they payout monthly recurring commissions as well. In fact, when I look for a good Clickbank product to promote that is one of the criteria that I look for in selecting affiliate products through Clickbank.
The other thing that is nice about Clickbank is the fact that you can choose products based on certain criteria that let you know whether there is a good chance that the product will sell on the marketplace or not. These criteria or metrics are categorized as follows:
- Popularity
- Avg $/sale
- Initial $/sale
- Average re bill Total
- Average %/Rebill
- Gravity
Most of these are self-explanatory, except for Gravity, which is what most Clickbank affiliates focus on. So, what is gravity?
According to the Clickbank website, gravity is the number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by promoting the vendor’s products during the past 12 weeks. It is a numerical value that can be from 0 to over 400. It is not exactly understood how it is really calculated, but it does represent how popular it is according to affiliates. I usually make a gravity of 20 or higher the metric to use when selecting a good product.
The thing about gravity is that it represents distinct affiliates, meaning if one affiliate sells the product a number of times, it only counts as one. This way, this number represents the actual number of affiliates generating sales as apposed to having a super affiliate skew the results. So, the higher the number, the more of a chance the product will sell. This is an indication that the sales page is doing its job pulling in sales.
Another selection criteria, of course, should be its relation to the niche you are interested in or the niche of your website, if you have one.
So, to really answer the question, can you really make money with the Clickbank Affiliate program, take a look at the screenshot below for potential commissions.
This product, Organifi, is from the Health and Fitness category within Clickbank. According to the Vendors spot lite, the average dollar generated per sale is $76.17. It does have a monthly subscription, so the average subscription commission is $298.38. This is a total, so it is based on the total amount made, not how long it has been made for. If someone cancels their subscription, you no longer earn from it.
That brings us to % per rebill, of 43% which means that 43% of the customers take the subscription, so you can earn per month on this one product. The gravity is 67.07 which means 67.07 individual affiliates made at least one sale within a 12-week period. This gives you an idea of how likely it would be for you to make a commission.
So, as you can see, people do make money with the Clickbank Affiliate program.
Pros and Cons of the Clickbank Affiliate Program
There are a lot more pros than cons with this program, but there are still a few.
Pros:
- Easy to Sign up
- Easy to get accepted as an affiliate
- Trustworthy platform for affiliates
- Huge number of niches available to choose from (not as much as Amazon, but higher commissions)
- High affiliate commissions, especially for digital products
Cons:
- Easy vendor qualification, so you have to be somewhat choosier when it comes to selecting quality products.
- Customers are not as familiar with Clickbank compared to Amazon.
Clickbank Affiliate Review – Final thoughts
We saw that affiliates do indeed make money selling Clickbank affiliate products. But, how do affiliates typically sell Clickbank products. What platform do they used to house their affiliate promotions and how do they drive traffic to their affiliate offers?
As shown above in the categories section of Clickbank, each category can represent a complete niche. Many Clickbank affiliates will build a niche website based around one of these categories and then promote those products within the given category that relates to their niche.
You see it is all about relevancy. Their niche website can be about green products, for example, and then they can write articles about why it’s important to “go green”. Or they can write “how to” articles on how to go green in certain aspects of daily life. They can even write about growing “green” or organic produce and that can open up a whole new idea or line of products to sell on their website.
All of this said, one needs learning and understand what it takes to become a successful affiliate marketer so that they can take advantage of the very high commissions that the Clickbank affiliate program offers. One such training I highly recommend is the Wealthy Affiliate University. They, not only provide the training, but they supply all the necessary tools and hosting as well.
Driving traffic to your Clickbank Affiliate links is done by ranking their individual articles, pages and posts on the first page of the search engines as well as placing ads through Google, YouTube and a variety of other traffic sources. All of these affiliate marketing strategies are taught at Wealthy Affiliate. Also, click the banner below to access our free online affiliate marketing training learning how the pros make a killing as a Clickbank Affiliate, or any other affiliate program for that matter.