0

How to Make Money With Clickbank in 2020: A Definitive Guide

So, you’re looking at how to make money with Clickbank? I’m going to show you one of the easiest and most profitable ways to do it… we’re talking making money as soon as today!

Quick Guide:

• What is Clickbank?
• Is Clickbank Legit?
• How Does Clickbank Work?
• How To Make Money With Clickbank: Step-By-Step?
• Choosing A Product To Promote On Clickbank
• Spy on The Top Clickbank Affiliates
• How to Maximize Your Clickbank Affiliate Profits?
• Launching your Clickbank affiliate campaign on RevContent
• Drilling down into the Profit Zone
• How to Make Money with Clickbank Conclusion?

Setting up this particular method took me just 60 minutes. Once my ads were approved I was off to the races!

With the combination of a solid Clickbank offer that converts like crazy, ads you know are working, and a traffic source with quality visitors, it makes it easy.

And better still, as of right now… no-one is teaching this that I know of!

All the “gurus” are teaching “how to make money with Clickbank using Facebook ads”… whilst I and a few others are KILLING it with Clickbank affiliate marketing with this method.

This method is so simple, with no risk of losing ad accounts or paying crazy high ad costs!

OK, let’s start with a brief intro to Clickbank for beginners, and then we can really get into how to make money with ClickBank.

What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is an affiliate marketing program, and quite possibly the largest marketplace for digital products (ebooks, online videos, etc).

There’s a huge library of categories and products on the marketplace. Everything from health to education, to cooking and anything else you can think of.

It allows both vendors to place their products on the marketplace, as well as allowing affiliates to easily promote these products and earn an affiliate commission for each sale they refer.

Some of the top Clickbank affiliates make well over $10,000+ a day from promoting Clickbank products.

Is Clickbank Legit?

Absolutely, it’s 100% legit for all 3 parties: Vendors, affiliates, and most importantly customers.

The reason why there’s a little bit of doubt around Clickbank is due to the type of products they used to accept on the platform. It used to be extremely easy to add a product to the marketplace which meant a lot of over-hyped products which were mostly all fluff and no value made it through to the marketplace. This resulted in high refund rates and bad press on those particular products which reflected upon Clickbank.

That being said, Clickbank has always honoured the customer. They hold a % of vendor revenue and affiliate commissions for a 60 day period to allow for refunds.

How Does Clickbank Work?

Clickbank allows vendors to add their products to the Clickbank marketplace.

It then allows affiliates to easily promote products on the marketplace. The vast majority are publicly open to be promoted, all you need is a link. However, some products require a previous relationship with the vendor or filling out a form with details on how you plan to promote the product.

Once you have a product to promote, you can start driving visitors to your affiliate links.

Clickbank also acts as the payment processor, so there’s no need to worry about the vendor not fully disclosing sales or commissions earned through your affiliate links.

As an affiliate, your first payment from Clickbank will be the Wednesday 2 weeks after you cross your payout threshold (usually $100). Then as long as you keep making affiliate commissions, you can select to be paid weekly, every Wednesday.

As mentioned, Clickbank will withhold a % of your commissions in case any refunds come in. After the refund period, they’ll release those funds.

How To Make Money With Clickbank: Step-By-Step

Just a quick heads up. This is not somehow to make money with Clickbank fast method so if you’re looking to become a millionaire by this time tomorrow, sorry this isn’t what you’re looking for! However, if you want to learn a real, actionable, proven method to bank huge profits long-term, then strap yourself in!

The first thing you need to do is create an account or login to the Clickbank affiliate program.

Choosing A Product To Promote On Clickbank

Once you’re in, you need to find a Clickbank product to promote from the marketplace.

Then, you’ll see a wide range of categories on the left-hand side – if you already have an audience in a certain niche or category then feel free to check out those.

However, for this specific method, I really recommend looking in the top 20 most popular Clickbank products right now.

To do that, simply click the magnifying glass leaving the search bar empty…

You’ll then be looking at all the Clickbank products on the marketplace stacked in order of popularity, and this is exactly what we want to look at.

We want a product that we know is selling well, with a good number of affiliates pushing it – there’s a reason why they are promoting it… because they’re making money.

Usually, the top 20 will be made up of predominantly weight loss products, diabetes products, and survival or renewable energy products.

As of right now, the top 3 are Resurge (weight loss supplement), Leptitox (weight loss supplement), and Lost Book of Remedies (survival).

So, we have an idea of what products are hot right now… the next thing we want to do is find out how other affiliates are promoting these products. We want to find their ads and landing pages, the reason why is we want to be able to get a good head start and give ourselves the best chance of hitting that lovely green profit right off the bat!

Spy on the Top Clickbank Affiliates

Alright, so let’s use the Leptitox product as an example.

Most products come with an Affiliate resources page where you can find different tools like banners, email swipes, keywords, etc. 9 times out of 10 there’s nothing that we can really use for this method apart from getting ideas.

What we do is take the domain of the product we’re spying so in this case leptitox dot com (simply just click the offer name and the sales page will open up).

And we head over to my #1 recommended spy tool – Adplexity Use code: thomas_owen_80 for an $80 discount.

As soon as we get inside Adplexity I want to see exactly what other affiliates are running to the Leptitox offer.

So, we need to select ‘By Advertiser’ in the top right, and then select ‘all of the above’ from the dropdown, then paste the offered domain into the search box like in the image below.

Then hit search…

In the top right there’s another dropdown which by default will say ‘Newest’… change that to ‘Received most traffic’. Now all of the ads running across the native ad platforms that are promoting the Leptitox Clickbank offer will be displayed and sorted by the most traffic received.

This is awesome, as we basically have the exact ads and landing pages that we KNOW other top Clickbank affiliates are spending a decent amount of money on. And we know one other thing… you would not spend money if you weren’t making money back!

What I personally like to do, is look through each of the top 10-20 ads. I’m looking at the banners they are running, and also the landing pages. Whilst also looking at some important stats like the device types they are running on.

Let’s take a quick look…

So, we can see exactly what type of images are working. Now, it’s important to point out, that the traffic source I use and talk about in this method does not allow the close-ups of stomachs so they are a no-no. However other native platforms do allow them hence why they are there.

Another no-no on the traffic source we’re going to be using is running supplements that have not been listed with the FDA. However, where there’s a will, there’s a way. As you can see there’s plenty of affiliates running supplement offers on native ads including our traffic source we will be using.

How do they do it? Well, they use a tracking tool (more on that later), and they setup their offer as a product that is allowed. As soon as their ads are approved they switch the offer to the supplement. All done inside their tracker without having to resend the ads in for approval.

Now, keep in mind that does not keep you 100% safe, it’s not hard for their team to go back through your ads a few days later and spot you’re up to no good. Fortunately, unlike Facebook, chances are you won’t be banned and instead will have your ads disapproved instead.

Anyway, back to how to make money with Clickbank with native ads.

I’m looking at all the weird fruit/vegetable drinks, and the lady in green (side not: that lady in green right there is responsible for several thousands of dollars of profit for me).

I like to take 5-10 banners and put them into my little swipe file on my desktop.

I’m also looking at the headlines that are running. I usually take 1 of the top headlines I find and then write my own headline to test.

Now we have at least 5 banners and 2 headlines ready to use, now we need a landing page.

I click each of the top ads that I’m looking at from the image above and check out there landing pages seen below.

Now we can see all the landing pages each ad has been running to, and better still we can stack them up and sort them by the number of days they’ve been running. Any serious affiliate is using a tracker (more on that in a second), and will be testing multiple landing pages as you can see above. So any landing pages that have been running the longest are usually going to be their most profitable pages.

What we can do now is base our landing page on theirs.

This requires either coding knowledge (I’m useless with coding), or a landing page builder (there’s a ton: clickfunnels, instapage, unbounce, leadpages to name a few)

I use Convertri. It’s by far the fastest landing page builder, with lightning load times and I don’t think it’s ever been down which is hard to say about some of their competitors. It also has some very nifty tools and features which are not available with any other landing page builders to my knowledge… like a page importer, which allows you to import any web page by just grabbing the URL even if you don’t own that page (although it clearly states it’s not for that purpose and you must own the page).

Anyway, if you want to check out Convertri, you can go here and get a 14 day free trial. As well as that I will send you my 5 best converting landing pages for affiliate offers as a bonus (just send me your receipt to thomas@myonlinehustle.com).

Convertri seems a little daunting at first, but once you spend 15 minutes playing around it’s actually very easy.

Here’s a landing page that I’m using right now in my campaigns (it’s also one of the bonus pages I’ll be including if you sign up to Convertri here)

As you can see, nothing crazy. It’s a very simple landing page made up of a headline, sub-headline with call-to-action, a before and after image, a brief overview, and then another call-to-action. It works really well, with a high click through rate and great conversion rate on the offer.

You can whip up something like this in a few minutes with a landing page builder.

Then we’ll want to install and scripts and pixels you may have. I use google tag manager which houses my Facebook pixel, google remarketing, heatmapping, etc. The reason I have my Facebook pixel and Google remarketing tags in there is in case I start to promote on those platforms. I have now started to promote on Facebook, and I already have a good amount of data on my Facebook pixel from the traffic I’ve been sending from the native platform. Anyway, more on this in the next section.

We’ll also need to add our affiliate links, I do this using a tracking system and highly recommend you do as well, and we’ll be touching on how to do this in the next section.

One other thing you will need is a domain. I recommend quite a generic domain that allows you to test multiple offers and niches without having to get a new domain for each niche you promote an offer in. Something like: dailyconsumer.com will do just fine.

As you’re most likely using a landing page builder, you won’t need hosting unless you’re planning on building a blog (another post about that coming soon). Your landing page builder should allow you to point the domain at their hosting servers.

OK, so we have our ads and landing page ready to go, it’s now time to setup the tracker.

How to maximize your Clickbank affiliate profits

Now, this in my opinion is essential!

Yet I see so many affiliates not using this, and even the so-called “gurus” that even teach how to make money with Clickbank forget about this.

What is… this? Tracking!

If you’re running any amount of volume of paid traffic then you really need to be tracking. You need to track every step of the flow.

• Tracking landing pages (split testing headlines, images, call-to-actions, etc)
• Tracking ads (which images and headlines are returning the highest ROI)
• Tracking offers (if there are similar offers then you could test each one so 50% of traffic goes to offer #1 and the other 50% goes to offer #2)
• Tracking device types, OS name, browser (now you can get really granular, maybe desktop traffic is profitable but mobile traffic is negative)
• Tracking day of the week and time of the day (noticed that Mondays and Saturdays are always negative… cut them off and maximize your profit)
• And literally tons more that you can track to really drill down and maximize your profits.

I use a tracking tool called Binom. There are many different trackers out there, I’ve used a few and can say Binom is by far the easiest one I’ve used. Plus their support team is second to none.

You can grab a free month of Binom by signing up through this link here. If you do happen to go through this link, I’ll be sending you my detailed walkthru video of how I setup my tracking campaigns for maximum profits from the start!

Once you have Binom or a tracker setup, it’s as simple as adding an A record in your domain provider and pointing it to your tracking tool IP address.

Then simply add your landing page URL as a lander, add your affiliate link as an offer, and then create your campaign. It really is that simple.

I will point out that in order for the Binom tracker to track conversions for Clickbank, it does require you reaching out to Binom support, they take care of everything and will have it setup in a couple of minutes flat!

Next, we need to place our Facebook pixel inside Clickbank. Again, why are we doing this when we aren’t even using Facebook ads? Because maybe we will in the future and like I already mentioned… I just launched my Facebook ad campaigns, and if I have a pixel with visitors and purchase data already on that pixel, I get a huge headstart.

As you can see, head to ‘Vendor Settings’ and then ‘My Site’. Then scroll down until you see the ‘Integrated Sales Reporting’ section. You should see a red button saying ‘Add Tracking Code’. Select that and from the dropdown choose Facebook pixel. Then paste your Facebook pixel ID.

Don’t have a Facebook pixel? It’s easy to create one. Head to Facebook business manager and create an account. Follow the simple steps Facebook provides, then head to the business settings, and from there select ‘Data Sources’ in the left column. And then add a new pixel.

You can also add in Google ads and analytics tags which I recommend you do as well.

Once all tracking and pixels are setup and good to go, it’s time to setup the campaign.

Launching your Clickbank affiliate campaign on RevContent

RevContent is the native traffic platform we’re using in this method. With a good amount of quality traffic, predominantly in the US, however, they do have traffic in a lot of other countries as well. And the best thing is, this traffic is relatively cheap and converts like crazy!

Create a RevContent account here and get a 5% greater revshare!

First things first, you need to add funds to your account. The minimum daily budget is $100 per day so keep that in mind, although you can spend way less than that per day with your bidding strategy which we’ll look at in just a second. I recommend you have a starting budget of at least $2000 so you can at least run 20 days worth of traffic at a minimum budget.

Now keep in mind, with Clickbank it’s going to be at least 2 weeks before you receive a payout. Most likely even longer as you might not make sales the first few days so you might need to look at a 3 week window.

Also keep in mind that the beginning phase is all about collecting data, testing ads and landing pages, finding which placements convert and which are eating up money and not converting.

Of course, you can start with whatever you can afford, but I really recommend that you try not to stop and start campaigns, so starting with a good-sized budget for the testing phase is recommended.

OK, so you’ve added funds to your balance. Now it’s time to setup your first campaign… or boost as it’s called on RevContent.

Click ‘Create Campaign Boost’ and then enter your campaign parameters…

So, starting with the boost name, I like to lay mine out by affiliate platform, niche, countries, and device type. Usually, I’ll add in the data as well but I haven’t here.

Then bid amount, this is the amount you’re willing to bid for a click on each placement (website). There are three ways to handle the bid amount.

1. Start low – under 0.05 and gradually creep your bid up as you cut placements (best for those who are limited by budget)
2. Start somewhere in the middle – around 0.20 dependent on what countries and device types your targeting (best for those who want a mix of volume whilst still being cautious)
3. Start high – over 0.60 (best for those with a large budget and no patience who want data fast)

Each way has pros and cons.

Starting low means your going to spend way less. You won’t even get traffic on most placements as the bid is too low. However, it allows you to really be careful with your budget. It’s going to take you a long time to gather data, but then on the flipside you’ll do it without blowing your budget.

Starting in the middle is usually by preferred method. You can get a good amount of traffic without blowing your budget in the first hour.

Starting high means you’re going together data fast, which if you have the budget is great as you can test way faster and optimize way quicker meaning you find those juicy pockets of profit.

It’s also important to point out that the USA comes with a higher average cost per click compared to somewhere like France. It’s also important to point out that desktop traffic is usually higher than mobile. So take those things into consideration when setting up your campaign boost.

Next, your budget amount.

Pretty self-explanatory, you can set a daily limit or keep it unlimited. To start I recommend a daily limit especially if you’re starting in the middle or high with your bidding. Leave it unlimited when you’re bidding high and you’ll blow your budget faster than you can snap your fingers.

As I’ve been running my campaign for a while, I’ve gathered a good amount of data, found some awesome placement ID’s that convert like crazy so I can keep my budget unlimited as the only high bids I have are the placements where I’m profitable. I’ll show you what I mean in the next section.

OK, what to optimize for?

I always set this to engagement. This is basically optimized for clicks. Whereas CPA ROI is optimized for conversions. I’ll be honest, I’ve never taken the time to test out CPA ROI as my results from Engagement have always been awesome which means it’s never been necessary for me to look at CPA ROI. However, I really should at least test it to see what the results are.

My recommendation for now is to set this to engagement simply because I don’t know how CPA ROI will perform.

Brand logo, you can just leave as Automatically Detect unless you have a specific logo you want to use.

Start and end dates, I usually set it to start ‘Immediately’ as soon as the ads have been approved. Just be mindful again depending on bid strategy and daily budget if your ads get approved at 10pm then you might blow through a lot of budget in a very short space of time.

And I leave the end date as ‘Never Ends’.

With targeting, you choose which countries to target. With RevContent, the majority of traffic is in the USA, however, they do have traffic in other countries so don’t neglect them!

For my example, this is a US only campaign. I started targeting the big four countries (USA, UK, CA, and AU) however noticed the profit was coming from the US so removed the other 3 countries.

Also, notice how I’ve excluded 3 states. Why? Because of the data, I’m looking at in my tracker.

I’m filtering by state to see where the profit is and where budget is being spent with little to no return.

Usually, when I’m drilling down into the data. I want to try and give at least 2x the payout. So the lowest payout for this offer is $79. Meaning I want each state to have spent at least $158 with either 0 sales or negative with a large number of clicks but low click through rate on the landing page. By excluding these states spending money with little to no returns, I’m allowing more spend to go through to the states that are bringing in profits.

To start with, I recommend you target the whole of the USA and gather data before making your own exclusions.

Next, we have device targeting. As mentioned earlier, the desktop is usually more expensive, and for good reason… it usually converts much higher than mobile. Someone who’s on their desktop is usually stable and not on the move, and has more time and fewer distractions to watch a 30-45 minute VSL which most Clickbank offers have.

I recommend splitting device types into individual campaign boosts. So you’d have one campaign boost targeting desktop traffic, one campaign boost targeting tablet, and one campaign boost targeting mobile. Or if budget is an issue, just stick with the desktop for now with the plan to reinvest some of those profits into testing different devices and countries.

You can ignore zip code and metro targeting unless you have specific areas you want to target.

And for languages, I always put English unless running an offer in a different language.

Once your campaign boost is saved, it’s time to add your content.

Head over to ‘Manage Content’.

My structure for ads here is as follows:

• 5 images
• 2 headlines

So image 1 + headline 1, image 1 + headline 2, image 2 + headline 1, image 2 + headline 2 and so on. In total, we have 10 variations of the ad. It’s important you don’t go overboard here. If you have 30 different variations, it’s going to take a while to gather enough data on each to make any educated decisions.

To add an ad, all you do is click ‘Content’ in the top right. Select ‘Add new’ and paste in your campaign URL from Binom or whichever tracker you’re using. If you’re using Binom you do not need to edit the campaign URL at all. Everything will be replaced dynamically.

Enter your first headline, enter your brand name (I usually just enter my domain URL so if we had domain dailyconsumer.com, I’d put Daily Consumer as the brand name. Then upload your image 1 and submit. Important: Remember what I mentioned about Revcontent not approving supplement offers, so be very mindful of that.

Wahey! You’ve now submitted your first ad for approval.

Continue to follow the exact same steps for the remaining 9 ads.

Then sit back and wait for your ads to be approved, this can take anywhere up to 48 hours but is usually much faster. One thing you can do if you don’t want them to run right away is turning them off under the ‘Enabled’ column. Then when they are approved you can just switch them back on.

The final section of this how to make money with Clickbank in 2020 guide is all about optimization and drilling down into the profit zone.

Drilling down into the Profit Zone

Alright at this point, we have our campaign launched. Now depending on which way you went with your bidding strategy will decide how soon you can start optimizing.

One thing you need to understand is there are multiple levels of optimization, and what I mean by that is…

Level #1 Optimization

To start with the placement ID or website that your ad is being shown. There are thousands of placement IDs within the Revcontents network. The whole aim of running a profitable native campaign is to find the placements which are profitable and to do that you need to allow a certain amount of budget on other placements which are not going to be profitable, but you have no way of knowing until you’re ads are being shown there.

For your optimization to be truly effective you need to be reading data from inside Revcontent and from within your tracking platform simultaneously. Using Binom, I can drill down and cross reference the exact placement/widget ID to make sure costs and revenue are both accurate.

There are also different levels of aggression in optimizing.

You could be ultra aggressive, and cut placements after let’s say 10 ad clicks and 0 landing page click throughs… remember there are thousands of placements to run through.

You could be less aggressive and allow each placement to spend at least 1x the offer payout, in our example $79. If a placement spends $79 with 90 conversions we shut it down and exclude it from our campaign.

Select the ‘Widget Targeting’ option at the top, and you’ll see all of the placements your ads have received impressions on (you’ll see the website or widget ID and site URL which I did not include in the image for obvious reasons).

Now this is where you really learn how to make money with Clickbank! As you can see one placement below is taking the vast majority of my budget and that’s because it’s profitable. So I manually increased my bid on that specific placement. I gradually increase the bid until I find the right balance of volume whilst still maintaining a positive ROI.

And then the placements that have spent at least 1x the payout with 0 conversions or have conversions but are still quite a way negative I blacklist from my campaign. I’m also looking at the click through rate (CTR). If one of the placements I’m running on is getting a lot of impressions but hardly any clicks resulting in a low CTR then I will potentially cut that placement as well. The placement or website might not be relevant for our offer hence the low CTR so why have that placement taking up a huge amount of our impressions.

As you can see, you really only need to find one good placement to make a good amount of profit!

Level #2 Optimization

OK, so now we know about optimizing placement ID’s. Now the next level of optimization is the ads.

A visitor has landed on the website/placement/widget and has now seen your ads. As mentioned I like 5 images running at one time.

I always like to have at least 1-2x payout on an ad before I cut it. If the ad has 0 conversions after spending 2x payout then I’ll turn that ad off and either turn on another ad or allow the budget to flow through to other winning ads.

One thing to point out that I’ve noticed with ads is the images die out faster than the headlines.

Images can fatigue weekly sometimes even faster depending on how much you’re spending. So here are some good ideas to help combat that:

• Keep swiping from spy tools like Adplexity
• Find similar images to your winners
• Change winning images contrast

I’ve actually had good performing images die out and then replace them just by increasing the contrast of the image and end up performing better than the original.

It’s a good idea to upload a bunch of ads at a time and turn them off apart from your first 5-10. Then when you turn 1 off, turn on 1 of your others. This way you’re not waiting 24+ hours for approvals.

Again I’m always cross referencing data from both Revcontent and my tracker to make sure it’s accurate.

Level #3 Optimization

Now it’s the landing page. Usually, I start with 2 landing pages exactly the same apart from a different headline. I’ll keep testing headlines throughout, I’ve found the style or layout doesn’t matter too much. The headline is most important and then the image. I’m seeing before and after images working well, and curiosity driven images like this landing page below:

I’m aiming for a 30% or higher click through rate, usually more towards the 40% mark.

Again, I look to allow a certain amount of spending before cutting any landing pages and that’s usually 2-3x payout unless the CTR is horrific which then I’ll cut it after 100 or so clicks.

A tracker makes it super easy to rotate landing pages.

And then it’s all about riding the profit waves when you find winning combinations, whilst continuously looking for more pockets of profit.

Also, important to quickly touch on scaling. When you find winning ads, landing pages, offers, and placements there’s nothing stopping you moving those combinations to a new campaign targeting a different country, targeting a different device or on a different platform altogether!

How to Make Money with Clickbank Conclusion

So, there you have it…

Hopefully, you got some value from this post. And more importantly, some actionable content that you can get started with right away and making some good money.

I hope you see this as a refreshing change to the relentless “how to make money with Clickbank using Facebook” that I see being taught everywhere! I’m not saying Promoting Clickbank products on Facebook is bad or doesn’t work, in fact, the opposite… I know it works. I’m just saying there are not many people talking about running Clickbank offers on Native ads which is ultimately much easier and way less risky.

Let me know any questions or feedback in the comments below!