Below, we’ll explain all of them and how you can apply them to different situations.

ClickBank General Terminology

• Vendor: An individual or company that sells products.
• Affiliate (Marketer): An individual or company that promotes vendor’s products and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make.
• Buyer: An individual or company who purchases products.
• Marketplace: A place where vendors provide information about the products they offer, and affiliates can find them to promote.
• Commissions: The amount of money that affiliates earn from the sales they make.
• Master Account: a feature that allows users to link multiple ClickBank accounts in order to easily manage all operations and transactions in a central location.
• Tickets: Messages or emails between a customer and a customer support team that get recorded.
• Clerks: Additional users added to ClickBank accounts that can help manage tickets or provide customer support.
• Account Nickname: A unique identifier that allows for all transactions related to an account (vendor or affiliate) to be accurately tracked. 
• ClickBank ID & CBID & Affiliate ID & Vendor ID: Outdated terms for the “Account Nickname.”
• Payment Threshold: The minimum accumulated commission an affiliate must earn before getting paid.
• Check: A payment method under a written form instructing a bank to pay a specific sum of money to a recipient.
• Direct Deposit: A payment method where funds are directly transferred to a payee’s bank account, usually electronically.
• Payment Frequency: The amount of time between commission paydays (Weekly or Bi-weekly).
• Instant Notification Service/INS: a service that notifies you of transactions within the ClickBank system for your account, such as sales, rebill, refund, etc.
• Marketplace Feed: A file containing an XML representation of the ClickBank marketplace intended for individuals who want to have access to the full marketplace without having to “scrape” it from the site.

ClickBank Marketplace Statistics And Terminology

Each ClickBank product comes with various statistics.

• Gravity: A relative ClickBank-generated stat indicating how many affiliates have successfully promoted a product. In general, the higher the score, the better the offer will convert. However, as a beginner, choosing products with gravity between 1 and 50 might be a better idea. This provides you with offers that have the potential to convert and aren’t too competitive at the same time.
• Initial $/conversion: The average commission an affiliate initially earns for each conversion to the vendor’s offer (not including rebills). It’s a good idea to choose products with a low initial $/conversion (less than $50). It usually means a low upfront cost for your customers. Therefore, you have a better chance of making sales.
• Avg $/Conversion: The average commission an affiliate earns for each conversion they make, including earnings from initial sales, upsells, and rebills.
• Recurring $/Rebill: The average commission an affiliate earns for each rebill (like a monthly or yearly subscription) of a product. When you have some experience, aim for products with a recurring billing model and high average $/conversion so you can make big profits.
• Cat: The category a product is in. The best categories to find profitable products (in order) are Health & Fitness, E-business & E-marketing, Spirituality, New Age & Alternative Beliefs, Self-Help, and Cooking, Food & Wine. These categories usually contain high-quality products with a low refund rate. They are also relatively easy to promote and not vulnerable to certain rules and laws (For example, Betting Systems are usually prohibited on most social platforms).
• Date added to marketplace: The first date a product appears inside the ClickBank marketplace. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to evaluate newly added products to find hidden gems.
• Rank: A hidden statistic based on a combination of factors, including overall sales volume, affiliate-generated sales, and affiliate commissions to sort products.

You can also find products based on certain attributes:

• Physical: This indicates whether a product is physical or digital.
• Upsell: Indicates whether a product has upsell flows. An upsell is an additional related product to the initial offer aiming to get customers to spend more.
• Language: A product can come in different languages. You can use this attribute to narrow down products in the language that you want.
• One-time: Includes products that are only billed for once.
• Recurring: Products that have recurring billing like monthly subscriptions.
• $1 Trial: Products that customers can try for $1 in a short period of time.
• Affiliates Tools Page: A webpage that contains resources such as images, email templates, or keywords to promote products more effectively.
• Support For Mobile Traffic/Mobile HopLink Target URL: This indicates whether the vendor has provided a mobile version of their landing page. When someone clicks on an affiliate link, ClickBank will automatically detect the device type of that person. If it’s a mobile device, they will be redirected to the URL’s mobile version for a better user experience.
• Affiliates Require Approval: Products that require affiliates to be approved before promoting.

ClickBank Affiliate Page Terminology

• Joint Venture/JV contract: An agreement between business entities for mutual benefit. 
• VSL/Video Sales Letter: A video that pitches vendor’s products.
• Email Swipes/Email Templates: Examples of high-performing emails that can be sent directly to customers.
• Front End: The first product that a new customer buys from a vendor.
• Back End: Additional products that a customer will buy over the time they remain a vendor’s customer.
• Funnel: A set of steps that someone goes through before taking action, such as giving out email addresses or purchasing a product.

ClickBank Sales Statistics And Terminology

Inside ClickBank Account homepage, you can see a quick overview of your sales performance:

• Weekly Sales Snapshot: A quick overview of your weekly sales.
• Daily Sales Snapshot: A quick overview of your daily sales.
• Transaction Quality: A combination of different statistics that allow for a quick peek into the quality of the account’s transactions.
• Current Sales: The total amount of earnings and the number of sales in the current month.
• Current RFND: The amount of money that has been paid out in refunds and the number of refunds that have been issued in the current month.
• Current CGBK: The amount of money that has been credited from your account due to chargebacks, as well as the number of chargeback transactions that have occurred in the current month.
• RFND/Sales Count: The percentage of the number of sales that have been refunded out of the total sales in a month.
• CGBK/Sales Count:  The percentage of the number of chargebacks to the number of total sales in a month.

ClickBank provides various analytics statistics to help you comprehensively evaluate product sales performance:

• Hops/Hop Count: The number of clicks your ClickBank affiliate marketing link receives.
• Order Form Impressions/All Order Form Impressions: The number of order form impressions your offer receives, including upsells.
• Order Form Submit: The number of times that prospects have attempted to submit an order. An order form submit can have a failed result due to declined credit-cards, incorrect information, etc.
• Initial Order Form Impressions: The number of order form impressions your initial offer receives (not including upsells or recurring bills). An order form impression occurs when a prospect’s directed from a payment link on a landing page to the order form.
• Initial Sales Count: The number of purchases your initial offer has.
• Initial Sales Amount: The total amount of money you receive from your initial sales.
• Rebill Sale Count: The number of customer rebilling events.
• Rebill Sale Amount: The total amount of money you receive from customer rebilling events. For example, monthly subscriptions.
• Upsell Count: The number of purchases of upselling products.
• Upsell Amount: The amount of money you receive from upselling products.
• Gross Sales Count: The total number of customer purchases, including initials, rebills, and upsells.
• Gross Sales Amount: The sum amount of money you receive from initials, rebills, and upsells.
• Refund Count: The number of purchases refunded by customers.
• Refund Amount: The amount of money refunded by customers.
• Cgbk Count: The number of purchases charged back by customers.
• Cgbk Amount: The amount of money charged back by customers.
• Net Sales Count: The number of purchases after subtracting Refund Count and Cgbk Count from Gross Sales Count.
• Net Sales Amount: The amount of profit you make.

Below are calculated metrics that are very helpful in deciding what to do next with an affiliate product:

• Hops Per Order Form Impression: Hop Count divided by All Order Form Impressions. This number should be below 20. If higher, it could mean that the price of your offer is too high or the landing page’s not convincing enough. You have 3 options: changing to high-income traffic (like the US and UK), using email marketing to persuade your prospects to purchase, or switching to another ClickBank product.
• Hops Per Order: Hop Count divided by Initial Sales Count. 200 should be the maximum. Similarly, you can improve this number by changing your traffic source, using email marketing, or trying another product.
• Order Form Sale Conversion: Initial Sales Count divided by All Order Form Impressions. The average number for this is between 5% to 20%. If you have a lower-than-5% Order Form Sale Conversion rate, running remarketing campaigns can improve the number.
• Initial Earnings Per Hop: Initial Sales Amount divided by Hop Count. This number is useful when assessing the performance of your paid ads. For example, if your CPC is $1, your Initial Earnings Per Hop should be above $1 to make up for your ad spend.
• Earnings Per Click: Gross Sales Amount divided by Hop Count. This number is useful when evaluating the performance of your entire sales campaign (including upsells and rebills). For example, if it takes you $1 to acquire a new customer, your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) should be above $1 to make a profit.
• Refund Rate: Refund Count divided by Gross Sales Count. The average number for this statistic is 10%.
• Cgbk Rate: Chargeback Count divided by Gross Sales Count.
• % of Total Sales: Gross Sales Count of a product divided by the entire Gross Sales Count of all products.

Conclusion

When starting affiliate marketing with ClickBank to make money, it’s important to understand all necessary metrics so you can use them to your advantage.

If you still have any ClickBank statistics or terminology you’re not entirely sure of, just comment below and we’ll try to help you out.

Happy marketing!

However, as a beginner, there are many things that you might not be entirely sure of. Or, you don’t know which product to promote.

Understanding the problem, we put out this article to guide you through every step you need to take to become a successful ClickBank affiliate marketer.

Let’s dive right in!

ClickBank: A Quick Overview

ClickBank is an online marketplace that connects customers, affiliate marketers, and product owners together in one place to buy, promote, and sell innovative digital and physical products.

Founded in 1998, the platform now has more than 6 million clients across 200 countries with over $4.2 billion in sales.

Because of its ease of use and high commissions, ClickBank becomes one of the most popular choices among affiliate marketers.

Why Affiliate Marketing with ClickBank?

As a beginner affiliate marketer, it’s a good idea to start with ClickBank for a number of reasons.

• Simple signup process: You can sign up and start affiliate marketing with ClickBank in a matter of minutes.
• Easy to receive payments: Unlike many other affiliate networks, ClickBank allows you to easily receive your payments via Check or Direct Deposit without having to fill in many legal documents.
• Large database: You can choose products across a wide variety of categories like entertainment, betting, business, investing, games, education, cooking, health & fitness, parenting, software & services, etc.
• High Commissions: ClickBank commissions are as high as 75% of the total product price.
• Advanced statistics and analytics: ClickBank gives you access to advanced data, allowing you to assess the competition and identify which products can make you money.

Since ClickBank is a marketplace, not every product is 100% good and legit. However, with the right strategies we’re about to discuss below, you’ll be able to find affiliate offers worth your time and effort.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing with ClickBank to Make Money

You can follow the 8 steps below to start affiliate marketing with Clickbank and make money.

1. Set up a ClickBank account
2. Understand the ClickBank marketplace
3. Identify affiliate marketing products on ClickBank that make money
4. Evaluate affiliate products further
5. Get your affiliate marketing links
6. Promote your affiliate marketing offers: 10 proven methods
7. Leverage your email list to triple your affiliate earnings
8. Analyze your marketing results
9. Get paid from ClickBank

1. Set up a ClickBank account

The first step is to create your ClickBank account. This will allow you to manage your own affiliate links.

Start by going to ClickBank and click on the “Sign Up” button in the top right corner.

The ClickBank signup page will pop up. You just need to fill in all the necessary information and click “Join ClickBank” to create your account.

Next is to complete your profile so you have access to all of the features the platform has to offer.

Before generating your affiliate links, you will need an account nickname. It is a unique identifier that allows for all transactions related to your account to be accurately tracked and credited.

ClickBank gives you the ability to create multiple account nicknames. This is helpful in case you want to track and analyze different types of affiliate marketing offers separately.

Inside the ClickBank dashboard, select the “Accounts” tab. Then, click the “Create an Account” button to start creating an account nickname.

Select “Affiliate (Promote products)” from the “Account Type” dropdown menu and type in any nickname you like. If your nickname is available, click “Sign Up” to create it.

And that’s pretty much it. You are now ready to find a profitable affiliate product to promote and make money.

2. Understand the ClickBank marketplace

After setting up your ClickBank account, you can visit ClickBank’s affiliate marketplace by clicking on “Affiliate Marketplace” inside the ClickBank dashboard. This is the place to find all of the affiliate products to promote.

You can start finding a product using the search bar at the top of the page or click on a category on the left side that you are interested in.

Each ClickBank offer comes with a wide range of stats. Together, they help you understand more about the potential of a product even before you promote it.

• Gravity: A relative ClickBank-generated metric indicating how many affiliates have successfully promoted a product. In general, the higher the score, the better the offer will convert.
• Avg $/Conversion: The average commission an affiliate earns for each conversion they make, including earnings from initial sales, upsells, and rebills.
• Initial $/conversion: The average commission an affiliate initially earns for each conversion to the vendor’s offer (not including rebills).
• Recurring $/Rebill: The average commission an affiliate earns for each rebill of a product.
• Cat: The category a product is in.

ClickBank also provides you with a “Filters & Attributes” panel, allowing you to quickly sort and filter all products depending on your needs.

Product attributes include:

• Physical: This indicates whether a product is physical or digital.
• Upsell: Indicates whether a product has upsell flows. An upsell is an additional related product to the initial offer aiming to get customers to spend more.
• Language: A product can come in different languages. You can use this attribute to narrow down products in the language that you want.
• One-time: Includes products that are only billed for once.
• Recurring: Products that have recurring billing like monthly subscriptions.
• $1 Trial: Products that customers can try for $1 in a short period of time.
• Must Have Affiliates Tools Page: Include offers that have an Affiliate Tools page. It contains resources such as images, email templates, or keywords to promote products more effectively.
• Support For Mobile Traffic: This indicates whether the vendor has provided a mobile version of their landing page. When someone clicks on an affiliate link, ClickBank will automatically detect the device type of that person. If it’s a mobile device, they will be redirected to the URL’s mobile version for a better user experience.
• Affiliates Require Approval: Display only offers that require affiliates to be approved before promoting

To learn more about the ClickBank marketplace, you can visit Using the ClickBank Marketplace.

3. Identify affiliate marketing products on ClickBank that make money

Not all affiliate offers are the same. Some are profitable and worth putting your effort into. Some are too competitive, and others are simply a waste of time.

Before choosing an affiliate marketing product on ClickBank, there is a set of criteria you should follow in order to find a profitable offer.

• Category: The best categories to find profitable products (in order) are Health & Fitness, E-business & E-marketing, Spirituality, New Age & Alternative Beliefs, Self-Help, and Cooking, Food & Wine. These categories usually contain high-quality products with a low refund rate. They are also relatively easy to promote and not vulnerable to certain rules and laws (For example, Betting Systems are usually prohibited on most social platforms).
• Gravity: Choose products that have gravity between 1 and 50. This proves your offers have the potential to convert and not too competitive at the same time.
• Initial $/conversion: As a beginner, it would be best to choose products with a low initial $/conversion (less than $50). It usually means a low upfront cost for your customers. Therefore, you have a better chance of making sales.
•  Avg $/conversion and Recurring $/rebill: In the beginning, you don’t need to worry about these two metrics. Your primary goal is to test as many affiliate products and strategies as possible. This will give you a general idea of what works and what doesn’t. After having some experience, you should aim for products with a recurring billing model and high average $/conversion so you can make big money.
• Affiliate tools page: Choosing ClickBank products with an affiliate marketing tools page will give you access to all necessary promotional resources. So, you have an easier time setting up and promoting your offers.
• Support for mobile traffic: Although it’s OK to promote a non-mobile-optimized affiliate marketing offer, it’s always better to pick one that people will have the best experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
• Language: English should be your top priority unless you have a very dedicated audience in another language.

Following the above criteria, you will be able to pick ClickBank offers that have a high potential of making sales from the get-go.

4. Evaluate affiliate products further

Some affiliate marketing products on ClickBank are made solely for the purpose of making money and not providing any value for customers.

While it totally depends on you to decide whether to promote those kinds of products, picking ones that provide real value for people doesn’t only mitigate refund rates. It also helps you build a strong relationship with your customers and succeed in the long run.

Before going out there and promoting your offers, it’s a good idea to assess their quality further. And, there are 2 main methods to do that.

The first one is to search for reviews of a product on Google and YouTube. If all review articles and videos say that it’s legit, you’re good to go.

For example, here are reviews for the ClickBank offer Speechelo – Turn text to human-sounding speech.

The second and better method is to try the product yourself. You don’t need to purchase it, though.

More often than not, if you send an email to the product owner saying that you’re an affiliate and asking to try the product in a short period of time, like 3 days or 7 days, they’ll gladly respond. If they don’t, you can pay for the product to review and refund it later.

The next thing to check is the affiliate tools page. Make sure that it provides all necessary resources like email templates, images, banners, etc. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier when promoting a product.

Below is an example of a good affiliate tools page.

5. Get your affiliate marketing links

ClickBank makes it very easy for you to generate affiliate marketing links.

In the marketplace, click on the “Promote” button next to an offer.

A hoplink generator will appear, allowing you to generate your own affiliate link.

Enter your account nickname and an optional tracking ID to the blank fields. Then, click “Generate HopLinks” to generate your affiliate link.

The tracking ID is an optional parameter that can help you better track your link activity. Suppose you promote your affiliate marketing offer on Facebook and Instagram. You can create 2 distinct affiliate links by entering 2 different tracking IDs. Doing this can help you assess the performance of each platform separately later.

You now have an affiliate link ready to be promoted.

Tips: ClickBank provides 2 other formats to create your affiliate links. They look like this:

https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=AFFILIATE&vendor=VENDOR

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

You need to replace AFFILIATE with your account nickname and VENDOR with the vendor’s account nickname whose product belongs to for the link to work correctly.

Although they aren’t as secure as HopShield Encrypted links, they’re more readable and look safer when sharing.

You can also find these link formats on affiliate tools pages.

6. Promote your affiliate marketing products: 9 proven methods

There are many ways to promote your ClickBank affiliate offers, including both free or paid promotions. Below are the 9 proven methods.

Facebook groups

The first free method is to create/join Facebook groups related to your products and promote them. This is effective as groups contain highly targeted audiences.

The key here is to provide as much value for group members as possible to build trust with them. Otherwise, you’ll look like a spammer and, worse, get banned by group admins.

Reddit communities

Similar to Facebook groups, Reddit communities are also a great source of high-quality traffic. Make sure that you read and comply with community rules.

Pinning on Pinterest

Besides Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is one of the largest and most engaging social networks with more than 416 million monthly active users. Because there are so many people on the platform actively searching for ideas and products, affiliate marketing on Pinterest can definitely bring you great results.

Creating a YouTube channel

Next, we have YouTube channels. You can create useful videos (directly or indirectly) promoting ClickBank offers and add your affiliate links in your video description to make money.

Start a blog

Starting a blog can help you acquire organic traffic, which refers to visitors landing on your site through search engines. Organic traffic’s extremely valuable as it’s free, relevant, and most importantly, you can get unlimited traffic as long as your content ranks high on search results.

For example, if you have a blog post that ranks for the query “How to make money online,” you can literally attract millions of visitors each month to your blog. Then, insert a ClickBank make-money-online offer to the article and start earning massive passive income. It’s easier said than done, but you get the point.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a more personalized way to speak with your potential customers.

Suppose you have an email list closely related to your ClickBank product. You can start sending emails to your prospects. Remember that you already have email templates provided on affiliate tools pages to use.

If you don’t have a list yet, begin building one with Facebook Lead Ads or putting email sign up forms on your blog to capture email addresses.

Bing ads

Bing Ads is an advertising platform from Microsoft that provides PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on both Bing and Yahoo search engines.

Unlike Facebook Ads and Google Ads, which don’t like affiliate links for the main reason that you have no control over the content promoted, Bing advertising is more affiliate-marketing friendly.

Additionally, Bing Ads offers a very cheap PPC rate compared to other similar platforms. Thus, this is one of the primary traffic sources you should focus on.

Native ad platforms

Besides Bing ads, other native advertising platforms like Outbrain and Taboola can also be used to promote your ClickBank affiliate marketing offers.

Instagram influencer marketing

Instagram influencer marketing is a marketing strategy related to promoting your products or services through influencers (accounts with an established fan base) on Instagram. Despite its potential reach, it’s still one of the most undervalued forms of marketing.

After having a list of influencers closely related to your affiliate product with a high engagement rate, you can contact them directly through Instagram Direct Message and ask them to promote it.

On average, Instagram influencers charge $10 per 1000 followers per post. You can use this number as a reference and negotiate your price accordingly.

7. Leverage your email list to triple your affiliate earnings

Although we have already mentioned email marketing above, we would like to touch on this one more time because of its importance.

According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing can produce as high as 4400% ROI (Return On Investment). It means that for each dollar spent on building and nurturing your email list, you can get back $44 in return.

Many affiliates also claim that they can triple their affiliate earnings by sending simple emails to people who have looked at an offer. This is because people often hesitate to purchase a product the first time they see it. By emailing them multiple times strategically, you can significantly increase your chance of making sales.

Better yet, you own your list for life. It means you can continuously maintain relationships with your customers and promote them with other products.

Therefore, if you want to make the most out of affiliate marketing, it’s a must to have an email list.

You can follow the steps below to start nurturing an engaging email list and later making affiliate sales:

• Sign up for an email marketing service: Email marketing service offers advanced features to help you easily manage your email list and communicate with your customers effectively. Some great and affordable options are MailerLite, ConvertKit, and MailChimp.
• Create a lead magnet: A lead magnet is an incentive you can provide to people in exchange for their email address. It could be PDF reports, books, discounts, or anything useful to your prospects. Lead magnets are important in encouraging people to give out their information and also build trust with them.
• Acquire email leads: After having an amazing lead magnet, you can use Facebook Lead Ads or Google Lead Ads to quickly build up your email list. Putting a signup form on your blog and inside your blog post is also a great idea to acquire email leads.
• Build relationships: This is the most important step out of all. If you want to have a long-lasting successful business, it’s imperative to treat your prospects like your friends and build strong relationships with them. In this way, they feel the need to repay you by buying your offers. This step is done by regularly sending useful content to your email list, such as tips and tricks on a specific subject, gifts, books, etc. The trick here is 80% of your content should gear towards building trust, and 20% is promotional.
• Promote your affiliate marketing products: Promote a good ClickBank offer, and people will gladly pull out their cards.

Tips: PLR content is a great source to create lead magnets and content (or even your own products to sell).

8. Analyze your marketing results

Paying close attention to your marketing results can help you identify what works and what doesn’t and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Inside your ClickBank dashboard, select the “Accounts” tab and click on an account nickname you would like to analyze.

You’ll be directed to your account nickname homepage. Here, you’ll be able to see snapshots of your daily, weekly sales and your transaction quality.

To start analyzing your marketing results further, click the “Reporting” tab at the top of the page.

There are a lot of metrics you can analyze. However, in the beginning, the most important ones are listed below.

• Hop Count: The number of clicks your ClickBank affiliate marketing link receives.
• Initial Order Form Impressions: The number of order form impressions your initial offer receives (not including upsells or recurring bills). An order form impression occurs when a prospect’s directed from a payment link on a landing page to the order form.
• All Order Form Impressions: The number of order form impressions your offer receives, including upsells.
• Initial Sales Count: The number of purchases your initial offer has.
• Initial Sales Amount: The total amount of money you receive from your initial sales.

These metrics can be vastly different depending on many factors such as your traffic quality, how appealing your affiliate offer is, the price, etc. However, you can use some criteria below to decide your next action.

• Hop Count: If your ClickBank offer receives few to none hops, try to change your traffic source or make your offer more appealing by testing different titles, text, and images. Or, if you bid on certain PPC keywords, try other keywords.
• Hops Per Order Form Impression: Hop Count divided by All Order Form Impressions. This number should be below 20. If higher, it could mean that the price of your offer is too high or the landing page’s not convincing enough. You have 3 options: changing to high-income traffic (like the US and UK), using email marketing to persuade your prospects to purchase, or switching to another ClickBank product.
• Hops Per Order: Hop Count divided by Initial Sales Count. 200 should be the maximum. Similarly, you can improve this number by changing your traffic source, using email marketing, or trying another product.
• Order Form Sale Conversion: Initial Sales Count divided by All Order Form Impressions. The average number for this is between 5% to 20%. If you have a lower-than-5% Order Form Sale Conversion rate, running remarketing campaigns can improve the number.
• Initial Earnings Per Hop: Initial Sales Amount divided by Hop Count. This number is useful when evaluating the performance of your paid ads. For example, if your CPC is $1, your initial earnings per hop should be above $1 to make a profit.

It’s important to note that Earnings Per Click is a more accurate metric to evaluate your ad performance since it factors in upsells. However, it’s better to aim at optimizing your ads for initial sales to guarantee a profit.

Other metrics related to Upsell or Rebill are hard to improve because you have no control over them. However, you can try using email marketing as a way to reconnect with your customers and convince them to purchase upsells or stay on subscription plans as long as possible.

9. Get paid from ClickBank

Once you start making sales, you’ll receive payment from ClickBank.

There are 2 main payment methods the platform provides. The default one is via paper check, and the second one is via direct deposit.

To set up the ClickBank payment method, inside your account nickname homepage, click the “Account Settings” tab at the top of the page.

Ensure that you fill in the correct Payee Name and Address if you prefer receiving payment via paper check.

If you would like to get paid via direct deposit, click the “Edit” button next to the “Pay Information” section.

Here, you can change your payment threshold, payment method, and payment frequency.

It’s important to note that ClickBank doesn’t support direct deposit to all countries. Therefore, if you’re from an unsupported country, you can use Payoneer to create an international banking account and get paid globally.

Affiliate Marketing with ClickBank – Conclusion

Affiliate marketing with ClickBank is a good opportunity to make money online. It’s simple to get started and doesn’t require any significant capital upfront.

With the right mindset and strategy, you’ll be able to make your first sales in no time.

Enjoy your affiliate journey and happy selling!

This post will guide you through the detailed step-by-step process on how to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest successfully.

What is Pinterest affiliate marketing?

Pinterest affiliate marketing is the activity of promoting other people’s products or services on Pinterest to earn commissions. You find an affiliate offer related to your Pinterest audience and create content around it. Then, you incentivize them to make purchases through your affiliate link to make money.

People who purchase through your affiliate link don’t have any drawbacks compared to a direct link. In fact, you can even make a deal with affiliate merchants or networks to offer unique discounts for your audience. Ultimately, it’s a win-win situation for both parties. You earn money while providing extra benefits to your Pinterest audience.

How does Pinterest affiliate marketing work?

Affiliate marketing on Pinterest works similarly to any other type of affiliate marketing.

You find good affiliate marketing products or services from networks such as Amazon Associates, ClickBank, ShareASale, or companies that provide affiliate programs. Then, you get your unique affiliate links that help track clicks, click sources, commissions, etc. Finally, you create Pinterest Pins and promote them to your audience to make money.

The process is as simple as that!

The most important thing is that you choose suitable affiliate marketing offers and create great Pinterest content that can attract people to click on.

Why you should try affiliate marketing on Pinterest

There are 2 main reasons why you should try affiliate marketing on Pinterest.

First, let’s talk a little bit about the advantages of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a business model that is relatively easy to learn and set up without requiring much up-front capital. It also has the potential to scale automatically and effortlessly because of the way it works.

The second reason lies in Pinterest itself.

Launched in March 2010, Pinterest was the fastest website in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors. Nowadays, the platform is one of the largest and most engaging social networks with more than 416 million monthly active users.

In addition to such impressive feats, 64% of Pinterest users also describe the website as a place to find ideas, products, or services they can trust. Furthermore, 98% of them would like to try new things they find on Pinterest.

With all of that metrics, Pinterest is definitely a lucrative opportunity for any business as a whole and affiliate marketing in particular.

How to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest successfully

These are 9 steps to help you do affiliate marketing on Pinterest successfully.

1. Research profitable topics on Pinterest
2. Find a potential affiliate marketing product to promote
3. Assess the affiliate marketing offer
4. Get your affiliate link
5. Find affiliate marketing materials
6. Create a great landing page for your affiliate marketing offer
7. Set up your Pinterest account correctly for affiliate marketing
8. Create great Pinterest content
9. Publish your Pins
10. Drive traffic to your Pins
11. Analyze your results

1. Research profitable topics on Pinterest

The first thing you need to care about when doing affiliate marketing on Pinterest is researching topics that can attract Pinterest users. This is important because not every social platform works the same way. Furthermore, users on different platforms are widely diversified in terms of genders, ages, behaviors, countries, and especially interests.

Pinterest user genders

According to Statista, 77% of Pinterest users are female. It means that when choosing an affiliate offer to promote on Pinterest, it would be best to pick one that can attract females or both genders. For example, you might have a hard time finding the right audience for video gaming or woodworking products/services.

Pinterest user ages

The average age of Pinterest users is 40, and the majority of active pinners are below 40. Therefore, you should pick affiliate offers that suit this age range.

Pinterest user behaviors

85% of Pinners use Pinterest mobile app. Therefore, make sure you promote things that are quick to catch people’s attention and easy to follow on mobile devices.

Pinterest categories

Currently, there are more than 30 main categories and interests on Pinterest, including Animals & Pets, Architecture, Art, Beauty, Finance, Gardening, Design, Photograph, Sport, Quotes, Travel, Vehicles, and more.

However, the 10 most popular Pinterest categories in order are Food & Drink, Home Decor, Travel, Health & Fitness, Women’s Fashion, Hair & Beauty, DIY & Crafts, Entertainment, Weddings, and Holidays & Events.

If you want to explore all Pinterest categories and interests yourself, a method you can use is to convert your Pinterest account to a business one. Next, create a dummy ad campaign by clicking on the “create ad” button in the “Ads” tab.

Then scrolling down the page a little bit. You can see the “interests” section.

Now, you can freely explore every category and interest that Pinterest provides.

It might seem like a good idea to target the most popular Pinterest categories mentioned earlier. However, it also means that you will have more competitions. If you cannot find a good angle to promote your affiliate marketing offers, it’ll be hard to get people to click on your Pinterest pins instead of others in the same niche. In that case, it would be better to find a less competitive category.

Picking which category to focus on totally depends on you. However, in the beginning, we recommend you choose one with moderate to low levels of competitiveness. In that way, you have an easier time competing with other advertisers.

To check how competitive a category is, select one from the “interests” section and look at the audience size in the right panel.

The larger the audience size, the more competitive a category is.

In our opinion, a category with an audience size of below 30 million is a good choice for beginners.

You can also go to Pinterest Audience insights by clicking on “Analytics,” select “Audience insights,” and then switch to “All Pinterest users” to access more in-depth information on this topic.

Pinterest keyword research

Doing keyword research will not only give you a general idea of how appealing your affiliate offer is to Pinterest users. It also helps you optimize your Pins for the Pinterest search engine to gain better results.

To start doing keyword research, create a dummy ad as earlier. Then, scroll down the ad page a little bit. You should see a keyword section.

Just enter a keyword into the search bar and hit Enter. Related keywords, along with the number of monthly searches, will appear below your seed keyword.

In general, you should start with keywords that have below 500k monthly searches. Any keyword with searches above that number is very competitive.

2. Find a potential affiliate marketing product to promote

After having a general idea of which category and which type of product or service to target, it’s time for you to actually find a great affiliate marketing offer.

In this post, we’ll use ClickBank as an example. But, you should go through all affiliate networks to find offers that suit your need.

If you didn’t have a ClickBank account, click the “Sign up” button on the top right corner of its homepage to create one. Then, visit ClickBank’s affiliate marketplace by clicking on “Affiliate Marketplace” inside the ClickBank dashboard or visiting this ClickBank Marketplace direct link.

On the left panel, you can see a list of categories to choose from. When clicking on one category, the “Filters & Attributes” panel will appear, allowing you to quickly filter through all offers.

The “Gravity” score is a relative ClickBank-generated metric indicating how many affiliates have successfully promoted a product. In general, the higher the score, the better the offer will convert.

So, do you have to be concerned about products with high gravity scores as they might be too competitive?

If you decide to run Facebook or Google ads for those products, it would be wise to assess the competition. However, in the case of Pinterest organic traffic, the answer is no. The reason is that your affiliate marketing offers will appear as usual Pinterest Pins (Note that you still have to disclose this to your audience).

For example, with the “Get Paid To Use Facebook, Twitter, And Youtube” affiliate offer, you probably create Pins like “Ways to make money from home” or “How to get paid using Facebook.” The competition now becomes more of a Pin and keyword game rather than the competition of the product itself.

Another metric you should pay attention to is Avg $/Conversion. This number represents the average commission an affiliate earns for each conversion they make, including earnings from initial sales, upsells, and rebills.

Finally, it’s the “Support for mobile traffic” attribute. It indicates whether the vendor has provided a mobile version of their landing page. When someone clicks on an affiliate link, ClickBank will automatically detect the device type of that person. If it’s a mobile device, they will be redirected to the mobile version of the URL for a better user experience.

Although it’s OK to promote a non-mobile-optimized affiliate marketing offer, it’s always better to pick one that people will have the best experience with, especially for Pinterest users.

To learn more about other ClickBank metrics, visit How to use ClickBank search functions.

3. Assess the affiliate marketing offer

The next step is to evaluate the product you have got your eyes on.

Not all affiliate products are the same. Some are legit, and others are solely made to make money. Although you are free to promote any affiliate offer, it’s best to choose one that provides real value to customers.

There are 2 ways to assess the quality of an affiliate product.

The first method is to search for reviews of the product on Google and YouTube. If all review articles and videos say that it’s legit, you’re good to go.

The second method is to try the product yourself. You don’t need to pay for it, though. More often than not, if you send an email to the product owner saying that you’re an affiliate and asking to try the product in a short period of time, like 3 days or 7 days, they’ll gladly respond. If they don’t, you should move on to find another offer as it’s very likely that the owner is a scammer and afraid to give you access.

4. Get your affiliate link

Affiliate marketing networks make it very easy for you to get your own affiliate link for a specific product. For example, in the ClickBank marketplace, just click on the “Promote” button of an offer you are interested in.

A hoplink generator will appear, allowing you to generate your own affiliate link.

If you haven’t created an account nickname yet, go to the ClickBank dashboard, then click on the “Accounts” tab and create one.

The tracking ID is an optional parameter that can help you better track your activity. Suppose you promote your affiliate marketing offer on Facebook and Pinterest. You can create 2 distinct affiliate links by entering 2 different tracking IDs. Doing this can help you assess the performance of each platform separately later.

After entering your account nickname and an optional tracking ID, click “Generate HopLinks” to generate your affiliate link.

Now you have your own affiliate link ready to be promoted to your Pinterest audience.

Getting affiliate links on other networks should be more or less the same.

5. Find affiliate marketing materials

An affiliate offer usually comes with marketing materials such as email templates, banners, and testimonials to help you get started quickly. These can often be found easily under the offer.

Sometimes, the affiliate program requires you to sign up to get your materials. Don’t hesitate and just enter your information. You’ll usually get accepted to the program immediately. Note that if you are asked to provide your ClickBank ID, it’s your account nickname.

Here is an example of email templates.

With these materials, you can build a high-converting landing page for your affiliate marketing offer.

6. Create a great landing page for your affiliate marketing offer

A landing page is a single web page designed specifically for a marketing campaign.

Although it’s possible to send your customers directly to the offer with your affiliate link, creating your own landing page and send people to this page first gives you many advantages.

First, it gives you an opportunity to collect emails from your customers. People usually hesitate the first time they see a product. With email marketing, you can remind them about the offer and increase your chance of making sales. Furthermore, the emails you have collected can be used for future promotions.

Secondly, it makes your affiliate offer more trustworthy. If your Pinterest audience lands on another website immediately without proper explanation, they might be confused and skeptical about the product.

Understanding the importance, there are 2 main methods to create a great landing page.

The first method is to start a blog (or a website), and we recommend going this route. The reason is that blogging is a great way to build a strong relationship with your audience and achieve long-term success. You can follow this How to Start a Blog for Free guide to create one for free. Otherwise, follow this Start a Blog with BlueHost guide to set up a paid one and have complete control over every part of your blog.

The second method is to use a landing page builder such as ClickFunnels or Leadpages. They provide a wide variety of tools to help you quickly set up a high-converting landing page, collect email leads, and analyze results.

Here is an example landing page for the affiliate offer Perpetual Income 365.

We just took affiliate marketing materials provided by the affiliate merchant and put them together to create a great landing page.

If you want to collect emails from visitors, just show a signup form when people click on the CTA (Call To Action) button. Then, tell them to enter their information first before being directed to the affiliate page.

It’s important to note that some affiliate offers like “Perpetual Income 365” have already provided visitors with their own email signup form. In this case, it might not be a good idea to show your email form as it will require people to enter their information twice. The key here is to test and see what works best for you.

7. Set up your Pinterest account correctly for affiliate marketing

Setting up your Pinterest account correctly can significant increase the visibility of your Pins.

First, switch your Pinterest account to a business one. This will allow you to access all of the advanced tools Pinterest offers.

Make sure that you fill in all of the information fields in your Pinterest profile, especially your username, display name, and description.

Pinterest will look at your profile as one of many SEO factors to decide the relevancy of your content. Therefore, it’s best to include some relevant keywords in your display name and description. For example, if you promote an affiliate marketing offer related to making money online, some keywords to include in your Pinterest profile can be “make money online,” “make money from home,” or “earn cash online.”

The next step is to claim your website so that Pinterest can give credit to your content properly. When you claim your content, your name and profile picture will show up next to any Pins from your site or external accounts.

Next is to create Pinterest boards. They are similar to folders where you save and organize your Pins. Many successful Pinterest brands suggest that your account should have at least 15-20 boards.

When creating Pinterest boards, it’s also important to give them names and descriptions related to your affiliate marketing topic.

Another important thing you should do is to install Rich Pins. This feature allows for showing metadata right on your Pins, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement.

We suggest that you use Tailwind to help you during the Pinterest profile setup process. It’s a smart social media scheduling tool that allows for posting automation, audience analysis, Pinterest account monitoring to give you suggestions on how to improve it, and more.

After signing up for Tailwind, it will immediately guide you through every step to set up your Pinterest account quickly and correctly for your affiliate marketing business.

8. Create great Pinterest content

There are hundreds of thousands of Pins published on Pinterest every single day. Therefore, to stay on top of the competition, your Pins not only have to be beautiful. They also need to follow various criteria, and most importantly, include relevant keywords.

Pinterest community guidelines

Since users are the lifeblood of any social media network, including Pinterest, the platform strictly monitors the content being published to ensure Pinners’ safety.

Before creating Pins, we recommend that you read Pinterest community guidelines thoroughly to avoid violating rules and getting your account banned.

As an affiliate, you should pay close attention to some rules below:

• Adult content: You are allowed to save content about sexual health, breastfeeding, mastectomies, art, etc. However, they are still somewhat limited by Pinterest, and explicit adult content is a no on the platform.
• Dangerous content: Pinterest limits content that purposely shows the use of violence. It also restricts the distribution of alcohol, tobacco, drugs, weapons, etc.
• Misinformation: Pinterest removes or limits the distribution of false or misleading content. These might include conspiracy theories, medically unsupported health claims, illegal information, etc.
• Impersonation:  Pinterest doesn’t allow accounts that impersonate or misrepresent their affiliation with any person or organization.
• Spam: Pinterest doesn’t allow spamming or engaging in spammy behaviors, such as creating or saving content that is repetitive, deceptive, linking to websites that are unsafe, untrustworthy, using automation that hasn’t been explicitly approved by Pinterest (List of approved Pinterest partner tools here).
• Paid Partnership and Affiliate guidelines: All promotional content must disclose its commercial nature, such as in the title or description of the Pin. You are also not allowed to use shortened or redirect links that make the destination domain unclear. In short, make sure that your affiliate marketing Pinterest content is authentic and transparent.

Pin design

To quickly design beautiful Pinterest Pins, you can use tools like Canva or Tailwind. They offer various ready-made templates, images, and other elements that are optimized for Pinterest.

It’s important to note that Pinterest considers Pins with different designs as “fresh” Pins. Therefore, even if your Pins have the same titles, descriptions, website links but different designs, you will be safe from being a spammer. Tools we just mentioned above also give you the ability to quickly switch between different designs so you can create fresh Pins in minutes.

Pinterest algorithm

Pinterest has its own algorithm to rank content published on the platform. Although no one knows exactly how the algorithm works, there are some factors either discovered by experts or stated by the Pinterest team that affect the visibility of Pins.

• Domain quality: Pinterest uses your website and Pins to determine the quality of your account. By setting up your Pinterest account correctly and creating a safe and active website, you can increase your domain quality.
• Pin quality: The more relevant, useful, and engaging your Pins are, the higher the quality Pinterest will consider them to be.
• Pinner quality: The more active and consistent you are in creating and pinning high-quality content, the better it is.
• Pinterest Lens: Besides factors like titles and descriptions of your profile or your board, Pinterest dissects your Pins to see how relevant they are. This includes things like text overlays and elements on your Pin images. Therefore, make sure they are also related to the content you promote.

Knowing the Pinterest algorithm can help you make your content better and rank higher.

Pinterest keywords

Using the right keywords is one of the most important things when pinning on Pinterest. It doesn’t only help Pinterest rank your content properly, but it can also give you a better chance to out-rank your competitors.

Like we have mentioned earlier, it’s best to choose keywords that are not too competitive, but people also search for.

Retake the “Perpetual Income 365” offer as an example. The main topic of this affiliate marketing product is making money online. By doing quick research for the terms “make money online,” you can get back some related keywords such as “extra income ideas,” “make more money,” “make quick cash,” “income from home,” or “earn cash online.”

Each keyword has different numbers of monthly searches. Although all can be used to promote the affiliate offer, you should start with ones with less than 500k monthly searches like “income from home” or “earn cash online” as they are less competitive.

You should also look at search results for all keywords to have a general idea of the competition and where you can potentially improve.

Below is the search result for “make money online.” You can see that all of the top Pins have images, titles, and descriptions closely related or exactly matching the search term.

And here is the search result for “earn cash online.”

Although the top Pins have descriptions closely related to the search term, all of them don’t have the exact match keyword on the Pin images. Some don’t even have the keyword in the Pin title. This is your chance to compete for a top spot.

For example, if we were to compete for this keyword, below would be our pin.

We would then give it a title like “How to earn cash online” or “The secret way to earn cash online.” And, remember to mention this keyword multiple times in the Pin description.

Supplemental valuable content

Although you can create hundreds or even thousands of beautiful Pins for one affiliate marketing offer, it’s hard for Pinterest to consider your account as high-quality because your Pins don’t bring much value to people.

If you want your account to get noticed by Pinterest and your content to be shown more regularly in front of Pinterest users, it’s crucial that you start creating additional valuable content.

Suppose you are promoting a weight-loss-related product. You could write blog posts about “how to lose weight,” “tips for losing weight,” or “diet for losing weight” and create Pins around these. If you don’t like the idea of writing blog posts, creating infographic images is another method you can use. As long as you create useful and high-quality content consistently, Pinterest will start to notice your account and show your content to more people.

9. Publish your Pins

It’s easy to publish your content on Pinterest. However, how many Pins you should publish a day can be a tricky question.

In general, it’s recommended that you should aim to pin between 15-25 Pins per day. The number looks daunting. However, it’s relatively easy to achieve it.

First, if you pin your Pin to a different board (remember that your account should have at least 15-20 boards), it will still count as a publish action. It’s important to note that a Pin shouldn’t be pinned in more than 10 boards.

Second, they don’t have to be all your Pins. You can repin other people’s content related to your topic, and Pinterest will still give you credit for doing this. At the end of the day, it’s also a way to contribute to the Pinterest community.

For example, you have 3 pieces of content to promote (1 affiliate marketing offer and 2 informational posts), and you create 5 Pins for each. Suppose you intend to pin these pieces of content to 10 relevant boards. Ultimately, if you publish 3 of your Pins each day, it would take you 50 days to finish pinning all of your content. To fulfill the plan of pinning at least 15 Pins per day, you can curate 12 more Pins from other Pinners.

That’s the idea!

When you have more content, you can choose to pin more frequently or start pinning less other people’s Pins and focus more on your content.

You can also automate this process using Tailwind. It provides advanced tools to help optimize your publishing time slots so your Pins can reach the most people, curate additional content in just a few clicks, and set your Pin schedule on autopilot so you don’t need to worry about publishing Pins manually.

10. Drive traffic to your Pins

Besides creating great content and using the right keywords, there are 3 more ways to get your Pins more exposure.

The first one is to find and join popular group boards related to your topic and start contributing. Since these Pinterest group boards have already had a lot of followers, your content can gain tons of impressions.

To find group boards to join, simply type a keyword into the Pinterest search field and switch the filter to “Boards.”

The second method is to use Pinterest Ads. They look like regular Pins that you pay to be placed where users are most likely to see them. Using Ads is the quickest way to get your Pins in front of the right customers.

Finally, we have Tailwind Tribes. They are communities where you can find like-minded people, start connecting, sharing your Pins, attract followers, and get your Pins shared by other successful Pinners.

11. Analyze your results

Pinterest has built-in analytics tools to help you measure your pin performance, the number of impressions, engagements, and your audience size. Using Pinterest Analytics, you know how your Pins and boards perform and use that data to optimize your profile accordingly.

Tailwind also has its own analytics tools that let you see even more advanced metrics such as virality score, engagement score, engagement rate, organic activity, and more.

The idea here is to keep pinning your popular Pins to your best performing boards and gradually archive underperforming boards (don’t remove your board because you will lose followers that follow that board). For Pins that don’t perform well, you can try changing their designs, keywords, or even switching to different content that can attract more attention.

Affiliate marketing on Pinterest – Conclusion

Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is a good time and effort investment opportunity. It’s easy to set up and doesn’t require rocket-science knowledge to understand and do it successfully. With an entrepreneurial mind and a will to try it, you can learn a lot and make money along the way.