Affiliate Marketing with ClickBank to Make Money: Definitive Guide

ClickBank is one of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms to make money online. It’s easy to use and offers a very high commission rate.

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!