I’ve been using Clickbank for about 18 months now to make money as an affiliate, (sign up as a ClickBank affiliate here (it’s free). Currently I don’t have any products in the Clickbank marketplace, (so I only market others products) but can see that would be the way to go to make a lot of money.
I’ve been practicing SEO for over 10 years and offering SEO services for about 8 years, so I could make an SEO product to sell on the Clickbank marketplace (probably will).
Clickbank Affiliate Products
In the meantime I’m a Clickbank affiliate promoting a handful of personally reviewed products, I don’t seriously promote a Clickbank product in a review format if I don’t think the product is worth buying: in other words I’ve bought and used the product and recommend others to use it because I think it’s good.
This has limited the number of products I promote (there’s only so many products I actually use), but this week I’ve finally found a popular one 
If you look through my previous affiliate revenue reports (August affiliate revenue for example) you’ll see I’ve been making a small amount from Clickbank (just under $500 in August and just over $600 in July). This money is from sales from a few products, (order or two a day) so considering how little effort (after the review process) this money is taking, it’s easy money (also doesn’t take a great deal of traffic either).
Found a new product that I’ve used and reviewed and this one is making a lot more sales than all the others combined. I just had my second $200 plus Clickbank day which is great because I’ve lost some money this month from my AdSense income, a popular site of mine was pulling in 10k+ visitors a day, but Google has penalised it (few days into September and traffic died from Google, now under 2K visitors a day!).
I think the penalty was for selling text links from it via one of the popular link seller sites,: sold 2 links at about $5 a month each! The loss of this site has cost me $50 a day in lost AdSense income! I’ve removed the sold text links and put in a re-inclusion request with Google admitting I added paid links to the site, can only hope they reinstate it.
Anyway, back to Clickbank revenue
Last 7 days I’ve had these Clickbank affiliate sales:
Wed Sep 24 $219.82 (still a few hours left as well)
Tue Sep 23 $172.81
Mon Sep 22 $187.37
Sun Sep 21 $208.80
Sat Sep 20 $62.73
Fri Sep 19 $125.82
Thu Sep 18 $62.06
Total Clickbank sales for the week: $1,039.41
Now that’s a nice amount of affiliate revenue for something that takes little effort.
It’s a total of 63 sales, so on average I’m making $16.50 a sale. I love how Clickbank products have a 50% or more revenue share, finding other affiliates with a decent revenue share is HARD!
Would be nice to find an expensive product worth promoting, I’m planning to trade Forex in the near future, so looking into Forex products on Clickbank. Found one that looked interesting, (I think it would have made me a LOT from affiliate sales) but based on a mistake they have made in their email marketing it became clear the product was a SCAM: basically they are sending out potential earnings for weekends when the stock market etc… is closed!
Was tempting to recommend it anyway for the money, but I have my reputation to maintain so said it was a SCAM at a Forex Products review page, all I have to do now is find a product I can recommend (got one possibility, but not tried it yet, not a Clickbank product though).
If my Clickbank sales stay constant looks like I’ll be making $4,000 a month through Clickbank which is more than I made last month from all affiliate revenue sources (AdSense, Clickbank, Amazon etc…), so that would be great as could double my affiliate type income to around $7,000 to $8,000 a month (that would be a nice chunk of change).
My eldest son is doing OK with Clickbank as well, think he made $200 this week promoting similar products (he copies what I review!).
Will post September revenue report just as soon as September is over, wish me luck that these figures remain constant and the site Google penalised is reinstated.
David Law
12 responses to Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
When I log on to Clickbank it all seems very dodgy. How do you find the quality, serious stuff to promote?
Hi Max,
Welcome to my world
Unfortunately for every half decent product there appears to be 9 terrible Clickbank products and some are clearly scams.
I was reading about a product yesterday and found a copy of the ebook online for free, after reading 30-40 pages of fluff explaining why the product Getting Free Google Ads at http://morearning.freegoogle.hop.clickbank.net/ isn’t a SCAM I got to the meat and all it was is:
You sell advertising space on the web pages your going to promote with Google AdWords (any PPC type campaign, not just AdWords) and the money you get from selling ad space offsets your PPC costs.
OK it’s a potential idea, but I don’t think it’s a $90 ebook idea! This is the sort of stuff you can find for free on various forums like Digitalpoint. The product went into a little detail of how to setup AdWords campaigns, how to find keywords, how to bring your AdWords costs down through testing, but it wasn’t worth $90! Most of the ebook was justifying the idea as a good idea and worthy of promotion!
Had I bought this product I would want a refund, false advertising for starters, it’s not free ads from Google.
So unfortunately your going to run into a LOT of bad Clickbank products. Which is why I’m seriously promoting less than 10 Clickbank products right now.
Research, research, research I’m afraid, when you find a good one it’s well worth it.
Last week I made $875.90 from Clickbank, (normally don’t make that a month) most from one product I added this month (really two related products, but from the same person) that was making between $13 and $20 a sale (67 sales in total last week). I’m promoting the product because I use it (it’s good), I buy and review all the products in this niche and recommend the best.
Since Clickbank publishers tend to give 50% of their product price that means I sold about $1,800 worth of products that week (from a handful of web pages).
In comparison I sold about $1,400 worth of Amazon affiliate products this month, so over 3 weeks (from about 250,000 web pages: I run Amazon stores through their datafeed!) which made me just $92.60!
It’s really easy to find good Amazon products to promote, but they pay less than 10% in affiliate fees (average about 6% for me this month, it various on sales, can be as low as 4% if low sales). It’s hard to find a good Clickbank product, but when you do it’s well worthwhile.
Alternatively you could do what a heck of a lot of Clickbank affiliates do and not care if the product is good/SCAM or not. If you read around the Free Google Ads products and who was originally promoting it you’ll find some big names in affiliate marketing (the ones that do big joint venture/product stuff) originally promoting it as the next big thing.
That was until a few of them actually read the ebook and realised it is pretty much snake oil, after which a lot of them retracted their glowing reviews of a product they obviously never even looked at!
Based on the gravity (a Clickbank measurement of popularity among affiliates and number of sales made over the last 90 days I think) of this product (quite high, over 200) it appears there’s still a lot of people actively promoting the ebook!
I guess it depends on how desperate you are to make money, I make a very good living as an SEO consultant, so have no need to lower myself to promoting ANY product that can make me a quick buck at the expense of naive consumers!
Another alternative is sell your own Clickbank product. I sell the very best SEO/AdSense templates for WordPress http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ on the market today (there is no better SEO’d themes for WordPress available: SEO is my thing) and going to start selling them through Clickbank just as soon as I work out how
David Law
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
I’ll agree with your statement that 1 good product and 9 bad ones are on clickbank. Lots of marketers just rehash other or eachothers products because they have a name(now that they successfully sold something on clickbank) they can get away with it
Well that’s weird. I realised the weekly figures I gave in my comment is a lot lower than the weekly figure in my post, so checked Clickbank snapshot reports page.
On the main report page it says:
2008-10-01 (current week) $295.92
2008-09-24 $875.80
2008-09-17 $274.57
2008-09-10 $249.12
2008-09-03 $93.84
When I click on the link to the week ending 2008-09-24 (should see $875.80) I get:
Displaying all 67 results. Total: $1,108.99
Over $200 more for the week!
OK figured it out.
Clickbank is over lapping periods when you click the weekly link. I’m seeing the 24th sales used from two weeks sales periods.
So it’s the last day for 2008-09-24 period AND the first day for 2008-10-01 period, effectively counting the sales twice!
They are actually counting 8 days sales for the week!
The main snapshot page is right, so I made $875.80 for the week 2008-09-24 not over $1,100.
BTW on the 24th I got an extra sale, made $233.19 in total, my best day yet.
David Law
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
So how exactly do you get people to your review pages? Do you use article marketing, ppc, seo? I signed up for clickbank about a month ago, and finally found a good product that made me about $220 last week. I’m looking to get that number to about $1,000 weekly and would like to accomplish this fairly quickly.
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
Hi Matthew,
I get to my review pages with a web browser
As you can appreciate not going to post here a list of products I’m promoting since that will result in more competition which equals less sales for me!
I rely completely on SEO means for traffic, I write SEO optimized product reviews and gain organic search engine traffic to them.
My Clickbank sales have died this week-
Daily Sales Snapshot
Sun Dec 07 $20.31
Sat Dec 06 $0.00
Fri Dec 05 $65.60
Thu Dec 04 $0.00
Wed Dec 03 $59.18
Tue Dec 02 $60.93
Mon Dec 01 $0.00
Sun Nov 30 $16.27
Sat Nov 29 $68.32
Fri Nov 28 $20.75
Thu Nov 27 $66.48
Wed Nov 26 $59.23
Tue Nov 25 $21.24
Mon Nov 24 $170.92
Sun Nov 23 $58.39
That’s working out around 1 sale a day, I’ve not had two no sales days in a week for at least a couple of months and I’ve had three days like this, so a very bad week!
A Clickbank product just updated, I got a lot of new traffic a week or two a ago (extra 1,000 visitors a day to reviews)-
2008-12-10 (current week) $145.09
2008-12-03 $291.98
2008-11-26 $644.34
2008-11-19 $1,376.81
2008-11-12 $497.62
And now the hype has died down AND new affiliates have come into the market my review pages have suffered in the SERPs!
As a side note the publisher of the Clickbank product has increased his prices and this has meant more money per sale, but my hop ratio is terrible at 91 hops per order, was around 30-40 per order, (this is for all products, the particular product is at around 140 hops!!) so not making as much money because of a big product price increase.
Also got a heck of a lot more refunds, in a two week period I’d have one refund, this last two weeks it’s 9 refunds so bringing down my sales!
David Law
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
Hi David,
Thank you very much for your inspirational blog and methods to make money online. With all the hype that’s going around the web to striking it rich, it’s difficult to determine which method works and which doesn’t. I’ve found this blog extremely informative and honest.
As for your Clickbank product reviews, I know you talked about promoting them solely through SEO and getting organic traffic but you also have the advantage of having a PR4 website so that makes indexing your content a lot quicker then most.
How would you recommend going about promoting Clickbank products for people with completely new websites? Do you do any directory submissions or bookmarking for your product reviews?
I’ve created a website at muscle-gaining.com which compares ebooks from Clickbank but I have lost nearly $50 on Adwords trying to drive clicks and sales. I’ve tried promoting weight loss offers from Neverblue Ads and made about $40. I then made about $20 through eBay websites so I’m still learning the affiliate game.
Even though I’m down overall, I still see it as progress but it’s just so difficult seeing that there are already so many established websites so not only is it difficult finding an affiliate offer, but it’s also difficult to compete with people who have been in the game for years.
I guess I need a little morale booster
Hann
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
Hi David,
Just refering back to what Hann was saying there,im basically in the same boat as her, I would be known as a newbie for all of this and after much extended research over the past few months have seein all types of blogs and claims in which case yours being one of the most genuine so far.
Information your providing is both intersesting and useful, trying to compete with affiliates thats bein in the game for years is tough and at the present minute im not making much money but will look at it as a learning curve threw trial, as the saying goes the bird will never fly without leaving the nest right?
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
i just signed up with Clickbank and i am very new to affiliate marketing. i just hope that i would earn on this program
i am just a beginner in make money online stuff and i find that making money on Clickbank is much better than Adbrite.
i just recently signed up with Clickbank and so far i earn some good cash from them. Clickbank is advisable for blogs and websites who receive mostly US traffic.
Hi David
Thank You very much for your blog.Is very useful and full of valuable informations about how to make money online.
Clickbank is not perfect, most of the products are overprice or just useless. But everyone can find a few good products to promote and make sales.
Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate
Leave a reply to Make Money with Clickbank as an Affiliate