moneygrowsontreesThese past few months I have been reading quite a few posts about Clickbank and why you should or shouldn´t use the program to generate affiliate income online.

First of all, for those that aren´t familiar with Clickbank, it is probably the biggest marketplace for vendors to sell e-books online and affiliates have a huge choice of e-books and software to promote.

Signing up for Clickbank is free and the commissions you can earn range from 1% to 75% plus you can choose to promote subscription products that will give you monthly recurring commissions.

Clickbank handles all the payments so unlike other affiliate programs, the vendor is not able to cheat the affiliate out of their commission, since these are generated automatically. And yes, Clickbank does take a small fee for processing the orders in a safe way, but this will be done before your commission is added to your account, so what you see is what you get.

Some of the important things you have to keep in mind if you have never used Clickbank before:

  • In order to receive your first payment you will have to generate sales that are paid with 5 different credit cards and 2 different payment methods (Visa, Mastercard etc.) plus you will need to make a minimum of $100 in order to reach minimum payout.
  • The initial 3 payments are made through paper checks every two weeks (over a minimum of $100) and after you have received and cashed in these checks, you can choose for the direct deposit option and be paid once per week or per two weeks.
  • In order to avoid problems with returns, Clickbank witholds a small amount of your commission to cover any refunds but this amount will be credited back after 12 weeks to your account so you will get the commissions on your generated sales.
  • If you have generated sales but not reached minimum payment yet, Clickbank will start to charge money on dormant accounts, meaning that if you don´t generate any sale during a 90 day period, they will take a fee, but hey your goal is to generate sales daily right?! If you are completely at loss and have no idea how to start generating Clickbank sales, I highly recommend One Week Marketing Plan which mainly focuses on generated income with Clickbank products through Squidoo, but can be applied to any affiliate program as well.
  • Clickbank has a 60 day money back garantuee installed on all the products on their marketplace, meaning that buyers have 60 days to return the product, no questions asked. This is both a negative and positive thing. Negative because you can make a sale one moment and find your commission disappearing if the buyer decides to return the item. Positive though because it does install a sense of security making people more likely to pull out their credit card and place an order, plus, many people just aren´t bothered to ask for a refund because of the “hassle” or they just forget about it.

Now that we have the boring details out of the way, let´s look at the fun side of Clickbank, the side that makes YOU money and if you are dedicated, loads of it or at least enough to pay all the bills.

Like I said, you can earn up to 75% commission on the clickbank products that you promote. Recently I read somewhere that this type of huge commission must be equivalent to scam products but I don´t feel that the percentage you can earn is directly related to whether a product is a “scam” or not.

Apart from thinking that people start screaming scam way too soon nowadays especially in the money making product business, I do want to recommend you choose the products you want to promote with care. The better your choice, the more money you will generate. Of course, a 75% commission is great, but there are times you can make a lot more money from products that give you less commission per sale. Important thing is to do your research and target keywords with low competition and really target those people likely to buy the product you are promoting.

So How Can You Research a Clickbank Product?

A really cool website that will tell you the background information on a product is cbtrends.com. Once you have found a product you are interested in promoting on Clickbank, you find out what the product ID is and then you go to cbtrends.com to see how that product has been performing, how many affiliates are promoting the same product and see how much money is earned per sale.

By the way, you can see the “earned per sale” in the Clickbank marketplace as well and unlike popular belief, this amount is not the money you get per product sale, but it also takes in account the number of refunds that have occurred. So if the “earned per sale” is way lower than you would expect to be, it means a lot of people have been asking for a refund, a small indication (or is it a big one?) of a product that is not delivering what it claims to be.

Another way to find Clickbank Products

Another way to find CB products to promote instead of using the regular marketplace is cb-analytics.com. This website shows you which are the newest products and a lot more interesting statistics. Especially the “new products” is a neat tool, because it allows you to jump right on top of new opportunities and get instant ideas for new projects for One Week Marketing.

Two ways to easily add Clickbank products to your blog

Apart from the obvious way which is writing a whole post on a specific product, there are 2 ways you can easily add clickbank products to your blog.

The Clickbank HopAd Builder

The first is found on the actual clickbank website, the HopAd Builder. When logging into your account, you will see a direct link to place an ad on your blog, similar to google adsense advertisement. If you can´t find the HopAd Builder on your account home page, go to Account Settings and then to HopAd Builder.

The HopAd Builder allows you to create a small ad section that you can completely modify to blend in with your blog and blog theme, offering your visitors related products and whenever they go ahead, click on one of the ads and buy the product, you will receive the regular commission. Pretty sweet.

Plugin to add Clickbank Products to Your Blog

The second way to easily add Clickbank products to your blog is a  free Wordpress plugin. After installation, this plugin allows you to add a widget to your sidebar (or wherever you choose to place a widget) that will show a certain number of related products. You can choose the number of products to show, the targeted keywords in order to have products show up that match your blog plus you can choose to add a description to each product or not.

Easy way to see your daily Clickbank Sales:

Many new affiliates catch the “Continuously Checking Statistics” virus but if you feel that you can spend your time more productive, like generating more sales rather than checking your stats every hour, (hoping and praying that some commission is added to your account) there is a neat little FireFox Addon you can install and that will show your CB stats at the bottom of your browser.

cb-notifier-plugin1

All you need to do is download CB Notify, install it and add your clickbank data and whenever you open your browser you will see just how much you have made that day.

Cb Notify firefox extension

To be honest, I haven´t really always been a big fan of Clickbank or promoting e-books and the likes, I had been a member for years but never really looked into promoting the products on there. It wasn´t until I started working with the One Week Marketing Plan that I really got into it and so far I can only say that it was a right move to make.

The money I am making from Clickbank is totally because of OWM so it was totally the right thing to start working on that, plus getting a bit more structure in my way of working, by having a real plan in my hands to tackle this online business is proving to be positive for my other projects as well, seeing that I have learned quite a bit about keyword research and neat little ways to generate more traffic.

I say for me, because I realize that the One Week Marketing Plan isn´t the right path to go for everybody.

However, if you haven´t been very successful with online marketing so far and you are really dedicated to make internet marketing your main income source, you really should give it a try! Once you get the hang of it, you will see that you can apply the experiences and knowledge you get from the OWM to any other affiliate program.

So what is your take on it, do you use Clickbank to earn money online?

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