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The Pros And Cons Of ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
The Pros And Cons Of ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
Any affiliate marketer worth their salt will know that ClickBank is one of the best digital marketplaces on the planet. It has literally helped several vendors and affiliates to become millionaires.
This global e-commerce platform which started back in 1998 is still as popular today. In fact, 23 years later, marketers are still trying to sell/promote products on ClickBank… and it shows no signs of slowing down.
But is ClickBank really all it’s cracked up to be in 2022? Or are marketers in a rut and blindly following each other?
In order to make an informed decision, you’ll need to weigh the pros and cons of being a ClickBank affiliate. Luckily for you, we’ve done the heavy lifting and listed them below…
Pros
There are many reasons why you should be a ClickBank affiliate as it can be a lucrative business model. So, let’s look at some of the best reasons to use ClickBank affiliate marketing
Reputable Platform
ClickBank has been around for over two decades and is not a fly-by-night scam. This is indeed reassuring. There are countless horror stories where platforms suddenly up and disappear leaving unpaid affiliates in the lurch.
ClickBank, however, has never missed a payout in over 20 years. So, you’re safe with them and you’ll receive your commissions like clockwork. You’ll need to decide if you want to be paid by checks, direct deposit or wire payments.
Wide Variety Of Products
While most of the products on ClickBank are of a digital nature, the products span a wide variety of niches ranging from weight loss to survival to gardening and more.
Recently, they’ve allowed physical products such as health supplements to be sold on their platform. Both vendors and affiliates are raking in serious cash with these supplements.
One downside here is that the search feature in ClickBank could be improved. Navigating through all the products can be time-consuming and a hassle.
High Commissions
Unlike Amazon which offers its associates (affiliates) a paltry 4% to 5% commission on most products, with ClickBank, vendors will pay you anywhere from 50% to even 100% a sale.
This makes promoting ClickBank’s selection a very lucrative opportunity.
That said, one cannot deny that Amazon is a sales machine that’s designed to sell. It’s trusted and it’s easier to convert visitors into customers on this trusted platform.
Promoting digital products is also more difficult and the visitor will require more convincing. The ClickBank vendors just don’t have the reputation that Amazon does.
So, you’ll need to create a landing page with a solid page builder, add visitors to your email list with a reputable autoresponder… and have an email marketing campaign in place to persuade them further.
It’s a bit more work, but the rewards are much sweeter.
Low Barriers To Entry
It’s quite easy to become an affiliate on ClickBank. Once you create an account, you’ll be able to get you hoplinks (affiliate links) and start promoting the products right away.
Do remember that with lower barriers of entry comes increased competition. This is a double-edged sword.
Some of the more popular products may require vendor approval. So you’ll need to contact the vendor and tell them why and how you wish to promote their products.
It’s also important to know that not all products are equal on ClickBank. There are many excellent products… but also just as many stinkers. This downside is to be expected since thousands of products are listed on this platform.
It’s not uncommon to find products with bold claims, empty promises and blatant hyperbole. All designed to hook the customers in and get them to part with their money while delivering a product/s that doesn’t deliver on its promises.
As an affiliate, you’ll need to have a keen eye and separate the wheat from the chaff. Ideally, you’ll want to purchase the product and go through it before promoting it. You’ll be able to promote the product more convincingly if you know what it’s all about, instead of blindly hyping it up.
Convenient
Many affiliates love ClickBank because it’s highly convenient. The platform tracks your sales, monitors refunds and chargebacks, and sends you your commissions on auto-pilot.
It’s a hands-off process for the affiliate who can just focus on the marketing and promotions. While ClickBank’s tracking is reasonably good, you’ll also want to use a tool like ClickMagick for better and more insightful tracking.
You’re also provided stats such as the earnings per sale, conversion rate, gravity, recurring billing and more. With these stats, you’ll be able to ascertain if a product is worth promoting or not.
That said, one minor downside here is that the ‘gravity’ stats can be a little misleading. Very often, affiliates only wish to promote products with a high gravity. They often fail to realize that there’s intense competition when promoting these top sellers.
Furthermore, you’ll often find products on pages 4-7 with a lower gravity and may be tempted to dismiss them. However, these products buried in the deeper pages were usually top sellers some time back.
Just because they have a lower gravity now doesn’t mean that the product isn’t good or sellable. It just means that affiliates have stopped promoting them, and so their rankings dropped.
These former ‘top sellers’ usually still have legs and you’ll be able to get a lot of sales from them while dealing with less competition. Give them a chance and don’t be too hasty to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Cons
While there are many reasons why you should be a ClickBank affiliate, it’s important to be aware of a few downsides.
Serial Refunders
All products on ClickBank need to have a money-back guarantee. While this helps to improve conversions, it also means that people who want something for nothing will purchase the product and request a refund without missing a beat.
Since the products are often digital in nature, it’s easier for them because they don’t (and can’t) need to return the product. As an affiliate, your commissions may decrease due to chargebacks and refunds.
Fees
This is another bugbear that many beginner affiliates have with ClickBank. If you’re a successful affiliate with an active account and making sales daily, it won’t affect you.
However, if you’re still a beginner and making an odd sale here and there, you may end up paying fees if your account is dormant.
So, even if you have a positive balance in your account but you’ve not made sales in 90 days, ClickBank will deem your account dormant and will deduct $1 every pay period. After that, it becomes $5 per pay period and goes up to $50.
You just might have commissions in there that are reduced to $0. That may make you balk… and it’s understandable. But it’s part of the game.
You’ll want to set a lower payment threshold when you’re starting out and try to become a proficient affiliate as soon as you can.
You can read the terms here: https://support.clickbank.com/hc/en-us/articles/220375627-What-happens-if-I-don-t-use-my-ClickBank-account-for-a-long-time-
Should You Become A ClickBank Affiliate?
Of course, you should!
Physical products and digital products are not mutually exclusive. You can promote both of them on your niche sites, YouTube channels and so on.
You’ll be spoiled for choice when choosing a digital product on ClickBank. With the high commission rates, even 3-5 sales a day may mean an extra $1k to $3k in earnings for you.
If that sounds awesome, sign up for a ClickBank account and master affiliate marketing today.
Follow these affiliate marketing tips, and you’ll be on the way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer in no time. And if you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
Affiliate Marketing With Clickbank
Affiliate Marketing With Clickbank Basics
Anyone who has been trying to make money online for more than 2 minutes would have heard of ClickBank and what a potential goldmine it is.
Clickbank is an extremely popular and profitable affiliate network on the worldwide web and many Clickbank affiliate marketers make a lot of money with it. This post will give you the basics on how to go about using this powerful website.
By the way, if you want to learn more about affiliate marketing in general such as some of the myths surrounding it, you can read a great post here.
OK, back to Clickbank. Signing up with Clickbank is fast and easy and there are several tutorials, tips and training that show you exactly how to get started.
Next, you’ll want to look for your first product or service–keep in mind that Clickbank is generally geared for digital products.
Try to start with something that you are interested in, or that is in a niche that already involved in. It’s easier to stay focused on what you are doing if the topic actually interests and even inspires you
If you already have an established site on a certain topic, it’s very easy to incorporate some Clickbank products to sell there. The more specifically targeted the product to your site, the better.
Look for products and services that have good gravity and popularity stats. If you find something that you really like but the stats don’t add up, then it’s probably not worth the effort you’ll have to spend on it.
You can decide to promote your product directly with the salespage given to you by the merchant, or you can do it by setting up a blog or website and positioning the product there on what is called a bridge page.
Most experienced marketers will agree that you can send traffic/visitors directly to merchant website as a newcomer to affiliate marketing, and it is a way to learn the ropes, so to speak.
But it is well worth the effort to eventually set up your own blog or website. This way you can use your bridge page to offer visitors a free report or checklist that is highly relevant to the Clickbank product you are promoting; this way you can get people’s email address and start building your own list.
If you want to build your own website or blog, WordPress (on which this website is written) is a great place to start, and it’s quite good in terms of SEO (search engine optimization) as well.
Some pros and cons of Clickbank affiliate marketing
- One big pro, especially if you are a newcomer to affiliate marketing, is that Clickbank is extremely easy.
- The second big pro is that the commissions are on the high end when compared to other affiliate networks.
- One con is that many of the products offered on Clickbank are not of the best quality, although they can be expensive. There are really a great deal of rags-to-riches types of products and e-books. You can also find many good products but you do need to do a bit of digging, depending on the niche you are working in.
- Another con is that the Clickbank stats are really nothing special, especially if you compare them to sites such as Adsense and Amazon, just to name a few. Also, you can only create text links automatically with Clickbank. Other types of links are not available.
As you can see, Clickbank affiliate marketing is a good place to get started in affiliate marketing and many experienced marketers are successful with them as well.
However, the problem that many beginners and even intermediate marketers face is that they just can’t crack the ‘ClickBank code’.
It’s as though those who know what to do are insiders who are raking in the cash while everyone else is an outsider struggling to make a single sale. It used to be that way for a long time until CB University appeared on the scene.
This is one of the most popular online marketing courses online and many customers have reported benefitting from it. The 2.0 version is an improvement on the first release and it’s bigger and better now.
Several CB University members have left glowing testimonials about the efficacy of the training and how it bridges the knowledge gap that has always prevented beginners from succeeding with ClickBank.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of CB University 2.0 and see if it lives up to the hype.
Clickbank University
The Good Points:
1) One of the strongest points about CB University is that it covers both affiliate marketing and product creation. This is definitely an improvement on the earlier version which only covered product creation.
With the 2.0 version you have more flexibility. Generally, beginners will find it easier to start off as an affiliate… and as their knowledge and experience gets better, they’ll be able to take on the more daunting challenge of becoming a product vendor.
2) The training itself is detailed with notes, videos and over-the-shoulder instructions. The methods are clearly explained in a step-by-step manner and even the greenest beginner will be able to follow along without difficulty.
3) The people behind CB University 2.0 (Matt Hulett, Adam Horwitz, Justin Atlan) are all accomplished marketers in their own right. They are NOT fly-by-night scammers who will take your money and run. This is crucial when choosing to spend money on any ‘make money online’ course.
4) The training is simple to follow, but is extremely in depth. The training for becoming a vendor on ClickBank is broken down into 12 weeks.
- Week 1 – How It Works
- Week 2 – Finding Your Perfect Product
- Week 3 – Creating Your Avatar
- Week 4 – Creating Your Product
- Week 5 – Creating your Perfect Upsell
- Week 6 – Sales Copy & Conversion Maximizing
- Week 7 – The Easy Video Sales Letter
- Week 8 – Finalizing your Product
- Week 9 – Getting onto ClickBank
- Week 10 – Attracting & Managing JV Relationships
- Week 11 – Split Testing
- Week 12 – Scaling your Success
- Bonus: Selling High Ticket Products on Webinars
And the training for ClickBank affiliates is spread out over 8 weeks:
- Week 1 – Affiliate Marketing on ClickBank
- Week 2 – Understanding Affiliate Marketing
- Week 3 – Finding Your Passion
- Week 4 – The Ultimate Affiliate Funnel
- Week 5 – Free, Free, Free: Always Over Deliver
- Week 6 – Writing the Perfect Swipe
- Week 7 – The Email Blueprint
- Week 8 – Scaling and Expanding
- Bonus: Running Affiliate Promotions
So, you’re going to be busy with this training for quite a while. Ideally, it’s best to choose one method and go all out with it. Most beginners would do well to start off with affiliate marketing.
5) The product comes with a 60-day money back guarantee. So, you have 2 months to give CB University 2.0 a test run. We’re guessing that once you join, you’ll probably stick around for a long time because it has that much value.
6) CB University has a forum for you to hang out with your peers and ask questions and mingle with other fellow marketers. It’s an active community that’s supportive and you’ll learn a lot from there.
This beats buying some eBook from some unknown marketer and being left to your own devices to figure it out, while the marketer has taken your money and run off.
7) The program is also equipped with a very useful toolkit that you’ll use over and over in your business. Basically, it’s a set of tools and online video training that covers some of the tech stuff that most beginners struggle with.
Here’s a list of some of the ‘tools’ inside:
- Camtasia Alternative: APowersoft for Screen Recording
- Creating a Sales Presentation with PowerPoint
- Demographic Research with Google & Twitter
- Design Banners, Posts, & Giveaways with Canva
- Enhance Your Social Media Activity with Hootsuite
- Increasing Conversions with Optimonk
- Introduction to Tools
- Outsourcing with UpWork
- Recording Your Sales Video with Camtasia
- Sending Broadcasts and Automating with AWeber
- Setting Up Your Funnel with CB Builder
- Setting Up a Custom Domain with GoDaddy
- Split Testing with Visual Website Optimizer
- Video Editing with Camtasia
8) There are also live Q & A sessions for members where more training is provided. For those who are unable to attend, you can always catch up on these sessions which are recorded and uploaded in the members area. The value in these sessions more than make up for the monthly fee.
The Bad Points:
1) Just like any online course, you’ll need to study and apply what is taught. Information is useful, but action is the foundational key to all success.
The problem is that most newbies hesitate to act on the information. You must overcome this mental obstacle to see success. CB University is not a winning lottery ticket. You MUST do the work.
2) The amount of information in CB University can be overwhelming to a beginner and may make them him/her that the process is too difficult.
The best way to get around this problem will be to focus on just being an affiliate, instead of a vendor. Once you’ve learned the ropes and are generating affiliate commissions, you’ll be more confident to take the leap and become a product vendor.
3) The membership is a recurring fee. A beginner who is strapped for cash may find that the monthly fee is a burden. The fee gets much higher if you choose the upgrade (Builder 2.0).
What they don’t tell you is that you can get a page builder like Thrive Architect or OptimizePress for a one-time fee and build your pages at a much lower cost. Well, now you know.
Should You Get It?
A resounding YES! This is one of the best online marketing courses on the planet and it’s the benchmark when it comes to ClickBank training.
The fact that it covers both affiliate marketing and how to be a vendor in the ClickBank marketplace makes this a truly well-rounded training program.
With thousands of students and many success stories, the product delivers what it says beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you wish to make a decent side income, this course is for you.
If you wish to make income that will allow you to quit your day job and have location independence and freedom, CB University will help you get there.
If you want to be a millionaire, guess what? Yup! This course is for you too. ClickBank has made millionaires out of several vendors and affiliates. If you do the work and follow the training closely, success can be yours too.