Can You Advertise ClickBank Products on Facebook — A Complete Guide

Are you wondering if it's possible to advertise ClickBank products on Facebook? We’ll provide the most in-depth answer right here!

The short version is — yes, you can advertise ClickBank items via Facebook, but with some caveats. We’ll give you a detailed guide on how to do it properly. 

Affiliate marketing platforms akin to ClickBank are an excellent way to make a passive income. The key is tapping into the broadest possible target audience — which is where social media platforms like Facebook come in.

Affiliate Marketing Annual Spending

Image source: cloudways

Saying that Facebook is the biggest social network would be an understatement. According to Statista, this platform has more than two and a half billion active users — making it the single most significant source of online leads, if utilized correctly. 

The beauty of Facebook is that almost everyone uses it. Finding an audience for your pitch on Facebook is not difficult, whether you’re selling SEO tools or weight loss guides. 

Unfortunately, advertising ClickBank products on Facebook is not as simple as pasting an affiliate link into your text. There are particular controversies regarding the ethical nature of affiliate links on social networks, and they're generally frowned upon. 

ClickBank

ClickBank is something similar to Facebook in the world of affiliate marketing. It is one of the oldest affiliate networks still in operation today, and it is one of the first affiliate companies to move its business online and build a web platform. The ClickBank marketplace has been working since 1998. 

This company offers some of the most significant commissions you can find online (up to 75%), and it lets marketers choose from all kinds of products. It's not niche-specific, and it doesn't limit you in picking the products you'd like using and reviewing. The platform encourages this practice. To summarize, ClickBank's benefits are:

• A wide variety of product niches

• Recognition among affiliate networks

• A stable web platform

Can I Run FB Ads for ClickBank Stuff?

Affiliate marketing is not prohibited on Facebook in and of itself. Spamming with affiliate links via Facebook ads or even in Facebook posts is another matter. 

ClickBank and Facebook are quite stringent about the use of affiliate links. You'll find both parties have penalties for using such links in a way that they do not encourage. Spamming people with affiliate links on Facebook is not acceptable, as a result. 

ClickBank and Facebook

The table above does not mean that affiliate marketing is impossible on Facebook. You just need to adjust your approach to this platform as a ClickBank member looking to promote physical or digital products there. 

The tricky part here is Facebook's terms regarding affiliate marketing. Facebook is notorious for legal guidelines that are often contradictory, hard to locate, and tough to understand. This goes double for their terms on branded content and affiliate promotions — such rules are in constant flux. 

Affiliate marketers and software resellers keep tweaking and evolving the methods of reaching their consumer base, and Facebook’s rules follow this trend. This affects how you can advertise ClickBank products using Facebook without doing something prohibited or frowned upon. The proper conduct in this situation depends on two things:

1. Guidelines from Facebook’s Branded Content Policy

2. Guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission 

The Branded Content Policy

How do affiliate links fit into Facebook’s BCP (Branded Content Policy)? 

The policy states that only verified Facebook profiles and pages are allowed to post branded content. That content category is defined as any content about brands other than Facebook and third-party products. 

If this were the only provision regarding branded content, the policy would seem strangely prohibitive. No-one except profiles and pages with the blue badge of verification could talk about other brands and promote them — making affiliate marketing impossible. 

That’s why Facebook further defines branded content as that which is influenced by a third-party business in exchange for value. This seemingly unimportant detail makes all the difference in the world when it comes to ClickBank links and products.

ClickBank is an affiliate marketing platform. The businesses that cooperate with marketers on such networks don’t exchange advertisements for value — they exchange them from a portion of the revenue. These are two entirely different business models. 

1. Influencer advertising — a business pays an online influencer to promote their products via their social networks

2. Affiliate marketing — an affiliate marketer promotes the products of an online business in exchange for a percentage of each sale

This interpretation of the Branded Content Policy allows users that aren’t verified to use affiliate links to promote the products — but it doesn’t allow them to receive payments for the promotion in any other form than a percentage of sales. 

Any individuals or business pages that want to post content related to third-party brands must transparently disclose the nature of their relationship with the third-party brand. This is true even if we take the differences between affiliate marketing and influencer ads into account. Facebook wants its users to have a clear overview of whether someone is making money by promoting products. 

Transparent disclosures regarding third-party promotions aren’t a requirement for no reason — the Federal Trade Commission enforces the same rules, and Facebook is simply in compliance with them. 

When you use affiliate links in your Facebook content, it has to be clear that you’re extracting some kind of worth from people clicking on them. The terminology here is not defined, but you have to ensure people realize that they’re clicking on an affiliate link — a literal disclosure using those words will suffice. 

Many marketers who resell digital products use an abbreviation like “aff link” before the link itself. We recommend not taking any shortcuts here if you want to remain completely compliant with Facebook’s policies and avoid potential confusion. 

Affiliate Links in Facebook Pages

Facebook's terms of service and ClickBank's link guidelines do not frown upon using affiliate links in Facebook posts, both on business pages and personal profiles. There are many other affiliate networks, and if you want to use any of them, you will also have to make sure that their terms of service align with Facebook. 

Affiliate Links on Facebook Ads

You may have noticed that the Branded Content Policy devised by Facebook does not have specific clauses regarding Facebook ads — it only defines the nature of branded content compared to affiliate marketing.

Considering that, how did we conclude that affiliate links are not allowed on Facebook ads, but are allowed in posts? The answer is — through practice. Facebook ads can be approved or denied on a case-by-case basis. Some ads containing affiliate links are accepted, and others are not. It seems that the most significant factor here is how aggressive and tenacious the advertisement is.

Even if your ad does get through after you tinker with it and resubmit — it’s clear that Facebook frowns upon affiliate links in paid ads. That sole fact is enough to know that you can't base your marketing strategy around Facebook ads. Facebook changes its policies constantly, and something that is only an unspoken practice today — like banning affiliate ads — may become official policy tomorrow. To summarize:

• Facebook does not officially ban affiliate paid ads

• Many of the ads that contain affiliate links aren’t approved in practice

Aspiring affiliate marketers that intend on using Facebook would be better off optimizing their pages and posts containing affiliate links. 

Facebook Page Optimization

Affiliate marketers — such as ClickBank users — manage to use Facebook for product promotion even without ads. The crucial part here is optimizing your pages for search engines, helping your target audience find the content. Using the proper content strategies and the correct niche keywords is imperative if you want people to stumble upon your pages easily. 

If no-one is getting to your product-related pages, they won’t click on the affiliate links. That means no-one will be buying the product through the links, drying up your commissions. The approach to ranking and keywords, in this case, is the same as it would be for your website on Google or any other search engine. 

Most people find Facebook content using the built-in search engine on the platform. Yet, the page comes up in keyword searches on search engines as well — making SEO an essential part of your affiliate marketing on Facebook. 

People looking for a particular product are likely to find your Facebook page among the top-ranking Google results if you do SEO properly.

Social Media Usage Statistics 

Image source: wordstream

How to Promote Your ClickBank Products on Facebook

Facebook ads may not always contain affiliate links, but they can still be used to promote affiliate products — with the help of an external website. 

1. Create your website or blog

2. Post content that contains affiliate links there

3. Submit a Facebook ad that links to your content with affiliate links

This technique represents an acceptable workaround to Facebook's ad policy because your ads don't contain actual affiliate links. The result is still the same, with one additional step. It should be noted that this puts a more substantial burden on the quality of your website content.

People don’t want to click through endless links before making a purchase — that’s why an efficient sales funnel contains minimal steps towards a sales page. If users need to go through ads and pages to get to the vendor website containing the product — all of the content needs to be captivating and impeccable. Internet users do not have long attention spans in 2020. 

It is also important to remember that Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission do not allow the promotion of any products that are deemed unsafe, adult, or illegal. That shouldn't be a problem with ClickBank vendors, seeing as their terms and conditions ban the sale of such items. 

How to Use Facebook to Drive to a ClickBank Product

You have all of the information needed to ascertain what kind of advertisement of ClickBank products is acceptable on Facebook and in what form. There are plenty of ways to effectively drive users toward a ClickBank product and achieve conversions, such as:

1. Image galleries

2. Video reviews

3. Personal posts

4. Facebook groups

Image Galleries

Text posts on Facebook usually have a lower reach compared to images. That's only logical, as users scroll through their feeds almost by habit, rarely stopping to spend time on walls of text. Moving images are more likely to catch their attention instead. 

Image galleries are an excellent way to promote an affiliate product. Post captivating photos of the affiliate product that you're promoting and follow them up with a product review or its description below. The images will attract users long enough to read the text content, possibly leading to a conversion. 

The wording here will have to be extremely careful, as Facebook does not approve of spammy content. This means you can't create such posts too frequently either. Plus, it's not just Facebook that you have to worry about. ClickBank has its own rules regarding affiliate content, and they ban any marketers that promote their products through spam. That sort of behavior damages their brand as well. 

Your posts need to be varied and reasonably objective if you want to remain in compliance with ClickBank and Facebook content regulations. This makes your choice of vendors and products even more important. It’s much tougher to promote shoddy products while remaining truthful and objective. 

Video Reviews

Video content is another type of post that draws in huge Facebook audiences, especially compared to purely text posts. You can raise audience engagement by making video tutorials for products or objective video reviews. 

These posts can still contain an affiliate link within the text area below the video. The engagement levels can also be boosted if you place your affiliate links in comments. 

Personal Posts

Your business page and personal profiles on Facebook can be used in tandem. For instance, you can create a post on a business page and then share it through your personal Facebook profile. 

This practice increases its reach via your friends and family, many of whom will share the post or write comments. Increasing engagement through organic means is an excellent way to promote affiliate links and, hopefully, achieve more conversions. 

Facebook Groups

Every business that wants to promote itself online needs to create a Facebook page — just like it needs a postal address or a phone number. Pages, however, aren't the only form of business representation on Facebook that can spark audience engagement. Facebook groups are excellent tools for this, as well. 

Once your business amasses a sizable number of active followers, a group for direct conversation would do wonders for your audience engagement. People who talk to you will have an easier time believing the trustworthiness of your product recommendations. This will increase your commissions in the long run, as more of your Facebook followers will purchase ClickBank products. 

It's also excellent for short-term gains because there's nothing that says you can't post affiliate links in private group conversations. If anything, this gives you a more direct way to convince your target audience of a product's value. 

ClickBank Guidelines

Facebook isn’t the only party that has regulations for affiliate links — ClickBank has some directions for its affiliates as well. The two most important rules they impose are:

• Spam is not allowed

• Negative campaigns are not allowed

ClickBank does not approve of its members spamming consumers with product promotions, on Facebook, or otherwise. Spamming complaints are treated as a serious matter, and it's not uncommon for affiliates who have repeatedly spammed customers to be banned from the platform. 

The ClickBank moderators do not approve of negative advertising campaigns either. Many affiliates get the idea to promote a product by rhetorically asking if it's a scam or shoddy and then posting content to the contrary and including an affiliate link. This is not allowed, as most ClickBank vendors do not approve of being associated with negative descriptions of their product, even in a heading or a post title. 

How to Use ClickBank on Facebook — Bottom Line

Facebook can be used to promote ClickBank products. The social network, however, disapproves of paid advertisements containing affiliate links. There are other ways to achieve promotion, such as links to external blogs, private groups, and posts with content reviews. Facebook is a viable medium for the advertisement of affiliate products, as long as their policies on branded content are respected.