How to Make Money on Instagram With Clickbank — An In-Depth Tutorial

Are you a ClickBank affiliate looking for ways to incorporate Instagram into your advertising strategy?

We’ll provide you with all the details needed to make informed choices as you build your affiliate marketing ecosystem via ClickBank and Instagram. 

Before examining how you can use these two online platforms in tandem to earn a passive income, we’ll answer a more immediate question — is Instagram a viable platform for affiliate marketing?

All economic indicators point towards “yes” as the answer. According to Oberlo, billions of people around the world spend an average of three hours solely on social media. 

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This makes social networking software a valuable advertising platform for software resellers and other marketers. Instagram and Facebook are chief among social media in terms of active users and advertising potential. 

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Instagram and ClickBank

Now that we’ve established the worth of ClickBank for affiliate marketing, we’ll dive into ways to make money from ClickBank and Instagram.

A majority of affiliate marketers tend to underestimate the power of Instagram for product promotion. The reason for that is simple — linking capabilities are limited, making Instagram a questionable platform for driving traffic towards affiliate links and products. 

If you pick the right niche and take the proper approach with your content, highly targeted traffic is an achievable goal. You just need to take the effort and time required to grow a following on Instagram. 

The ClickBank Instagram Method — Where to Start

Before you can start working on your Instagram strategy, you have to create a ClickBank account. 

ClickBank Signup Page

Signing up for a ClickBank account is a streamlined and straightforward process. Once you navigate to the "Create an Account" page on the ClickBank website, you need to enter the following personal information:

1. Your country of residence

2. Your first and last name

3. Your phone number

4. Your valid email address

5. Your secure password

Unlike some competing affiliate networks, ClickBank is free — but only for affiliates. Product merchants have to pay a specific fee for each account they create.

Picking a Niche

When you've finished creating your ClickBank account, you need to explore the platform's marketplace for valuable products you can promote. The ClickBank marketplace offers an impressive variety of product categories from which affiliates can choose. 

While the ClickBank staff don't allow the sale of any illegal products, bear in mind that there is not much curation beyond this. You'll find products and vendors with wildly differing levels of quality and profitability. It is your job as an affiliate to choose the most suitable products. 

When you enter the main marketplace page, you will see a section devoted to categories on the left. ClickBank uses these categories to sort products according to their respective niches, such as:

These categories are divided into a multitude of subcategories, which contain the products. There are hundreds of subcategories within each niche. Affiliates that work in extremely competitive niches often opt for a less populated subcategory to earn commissions more easily. 

For instance, let’s say that you were looking to promote white label marketing software. Such products would probably be found under the “Software & Services” category. But this is only the most general category for digital products. Within that tag, you might find both lead generation software and software for text message marketing. 

These are smaller subcategories you can choose from and more specific niches. When you’ve narrowed down your choices to a particular type of product, you can finally select the product you’re going to endorse and promote. 

Choosing a Product

Once you’ve pinpointed the narrowest niche in which you want to find your product, there are a couple of factors to consider while making the final selection:

• ClickBank gravity 

• Average price

• Popularity

Popularity and the average price of a sale are quite self-explanatory — but gravity is a value unique to the ClickBank marketplace. This makes their product filtering options a notch above the competition.  

The gravity indicator is also the best way to surmise if a product is worth your time or not. It’s a value representing the number of marketers that have converted leads to customers in the previous three months, for a specific product. 

In simpler terms, this is a value that indicates how profitable a product has been for affiliates lately. Sorting products by that score should be one of your priorities as a ClickBank member. 

Remember that astronomically high gravity scores aren’t ideal either — you want something over twenty, but you don’t want two hundred. If too many affiliates are earning commissions from a single product, you’ll probably have a harder time breaking into that niche. 

When you decide which product you want to market, the "Promote" option will lead to your unique affiliate link. This link contains your ClickBank ID and tracks which product sales came as a result of your lead conversions.   

Starting Your Affiliate Journey on Instagram

After generating your affiliate link on ClickBank, your job here is done for now. It is time to turn to Instagram and make it your primary lead generation channel. 

You need to create a new Instagram profile for your affiliate marketing scheme. Go to the Instagram website on your desktop, or access the app via mobile devices. Enter all required information in the signup form. 

Next, you will need a profile picture for this affiliate Instagram account. Choose one carefully, as this has to be an original and standout image — something that will attract your product’s target audience to the profile. Your best option is to go to a platform like Fiverr and hire someone to design your logo cheaply. 

Using stock images is an option, but this will lower the credibility of your profile significantly. Once you’ve chosen the perfect profile image, fill out your Instagram bio. This is a short description that quickly informs your followers about the purpose of your profile.

You need to have a lot of followers to use Instagram as a source of conversions for a ClickBank product. That means putting in the time to grow your account with regular posts that contain relevant niche hashtags. This will allow you only to attract the right target audience and not miss any potential sales. 

The next question to answer is — how do you determine which hashtags are right for you? Tools such as Hashtagify allow you to explore all of the relevant hashtags for any niche. 

For example, if you’re looking for hashtags related to reputation management software, you would search for these keywords. Hashtagify would provide you with all of the related hashtags that you could use in your posts and your bio. 

You have to mix these up, as Instagram does not reward the same hashtags being used in the same order repeatedly. Each Instagram post can contain as many as thirty different hashtags — use as many of these as you can. You can put these both in your comments and in the description for your posts. 

One of the other ways to find hashtags is to follow the most popular Instagram accounts in your niche. See which of their posts have received the most likes, and study their hashtag strategy. There are two types of hashtags you can use:

1. High density hashtags — those with more than 500,000 posts

2. Low density hashtags — found in fewer than 500,000 posts

The higher the density is, the bigger the competition will be. Using high density hashtags means that — unless your post becomes viral — it will probably be buried under a mountain of other posts. 

Still, you’re bound to receive a couple of likes from those hashtags too. Just make sure that most of your hashtags are those where you’re more competitive. This kind of content strategy will help you gradually grow your Instagram follower base. In due time, you will be able to compete with stronger hashtags and become even more popular.

How Does ClickBank Make Money on Instagram?

Now that you’ve created your profile and worked on building a following, it’s time to start adding affiliate links to your profile. You have three options when it comes to affiliate link placement on Instagram:

1. External landing pages

2. Bio links

3. Instagram stories

Affiliate Links via External Landing Pages

In most cases, affiliate marketers don’t develop separate Instagram accounts for each product they promote. They try to push products within a single niche that can be promoted via a single Instagram account. 

That makes affiliate links an issue — you can't put them all in your Instagram bio. Marketers solve this by using a page builder such as ClickFunnels to create a separate landing page that contains all of the affiliate links. Then, marketers place the link to this page in their Instagram bio. 

Affiliate Links via Instagram Bio

Driving traffic to your affiliate link isn't just the matter of placing it in your Instagram bio. People need to stumble upon your account for this to work. That's why you need to use the proper niche hashtags in your bio as well. 

Think of this as an SEO tool, but for Instagram’s search instead of Google. When people look at posts tagged with a niche hashtag, they’ll come across your affiliate account. If they’re interested in your Instagram content, they might use the affiliate link to buy a product. 

Affiliate Links in Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are one of the most efficient ways to reach your target audience. Stories provide room for an immediate reaction from customers, making them an excellent format for a quick but impactful call to action. 

More importantly, you can place your affiliate links in stories, but only on accounts that have a certain number of followers. Once your account surpasses 10,000 followers, you gain access to the swipe-up link feature. You can add affiliate links directly to your stories, or place a link toward your landing page with multiple affiliate links. 

How To Advertise Products on Instagram

Succeeding as an affiliate marketer on Instagram means more than optimizing your page for maximum traffic. The content that you post will have to be recognizable and interesting enough to cultivate a long-term follower base. 

It is important to note that having a sizable number of followers isn’t enough. Your profile needs to be recognized as a source of valid information by your niche audience before you can market products on Instagram. 

Steering Clear of Hard Sales

As an affiliate marketer on Instagram, your main goal is for people to buy the products that you’re promoting. That’s the only way you can make a commission. Because of this, plenty of newbie marketers make the mistake of approaching their target audience with a hard sell. 

Aggressive advertising tactics do not work on Instagram. More than any other social network, Instagram is geared towards influencer marketing. This type of advertising relies on the personal connection and trust that arises between the influencer and their target audience. 

Considering that, avoid shoving affiliate products down your followers’ throats in a manner that reminds of a used car salesman. Your marketing tactics should honor the elementary tenet of proper storytelling: show, don’t tell. Consumers don’t want to hear someone telling them that they should buy a product, especially on Instagram. Use graphics and videos to showcase the product without your followers feeling pressured to buy them. 

Implementing Photography

Instagram is one of the greatest platforms for product placement on the Internet, but that’s not its initial purpose. At its core, Instagram is still a social network where people share photos and images.

Understanding this is important if you don’t want to seem too salesy and pushy as you wield influence to promote ClickBank products. The product photos that you’re going to post on your profile have to be professional and creative. According to Hootsuite, a third of all stories people view on Instagram are posted by business profiles. 

Your story will have to compete with all of them for people’s attention, even when you’re not using post sponsoring. Detailed images that accompany your pitch or infographics that reveal insightful product details will help you do that. 

Interacting With the Audience 

Most successful Instagram marketers would qualify high-quality content with one word — engaging. The most secure road to lead conversion is to create posts and stories that people are likely to respond to. 

One of the best tactics in this vein is prompting your followers to tag you in their posts that contain some mention or a photo of the products that you’re promoting. That will enable you to share them on your own stories and repost them. Once other people see that their peers are satisfied with the product, they will be more inclined to give it a try themselves. 

Using Instagram Ads

Funneling affiliate traffic through your Instagram page is possible without paid aids. Yet, paid advertisements are an excellent shortcut towards higher targeted traffic to your affiliate product page or your landing page. 

Paid ads are a useful way to bring attention to a specific promotion or product, but they're not sustainable in the long run due to fixed expenses. Organic lead generation campaigns are still needed. 

Utilizing Promotions

You can afford to spend more time and effort building your online presence in a specific niche once you've picked what kind of products you wish to promote. Devising a giveaway program for potential leads can be a hugely effective marketing tactic. Not asking people to buy something right away is a surer way to get their sales in the long run. 

Experienced marketers draw leads in with free offers instead. For instance, if you take the time to write a short niche ebook, you can offer it for free in exchange for a lead’s email. Such opt-in forms are incredibly successful because they provide consumers with value right away. 

If you manage to build a reputation within your niche, you can even organize free webinars and achieve the most direct contact with your target audience. All of these promotions can be advertised via Stories, ads, and posts on your Instagram account. 

Conclusion