Have you thought about making money with ClickBank, but afraid the lack of a website will be too big of an obstacle?
It’s possible to make money with ClickBank without a website. Before explaining all of the details, we'd be remiss not to mention that this is not the easiest way to be a software reseller or an affiliate marketer for physical products. Most people decide to build their website sooner or later — this provides you with more options, and you become less dependent on third-party platforms.
Affiliate marketing is worth your time, regardless of how you choose to approach it at first — according to Truelist, the industry generates up to a third of all online merchant revenue.
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Before explaining how you can make money with ClickBank without a website, we must go over the basics of affiliate marketing first.
Affiliate marketing depends on a performance-based relationship between vendors and affiliates. The vendors create products for a specific target audience and use the marketing expertise of affiliates to advertise them. In turn, the members receive a commission for each sale that is made because of their advertising. There are plenty of advantages to entering the affiliate industry:
It’s a growing industry
The barrier of entry is extremely low
There is no prerequisite education
It’s an excellent passive income source
You have professional independence
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative sector, but it has its issues that mustn’t be disregarded. For instance, there are plenty of less-than-honest affiliate networks out there. It’s easy for a multi-level-marketing scheme to disguise itself as an affiliate network.
These differ from honest networks because they do not seek to make their profits from consumers, but from the affiliates themselves. If you are required to buy products to promote them, that is a red flag.
Professional affiliates appreciate a bona fide affiliate network that's there for them as much as the vendors. ClickBank is one of them. It is one of the oldest industry leaders, particularly in the online world. This affiliate company was one of the first to go online back in 1998, enabling reseller marketing ever since. The reasons to use ClickBank to find products as an affiliate are:
Satisfactory commissions
Constant payouts
Friendliness to industry newbies
Recurring commissions
Product variety
The commissions on ClickBank are attractive to even the most veteran affiliates, particularly when it comes to digital products. One look at other mainstream affiliate platforms is enough to verify that. Amazon’s affiliate program rarely goes above 5% in commissions except for specific product niches.
ClickBank’s commissions go up to a whopping 70% if you’re a software reseller. That's because digital items have no shipping and transit costs, meaning all other parties involved in the transaction can extract more value from each sale.
The company also offers weekly and bi-weekly payouts, across a variety of payment options. It has a variety of niches and products that guarantees every affiliate can find something that they’d be passionate about promoting.
Many of the SaaS products that are sold on the ClickBank marketplace offer recurring commissions to its affiliates — meaning a portion of each subscription paid every month. It also helps that ClickBank provides information about each product transparently, making the platform quite easy to get into for affiliate newcomers.
ClickBank doesn't require you to have a website to register as an affiliate. The registration is easy and free for affiliates. If you have your own products and want to become a vendor instead, you will have to pay a registration fee. There is also an option for a hybrid account for people who want to work as affiliates and vendors.
ClickBank Registration Fees | |
Vendor account | $49.95 |
Affiliate account | Free |
When you’ve successfully registered your ClickBank account, it’s time to find your first products on the ClickBank marketplace.
ClickBank Landing Page
The first goal for any new affiliate should be selecting the right niche. People that work as affiliate marketers through personalized brands rarely spread out across a multitude of different niches. Someone buying marketing software is likely to listen to a recommendation from a professional marketer — but they will listen to a more authoritative source when it comes to fitness products.
Selecting your niche is essential, as it will determine the range of products you can choose from. It's advisable to go for a niche you're familiar with — a category of products that you've used already. If you're short on ideas, see what's selling on the ClickBank marketplace.
Apart from being familiar, a niche also has to be profitable. The profitability of a niche is determined by the popularity of its products. If more people are talking about a type of product, selling them will be more relaxed, and you'll have to invest less time, money, and effort.
Do some googling on the niche that you're considering promoting. A good indicator of a lively product category is plenty of Facebook groups with constant discussions. The safest bet is a so-called "evergreen niche." In other words, a group of products whose relevance never fades, despite tech developments or the appearance of new fads. Some of these are:
Relationships
Fitness
Personal development
Medical advice
You don’t have to choose one of these product categories. These are simply the ones that prove to be the easiest for affiliate newbies to promote — especially without a dedicated website.
Once you've selected the niche you want to work in as an affiliate, it's time to choose the specific products that you'll promote. The ClickBank marketplace offers a simplistic yet usable interface for product searching. You can browse products according to their categories, or simply search for keywords you're interested in.
There are many filters that you can use to differentiate and sort products. The most important one among them is ClickBank gravity. Gravity is a value that represents the profitability of a given product from the perspective of its affiliates. It doesn’t show how much money vendors make from the product, but the commissions that affiliates earn.
A lot of product sales through affiliates translates to generous commissions, which brings high gravity. This is an aptly-named value because it draws other members to the product — gravity shows that not only are people buying a product, but it's also proven to be of high quality.
Gravity does not illustrate the popularity of a product over the entirety of its lifetime. Instead, gravity is measured for the last three months of affiliate sales. That way, gravity always shows the most up-to-date sales trends for a particular product.
In practice, this means you should browse for ClickBank products that have decent gravity scores. Affiliates have different standards when it comes to this, but we recommend products that don’t have less than a gravity score of 20. At the same time, you don’t want to choose products with extremely high gravity scores either. A lot of ClickBank marketers will be competing for a commission for these, making them a tougher sell for novice affiliates.
Gravity isn’t the only factor to take into account while choosing ClickBank products:
Type of sales page
Affiliate resources
Customer proof
Convincing CTA
One look at the vendor's sales page for a specific product will tell you a lot about the product's chances of success. Remember, the conversion rates don't depend solely on your marketing efforts. In the end, prospective leads will arrive at the sales pages designed by vendors. It's vital for the pages to be highly engaging, as that will affect the number of sales and thus your commissions.
A video sales pitch is always a good sign. It means that the company behind the product has put enough effort into marketing to produce a video. Besides this, try to gauge the quality of the call to action and the text copy in general. All of this will affect how much a product can be expected to sell.
When choosing a product, you should also look at its listing on the ClickBank marketplace. Top-rated products tend to have more affiliate resources than others, meaning promotional materials and upsell stuff like ebook giveaways.
It's handy to have some sort of customer proof for a product as well — convincing testimonials, positive reviews, etc. Being able to communicate how existing customers have found value in a product does wonder for advertising and lead conversion.
When you’ve picked the product that you will promote, you need to obtain your affiliate link. This is a unique link to the product website or sales page. It’s designed to trace how many product sales come through you as an affiliate, before calculating your commissions. The link usually contains the affiliate’s ClickBank username as identification — although ClickBank has options for changing this.
The product links are found on the ClickBank marketplace listing for every product. You can find different options for links in the section for affiliate tools. To use the links, copy your ClickBank username in place of the placeholder "ClickBankID" part, and you're all set.
You have all the information needed to start promoting ClickBank products. If you had a website, you would simply create content in the form of videos or blog posts and insert the affiliate link into an appropriate place. But how can you promote ClickBank products without a website? There are still ways to drive traffic to your vendor partners and present the affiliate link to the right target audience, even without your website.
It’s important to note that one of the advantages of creating your website is that you dictate the content policy. Other online platforms can be very strict regarding affiliate links. Experienced marketers know the woes of being refused by content managers because of promotional content. That's something you don't have to deal with when you've got your site.
Social media is one of the most famous avenues for affiliate marketers, and Facebook is the chief among them. There are two basic ways of promoting affiliate products on Facebook:
Facebook posts
Facebook groups
Facebook does not ban affiliate links from paid ads as a part of its public content policy, but it rarely allows them in practice. That leaves posts and private groups as the only options for advertising affiliate products on the platform.
Affiliates prepared for a long-term approach may use Facebook groups. Once you have amassed a sizable number of followers, you can create a group that will be used for discussions within your niche. This process entails:
Making a business profile
Creating a niche group
Locating similar groups
Networking
Making money
The first step towards marketing products via a Facebook group is creating another Facebook profile besides your own. You’ll use this for affiliate marketing purposes, keeping business separate from your personal life.
The next step is the actual creation of your group. The Facebook profile dashboard contains a “groups” button and a “Create Group” option within the appropriate screen. Try to come up with an original name for your group, but one that still illustrates your niche and purpose clearly.
Now that you have your Facebook group, you should seek out similar niche groups. Facebook is used by billions of people daily, so don't expect to reinvent the wheel — whatever your niche is, thousands of groups with a similar or identical idea already exist. This isn't a bad thing, though — it's your primary source of lead generation for your Facebook group.
When you’ve located the top groups for your product niche, join the most populous ones. If they’re invite-only, you’ll have to wait for the moderators to accept your application. Once that’s done, you’ll have access to the group content. Even more importantly, you’ll be able to peruse the member lists at your discretion.
Start adding the people who are members of these fellow groups as friends on your business profile. In due time, you’ll be able to message them regarding your group and invite them to join. This, however, is the part that makes Facebook groups a long-term effort.
You can't just start asking people to join your group on the first day that you've entered theirs — they'll find no value in doing so. Instead, you have to participate in niche conversations, showcase your expertise, and let them see that you have something to offer first.
When you have enough members in your group, you can begin posting content and sparking conversations. The fact that you don't have your website can make this part difficult — you will have to make do with material from other websites. You can always post articles on other people's niche blogs as a guest, as everyone appreciates original content. The affiliate links can be found there, and your group members will come upon it organically.
If you don't have a website, YouTube is one of the other biggest content platforms you can use besides social media. This goes for all affiliate programs or marketing in general. People engage with high-quality video content. We're not just talking about image quality here — the presentation needs to captivate the visitors' attention for the entire duration of the video.
Stock content won’t do here — you will have to stand in front of the camera yourself, or hire someone to do it. Unless you’re an affiliate company with a dedicated marketing budget, it’s usually the former. This is a problem for most people, bringing back memories of stage fright from school play productions.
It’s a fear you will have to surpass, at least in part. You may avoid appearing in front of the camera yourself in a few YouTube video formats, but your voice is still going to be required.
ClickBank YouTube Methods |
Personal presentation |
Slide videos |
Animated content |
Personal presentations aside, there are options for creating videos without exposing yourself to the camera. Slides are always an option when discussing niche topics — many viewers prefer these as they outline information with more clarity.
Animation videos seem like the most challenging option, but these aren't the trouble they once were. In 2020, you can find multiple software solutions for easier creation of animated videos from templates.
When you upload these videos to YouTube, you'll have the opportunity to create a detailed video description below them. That's where you will place your ClickBank link. Provided that the video content is engaging enough, you can look forward to stable conversions from YouTube.
Making money on ClickBank without a website is not impossible, but having a website makes the process easier. Otherwise, social media platforms such as Facebook or YouTube are your best option for advertising as an affiliate.
Just follow our battle-tested guidelines and rake in the profits.