How To Make Money On Clickbank

What is Clickbank?

Well, in their words:

Clickbank Is The Web's Most Trusted Digital Marketplace. Founded in 1998, ClickBank is a secure online retail outlet for more than 70,000 digital product vendors and 110,000 active affiliate marketers. ClickBank makes a sale somewhere in the world every three seconds, safely processing more than 27,000 digital transactions a day. They serve more than 200 countries, and are consistently ranked as one of the most high-traffic sites on the web.

Source: www.Clickbank.com.

Clickbank is the largest affiliate marketplace on the internet. Without Clickbank the internet would not be the same for many affiliates. In my opinion, you can’t really be an internet marketer without having an account with Clickbank. There are internet millionaires who have never sold anything themselves but earn all their money as an affiliate, selling other people’s products.

Clickbank is also known simply as “CB” in the Internet marketing world.

Clickbank is sort of like Amazon but only for digital products. You can sign up at www.Clickbank.com.

Clickbank mostly sells digital products: eBooks, software, videos. The products range from ‘how to stop your dog barking’ to ‘how to make money on the internet’ and everything else in between. Because all products are digital and the delivery cost is zero, the commission rates are very high: between 50% to 75% and even more.

Clickbank is a database where affiliates can find products to sell or where vendors can find affiliates to sell their products. Signing up as an affiliate with Clickbank is free. If you have written an eBook on “piano repair” but you are not very good at selling or building websites, you can become a vendor on Clickbank and put your eBook there for anybody to sell. In return you give the seller part of the selling price. As an example, you keep 40% and the affiliate gets 60% when a book is sold.

On the other hand, if you know nothing about piano repair but you think that there is a gap on the internet to sell books on piano repairs, you would sign up as an affiliate on Clickbank and find a piano repair book to sell on your website. You would get 60% (or whatever the commission rate is) of the selling price because you have put in most of the effort in the sale of the eBook.

To sign up as a vendor you need to pay a one-off fee of $49.95. You sign up as a vendor when you have your own product and you want to put in on the marketplace. You want people (affiliates) to sell it for you and you pay them commission for every sale.

Once you have signed up with www.Clickbank.com and you are a Clickbank affiliate, you will be given a unique hyperlink (or ‘hoplink’) to the product you want to promote. Then anyone who clicks your link and buys the product will earn you a percentage commission. How to get

that link onto your website will be covered later in this book.

Clickbank is the internet marketer’s dream come true. The big advantage of Clickbank is that

it has its own payment processor, so you can sell products and charge people to their credit card – Clickbank does all this for you automatically. Before Clickbank was online, you would have to get your own merchant account from your bank, and as a new business that would be almost impossible. With Clickbank, you can sell stuff online without ever having sold anything before - Clickbank will charge your customer.

Clickbank collects the money from the buyer, pays the affiliate the commission and pays the vendor the rest.

Here’s the example as a website developer: You are developing a website about pianos and piano repair but you do not have the knowledge to write an eBook on the subject. Here are the steps you need to take:

• Sign up as an affiliate on www.Clickbank.com. Visit the market place, search for piano repair and find the product you want to sell.

• Look at the different products and for the product that you like, choose ‘Promote’.Later in this book I will discuss other things to look for but at the moment I just want to point out how easy it all is to get a money-making code.

• When you click “promote” your affiliate link will automatically be created and you will be shown a code. Copy that code onto your website for a picture or anchor text like this: Buy a piano repair book here : with the hyperlink function of your web design software, you need to paste that link to the underlined text. When somebody clicks that link, they will go to the sales page of the piano repair book and Clickbank will pay you commission on the sale.

Shown above: Find the product you want to sell, search for ‘piano repair’ and click ‘promote’. You will be given an affiliate link to put on your site.

Here’s the example if you are the eBook writer who would like to find affiliates to sell your book: You have the knowledge of repairing a piano and you have enough material to write an eBook (approx. 60 to 150 pages) about the subject.

Here are the steps that you need to follow:

• Write your eBook

• Design a very simple cover

• Convert it to a PDF (‘save as’ in Microsoft Word and choose ‘PDF-format’).

• Make one page of text explaining why your eBook is wonderful and what it can do for the buyer

• Design a website with a sales page and an affiliate page. For examples of how an affiliate page can look like, visit Clickbank, open some websites and scroll to the bottom of each website where you will see “affiliates click here” or “ make money with this”, etc…

• Sign up as a vendor on www.Clickbank.com

• Put your eBook on the marketplace for affiliates to sell it

• Check your Clickbank account regularly to see how many books you have sold

• There is no need to write the eBook yourself or do any of the work yourself; you can outsource it as you will read later.

Who gets paid what?

Suppose the eBook cost $29 and the vendor says that the affiliate receives 70% of the sale and the vendor keeps 30% of the sale.

$29 x 70% = $20.30 This is what the affiliate gets (the person selling your book)

$29 x 30% = $8.70 This is what the vendor keeps (you as the writer of the book)

BUT Clickbank is a commercial institution. So Clickbank needs to get paid for its work.

Clickbank charges 7.5% of the sales price + $1.00 per sale.

$29 x 7.5% = $2.17 + $1.00 = $3.17 Therefore $3.17 is Clickbank’s profit.

$29 - $ 3.17 = $ 25.83 So this amount is what the vendor and affiliate get paid.

$25.83x 70% = $18.08 This is the amount that the affiliate gets paid in his Clickbank account.

$25.83x 30% = $7.74 This is the amount that the vendor gets paid in his Clickbank account.

When you sign up with Clickbank you can choose how you get paid: by bank transfer, cheque or international cheque. You can set a minimum when you want to get paid e.g. $100, $200,

etc… This means that as soon as you have $100 in your account, Clickbank will pay you. If you have not been paid enough by the end of each month, your balance will be moved to the next month.

Being an affiliate has the following advantages:

• No licence fees needed

• There is no contract to sign with anybody

• You can log onto your work anywhere in the world

• You can make money while you sleep ( after you have put in some hard work)

• You can sell in any country, worldwide

• You can sell in any niche

• You never have to process orders

• You never ever need to worry about stock take, over stock or left over stock

• You never need a customers’ service email or telephone number

• You never need large start-up capital to begin trading

• You never need a Payment Processing Gateway ( a bank that charges your customer’s card)

• You don’t need employees

• You don’t need sales experience

• You don’t need to know anything about the niche to sell in it

• You have no production costs to worry about

• You never have to leave your house

• You never have to speak to anybody if you don’t want to

• You can choose the hours you work

• You can be your own boss

• You can start up a business that can grow 200% or more each year, which is almost impossible to achieve in a business outside the web

• You never have to go to the bank to pay in cheques, as all is done electronically

• You never have to chase late payments as all is paid in advance

• There are no cash flow problems (if you manage your money correctly) as you receive your money immediately

• No refund worries as CB does this for you – everything is automated

So Clickbank is all about vendors and affiliates, but how does a vendor earn money from an affiliate? Do I have to email the vendor each time I have made a sale?

A lot of people ask me this. It all sounds a bit complicated to start with but once you have used it once or twice you won’t believe how simple it all is.

You must have come across websites that have underlined text, and if you click the underlined text, it re-directs you to another website. In a way, that is what Clickbank does.

But it just has a fancier word for it: hoplink. If somebody clicks on a hoplink, it means that they are re-directed to the page with your hoplink on so you make money.

A hoplink is the linking format that Clickbank uses. It puts the affiliate cookie into the user’s computer and then takes the user to the sales page of the product. A general Clickbank hoplink looks like this:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

AFFILIATE in this case is your Clickbank username or nickname.

VENDOR in this case is the vendor’s Clickbank username or nickname or the owner of the product that you are selling via your affiliate link.

Suppose the affiliate is called JUAN123 and the vendor is called DELACRUZ123, the hoplink would

look like this:

http://JUAN123.DELACRUZ123.hop.clickbank.net

Therefore each person who sells a product from the vendor would have a unique hoplink. If the affiliate would be called BLOGMAN123, the hoplink would look like this:

http://BLOGMAN123.DELACRUZ123.hop.clickbank.net

The vendor and affiliate nicknames can be ANYTHING you want, as long as the name does not already exist in Clickbank.

You must use your hoplinks all the time when you want to promote or sell a product. This is the only way that you will receive your commissions. Suppose you send an email to your friend with a Clickbank hoplink that looks like the above. When your friend clicks on the hoplink and buys your product, Clickbank will know to pay you your commission because of your unique hoplink.

When somebody clicks on your hoplink, Clickbank will know that you made a sale and will pay commission into your account. Clickbank does everything automatically. It is like a miniature accountancy system, because it keeps a record of all the sales made and it keeps a record of who gets how much commission.

To create a hoplink, you have to visit www.Clickbank.com and search for the product that you want to promote and your hoplink will automatically be created when you click “promote” next to the product description.

If you have only one traffic source the above hoplink will be okay but when you use several methods to generate sales, you will want to know from which traffic method the sale is created. So, add a TID (or tracking hoplink or tracking identification) to the above hoplink.

Your affiliate link will then look like this:

http://JUAN123.DELACRUZ123.hop.clickbank.net/?TID =ABC where ABC could be: friend’s email or facebookID or website or blog (see hoplink below), or whatever you want it to be.

http://JUAN123.DELACRUZ123.hop.clickbank.net/TID=BLOG

Your Clickbank account will show you which TID each sale was made with, so you can see which one of your traffic sources is doing well. You should try to use tracking hoplinks as much as possible, as this will help you to learn which of your methods is working best and which are not working at all. There will be more about TID later in this book.

Important: Clickbank changes their rules sometimes so make sure you know the rules before you start working with them as a vendor or as an affiliate.

BYOB - BE YOUR OWN BOSS