How to Make It Work

Clickbank.com is a nice way to get your feet wet in internet marketing.  Clickbank is a digital products retailer (digital meaning ebooks, internet-delivered courses, and software) where you can sign up as a “vendor” or as an “affiliate.”  As a vendor you create a digital product and promote it through Clickbank’s Marketplace– a large library of digital products in many niches; for example Business, Relationships, Sports, Money and Finance, Computing, Marketing, and so on.  Clickbank has thousands of affiliates who check the Marketplace for products they want to sell (of course, you can sell your product yourself, and, you can be both a vendor and an affiliate of CB selling other vendors’ products).

Clickbank has an easy-to-follow process to create a Payment Link– the HTML code one puts on his sales page that takes the purchaser to Clickbank’s payment processing system– beats the heck of having to buy an expensive shopping cart system.

But the true power comes from CB’s affiliate link system:  all an affiliate has to do to sell a vendor’s product and get paid a commission is to create a link in this format:

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

where AFFILIATE is the CB nickname of the affiliate, and VENDOR is the CB nickname of the vendor.   Affiliates promote CB products (they can sell an unlimited amount) using their special link on websites, on forums, on internet bulletin boards and classifieds like Craigslist, and by emailing to friends– basically anywhere on the internet where you can include your affiliate link.

When a prospect clicks the affiliate’s link, he is taken to the vendor’s sales page and a “cookie” is placed on his computer– a script that tells Clickbank (if he buys is) that he was referred by that particular affiliate.  If he winds up buying the product, CB tracks the purchase and the affiliate gets a commission.  Commissions are set by the vendor and can range between 25-75% of the product price.  CB deducts 7.5% of the sale price + $1.00 per sale.

Let me tell you that there are some people who are making 5-figures each MONTH selling Clickbank products.  The name of the game is to get a lot of clicks to your affiliate links.   The most popular approaches are PPC, blogs, using Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, natural search, and email spamming (don’t do this!)

As with many opportunities to make money online, it has gotten a bit more challenging making a lot of money through Clickbank due to increased competition and a general decline in appeal of the long-copy sales page approach.  But since there are new people coming online evey day, the opportunity to make it big still persists.