Clickbank Affiliate Marketing 101

In my attempt to find new ways to earn passive income online I decided to try my hand at affiliate marketing.  If you are not familiar with affiliate marketing, it is basically the process of selling products for another person or vendor in exchange for a commission.  Affiliate marketing has a huge potential and some people are making 10 and 20 thousand dollars a month just by selling other peoples products.

So how do you become an affiliate marketer?  It’s quite simple really.  If you ever download a piece of software or product, there is a good chance that the person or site who owns that product has an affiliate program.  To put it in to prospective, if you’ve bought it, you can sell it.  I find myself looking for affiliate links on the bottom of websites more often now after traveling this affiliate marketing endeavor.  It’s typically an easy sign-up process in which you provide your name, email address, your tax id number, and depending on the site maybe some other information.  They may require you to explain how you plan to market their product before they approve you as an affiliate.

To simplify things, there are sites that actually pair up affiliates with vendors.  This means that if you have a product to sell, you can host it with the site and then affiliates who join the site can sell the product for you.  And vice versa.  The most popular site for this is called Clickbank.  Clickbank pairs vendors and affiliates together to create a profitable relationship.  Simply find a product that you think will sell well, and sell it!

It may not be as simple as just selling it.  At this point you’ve probably already pulled up a new window and are exploring the Clickbank website (I would be).  So now you’re asking yourself, ok how do I sell this stuff?  That is the $1750,000 question.  It’s easy to sign up, it’s easy to find good products.  The challenging part is selling the product.  Before we discuss how to sell the products let me make it a point to say that you can potentially make up to 75% commission on each sale of a Clickbank product.  That’s phenomenal!  Let’s do some math.  Let’s say a product on Clickbank is selling at $97 with a 75% commission.  That’s $72.75 in your pocket every time you sell that product!   Let’s say you sell this product to 5 people a week.  That’s $365.75 a week and to take it a step further, that is $1455.00 a month!  And that’s just one product!  So let’s talk about how to sell these products (how I am selling these products).

After I joined Clickbank I browsed through the marketplace to see what kind of products are available.  I found some products that I was interested in that I felt would appeal to a large audience and that were worth what the vendor was asking for it.  Most of the products are informational, meaning eBooks.  There are some that are packages, for instance a product about internet marketing that comes with free website templates.  There are also some software products as well.  Browse through the marketplace and find products you feel comfortable marketing.  Once you find a product on Clickbank, click the “promote” button to generate an affiliate link for that product.

What is an “affiliate link”?  An affiliate link is a link that, when clicked on, records which affiliate gets credit once the product is sold.  An affiliate link is unique to the affiliate selling the product.  This is so that when a customer clicks on the link, you get credit for selling that product.  It is important to use affiliate links correctly in order to make your commission.  Always copy and paste your affiliate link from Clickbank.  If you try to type the link out it may result in a typographical error which equates to a lost sale.

After you have picked the products you want to market, write them down.  It is now time to do a little marketing research.  You can pay for a software product that simplifies keywords and competition research, like Market Samurai, however I use Google’s Keyword Tool.   Google’s Keyword Tool is a free tool to see how many people are searching for a particular keyword.  Simply type in a couple keywords and Google will tell you how many people are searching for that keyword on a monthly basis.  They will also include other keywords that people are searching for to give you an idea of what people are typing into the search engine.  They key to success here is to find a keyword that is highly searched but has less competition.  There are a few ways you can check competition.  You can check it using a software package or you can do what I do and just go to Google.com, type in the keyword phrase, click search, and then see how many results have those keywords in the title.  So what is “low competition”.  It’s kind of relative to how many people are searching for it.  If there are 140,000 people searching for a keyword and there are 2 million results already for that keyword, the competition really isn’t that high.  If you have 4,000 people searching a particular keyword and there are 2 million results already for that keyword, I definitely wouldn’t want to be fighting 2 million other people for 4,000 searches a month.  Make sense?  Starting out, I wouldn’t compete with anything over 800,000 results.  Look at the example below.  I used the keywords  “Golf swing”.

Figure 1-0

As you can see in figure 1-0, there are 246,000 monthly searches for this keyword, which is great.  However, in figure 1-1, in a Google search it shows that there are 17,700,000 sites with the same keyword that I would have to compete with.  I would not choose this keyword.  However, looking at the figure 1-0 again, there are some other keywords that I could target that people are searching for.  For example, 18,100 people searched globally for “golf swing tips”.

 

Figure 1-1

So now you have a great product, great keywords that match the product, and easy competition.  Now what?  This is where you have decide what you’re most comfortable doing.  There are a few ways to market these products.

• Create a website or blog about the product.  This can be a sales site or maybe a product review.
• Write an article about the product, include your affiliate link in the article, and publish it to an article site.
• Create an email directory of potential buyers and send them emails that include the affiliate link.
• Mention the product in a blog post to show other people that you really like the product.
• Put an advertisement on classified sites telling customers about the product.
• Create fliers that include the affiliate link and hand them out to people (I wouldn’t personally recommend this)

Personally, I use the website method.  I create websites about the product and possibly include a product review.  To give you an example, check out one of my affiliate marketing niche sites here.  Creating a website is easier than most people think.  It is definitely intimidating at first, but after you’ve gone through the process, you’ll be putting websites up left and right.  I would highly recommend Bluehost for website hosting.  They are affordable, have great customer support, and most importantly (to me) they have a one-click WordPress installation.  When building a website you will also be faced with other challenges, the biggest adversity is getting traffic to your site.  This is a process and takes time to put things in place in order to get traffic to your site.  I will discuss this is another post.  Affiliate marketing is not for everyone.  It is time-consuming, requires SEO knowledge, and some people don’t have a knack for selling products.  It is, however, a great way to make a passive income.  After one week of putting together a site for a product niche, I sold my first software product.  I made nearly $53 just off the one sale.  Not bad for a rookie. So this passive income experiment definitely gets a “Pass”. If you are interested in earning a passive income, definitely consider affiliate marketing.

If you have anything you would like to add about affiliate marketing, feel free to leave a comment.  I should end by saying that there are thousands of products out there that claim to show you how to be successful at affiliate internet marketing.  I have never tried one but I can say that, with a little bit of time and research, you can get the same information for free online.

 

Best of Luck,

Matt

Motivatedtoearn.com