ClickBank success doesn’t happen overnight. For me, it took determination, patience, and these seven steps.
I first got into affiliate marketing in 2013. I must admit, I was totally lost at first. Information overload was coming at me from every angle. I was constantly distracted by the “next shiny object” promising to lead me to riches that never came. If you’re in a similar position right now, then the likelihood is that you haven’t yet carved out a strategy that will play to your strengths and work for you.
In this article I’m going to share with you the 7 things I did that helped me find success as a ClickBank affiliate.
These tips are replicable. I’m confident they can also work for you too, if you put in the work.
ClickBank Success In 7 Steps
When you’re building any type of business, it’s important to have a clear goal in mind, and an actionable strategy that can lead you to that goal. Understanding the affiliate marketing game will help you hone in on the areas you need to focus on, and then devise an actionable strategy.
1. Understand The Game of Affiliate Marketing
While there quite a few things a person needs to learn to have good success as an affiliate, overall, it really comes down to mastering 3 key skills:
a). Product
b). Traffic
c). Conversion
Let me break this down for you.
Product:
The skill of being able to find and recognize good products that will convert well. Personally, I’d say this is the easiest of the 3 skills to master. If you haven’t yet got this skill down, I go into it in a bit more detail later in this article.
Traffic:
The skill of being able to drive targeted traffic to the products you are promoting. Out of the 3 skills, this is the most important one for an affiliate marketer to master.
Conversion:
The skill of being able to convince your audience to buy the products in a non-pushy, non-sales way. In my opinion, this is probably the hardest skill to master. Fortunately though, the good news for affiliates is that you don’t need to become a conversion ninja in order to make a very sizable income.
It is mostly the product owner’s job (also known as a vendor), to convert the customer into a buyer once you’ve sent the visitor to the vendor’s landing page.
Basically, if you can recognize a high-converting landing page (skill number 1), and you know how to drive targeted traffic to it (skill number 2), then you stand to make a lot of money as an affiliate marketer.
To simplify conversions (skill number 3) for you as the affiliate, the main thing you need to learn is to talk the product up in a non-salesy way and entice the visitor to click your affiliate link.
Yes, of course, there are quite a few things an affiliate can then learn later to further increase sales, such as crafting an offer, enticing your audience with bonuses, and so forth. However, your main focus in the early days should be bringing the right traffic for the product and getting them to click your link.
If you understand these 3 concepts then it will stand you in good stead for your entire affiliate marketing career and ClickBank success, regardless of what platform you are using, or what products you are promoting.
2. Understand the ClickBank Platform
The second thing that helped my success with ClickBank was to take some time to understand the platform. In my opinion, ClickBank is one of the best affiliate networks out there for both beginner and advanced marketers.
No, I’m not just saying that because I’m writing this article for the ClickBank blog. This is based on my own experience working with ClickBank in both my early and current career as an affiliate marketer.
ClickBank offers a huge range of products across a large range of niches.
What I particularly like about ClickBank is that they host a massive range of digital products. This is great for affiliates because most digital products owners offer high commissions, typically between 50-75% per sale. These product owners are able to do this because they have lower margins to deal with than physical product vendors.
If you also choose to work with this network, then I highly recommend you take some time to familiarize yourself with the platform and understand the ClickBank metrics.
Knowing these metrics will help you to choose better products to promote, and tweak your campaigns to improve your conversions. Ultimately, it will help you to make more money.
3. Choose An Evergreen Niche
When I first got started promoting products, I focused on building small niche sites around a single product.
While this can work, if the product you’re promoting stops converting, or if the vendor slashes your affiliate commissions, or even stops running an affiliate program, then you’ll have to start all over again.
This happened to me more than once. So I focused on working in an evergreen niche. Once I did this, I built an audience and promoted a range of different products.
An evergreen niche is an industry that will most likely always have hungry buyers, no matter if you’re promoting now, or 20 years from now.
Here are some examples of evergreen niches:
- Fitness
- Weight loss
- Online marketing
- Dog training
- Fertility
- Relationships
This is just a very small example of evergreen niches, and there are also new ones created every single year as new trends continue to emerge.
Since most evergreen niches are highly competitive, the trick to break into one is to sub-niche, which basically means to look for a smaller category within one of these broader niches.
For example, back in 2015 I broke into the relationship niche, which is a pretty competitive space. However, I decided to halve my market and focus only on relationship advice for women. Over time, I built a steady, recurring monthly income in the high 4 figures.
Now, 5 years on as I write this article, the competition in that niche has continued to grow. So if I were to try to break into this niche now, I’d look for a sub-niche within a sub-niche to make it even easier for me to get started.
Choosing a niche is hugely important. Since it’s so crucial to your success, but beyond the scope of this article, I want to include a link to a helpful resource you can use for guidance on choosing a profitable niche.
4. Choose Good Products That Convert
As I mentioned earlier, learning how to recognize which products will convert well is a big part of being a successful affiliate.
It’s a skill that you will gain over time. However, the number one thing I did that helped me to acquire this skill is actually thanks to the ClickBank platform.
What I did was I spent time looking at a whole bunch of different offers on the ClickBank marketplace, regardless if they were in my niche or not, or if I had any interest at all in promoting them.
First, I looked for products that had an average to high Gravity rating. Gravity is a unique metric to ClickBank, and it basically tells you how well a product is converting. The higher the Gravity score, the more sales of that product are being made each week.
Secondly, I then spent quite a lot of time analyzing and comparing the landing pages of each of these products. I looked for similarities and made a list of all the elements they had in common.
I also paid attention to the sales copy, whether it was written or spoken in a video. Then, I noted the types of words, phrases and emotive calls to action that were used.
If you do this, it will start to become clear why some products convert, and others don’t.
When you learn to recognize the common elements of a successful landing page, you’ll quickly spot products that have a high chance of converting. This is very useful if you’re also promoting products on other networks that don’t offer helpful metrics like ClickBank.
5. Focus On One Traffic Source (at first)
The next thing I did was to focus on building one traffic source at a time.
When most people get started with affiliate marketing they usually try to promote on a lot of different platforms all at once.
This is a big mistake.
It takes time to establish a traffic source. If you’re trying to market your products on multiple platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and on a blog all at the same time, then you’re going to spread yourself too thin and you won’t gain traction.
Once I realized this, I chose one traffic source that played to my strengths (for me it was blogging), and focused on building an audience on this platform to the point where I was making consistent, regular sales.
After you’ve established a steady and continuous flow of traffic on your chosen platform, then you can start working on building other traffic sources.
To start, choose the one that either plays to your strengths or that you’re most familiar with.
6. Build a List
Building an email list is one of the most important things you can do in your affiliate business.
In the early days I relied on just promoting products directly from my blog. This is fine to start, but as soon as you’ve established some regular traffic, it’s advisable to start building a list.
Once I did this, I started building a relationship with my subscribers, and my chances of making a sale also increased.
This is the one thing I wish I started doing earlier.
7. Engage With Your Audience
Building an email list is great, but if you don’t engage with them, then your list is going to be far less responsive.
In the early days of building my list, I relied on cookie-cutter email swipes that I bought from another affiliate in my niche.
This was a great way to get started, and I made some regular sales by just relying on these email swipes for a while.
However, once I started also writing my own emails and began replying to people on my list when they messaged me, my sales increased considerably.
Final Thoughts
Getting started as an affiliate can be overwhelming if you don’t have a clear direction of where you’re going, and a means to get there.
I wasted quite a bit of time in the early days of my affiliate career trying to figure out a path that would lead to success. However, once I understood and implemented the principles and techniques in this article, I started to have consistent success.
If you’re struggling to gain traction as an affiliate, chances are you may not be implementing one or more of these tips. If you want a more detailed action plan to follow then you may want to also read my strategy blueprint to make money with ClickBank.
With a little focus and a clear plan to follow, you will also be able to build a consistent income online as an affiliate.