Does Clickbank work? Yes, you can earn money using Clinkbank; however it’s no magic pill. Clickbank is an exchange network where vendors (products owners) place their products so affiliates can promote them. If you successfully refer someone to a product from Clickbank through your affiliate ID, you earn a commission based on the sale.
Because Clickbank uses digital products you’ll usually earn somewhere between 20-40% commission based on the sale. However, the main hurdle for most affiliates is actually making the sale. Since there’s a lot of people promoting the most popular products from Clickbank, you’ll find a lot of competition in the various promotion methods.
A product will have a specific “gravity” which is a number Clickbank uses to rate a product based on sales being generated. A very high gravity suggests that the product is selling well, but also that there’s likely to be a lot of competition. A low gravity score means the products is not selling in as much volume, or at all! This can mean the product doesn’t have a good sales page, or that it’s new to the market. It may also mean than not many affiliates have picked up the product for promotion.
Does Clickbank Work?
“Does Clickbank work” is perhaps the wrong question to ask if you’re considering promoting a product from the site. The question almost suggests that Clickbank will do the work and guarantee sales, which of course it doesn’t. As an affiliate marketer you are the third party referrer of a product or service. If you generate sales, yes of course Clickbank (and the product owner) will honour the agreement and you’ll get paid. There is a payment threshold which you’ll need to meet to actually have the money paid to you of course. You can select an amount between $10 and $1,000,000 as your payment threshold amount. The default amount is $100.
The real question for affiliates though isn’t whether some affiliate product is genuine or not, it’s whether you actually have the ability to generate sales using the knowledge you have of whatever affiliate promotion methods you intend to use.
Some products you might find on Clickbank are promoting the idea that you can make “easy money” online. While you can earn online I would suggest that for the larger percentage of customers this just isn’t true! So take those grandiose claims with a large pinch of salt. In fact there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing and most give up before even making a single sale. See affiliate marketing success rate.
Products
There’s a huge variety of products on Clickbank and this means it’s a good platform for anyone with a pre-existing website which they want to monetise. Simply sign up for an account and place a banner on your site: instant monetisation. However, before you do this you should check into the product and ideally buy it yourself. How does the sales page look? Is it a good fit for your audience? Unless you know how to sell affiliate products already, or have already acquired a source of traffic, affiliate marketing can be tough. It’s even tougher if you choose a product which doesn’t sell.
Clickbank has thousands of products on its site, but that also means there’s a lot of bad products too! Look closely at the gravity of a product before you decide to promote it. Gravity is a good signal to a product’s worthiness. If you’re going to build a lot of content around your product, you want to genuinely stand behind that product and be 100% authentic about promoting it.
Before deciding on a product read a few reviews on it too. Often the review will be other affiliates promoting the product so keep this in mind when reading. The number of reviews can also give you an idea of the relative competitiveness of a product. If you were to write your own review of it, would you gain any traffic for instance? If there’s a lot of other affiliates promoting that product, you may struggle to make sales due to the competition.
It’s also worth considering promoting products which offer recurring income. Subscriptions can be a good idea, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. They pay out recurring affiliate commissions which means you can earn an ongoing income from only a few sales.