Many new affiliates start out on Clickbank and so will be asking is Clickbank a scam? Clickbank is a legitimate marketplace and not a scam! You can find a huge selection of digital products to promote on Clickbank in order to earn commissions on their sale.
ClickBank is a subsidiary of Keynetics Inc. and was founded in San Diego, California in 1998 by Tim and Eileen Barber. In 2011, the site had attracted over 1,500,000 affiliate marketers, approximately 100,000 of whom were designated as ‘active’ at any given time.
However, many of the products you can find on Clickbank.com are of low quality. Promoting those products may not lead you to the success you desire because some of them don’t sell particularly well.
As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’ll have a lot of challenges. If you go into affiliate marketing without a clear idea of what you’re doing, like many affiliates, the chances of success are vastly reduced. Many affiliates will of course fail, since affiliate marketing is a performance based business. See affiliate marketing failure rate. If you also choose products to promote which don’t sell that well, even when your marketing is good, the outcome can be disappointing!
So the key is to get support and training and choose products which are already selling well. You can determine whether a Clickbank product sells well by looking at the product’s “gravity”. A high gravity shows the product is selling well, whereas a low score for gravity shows a product isn’t selling. See also how does Clickbank work.
Is Clickbank A Scam? Products To Choose On Clickbank
Choosing a product to promote on Clickbank can be tricky. Too high a gravity and it means there’s many other affiliates out there promoting that product already. This means there’s potentially a lot of competition for it. Your promotion method will have a factor in your success here of course. But if you’re trying to get free traffic, you’ll need to look out for competitors, especially if you plan on ranking a affiliate website, for example.
Too low a gravity means the product isn’t selling at all. In general it’s a good idea to choose a product who’s gravity lies between 20 and 100. This shows the product does actually sell, but you also need to be mindful of the competition. A gravity of over 100 typically means there’s a lot of affiliate promoting it, and this means lots more competition.
It’s a good idea to choose products which offer recurring commissions since this means you can start earning consistent income more quickly with your efforts. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer ongoing commissions for previous sales and typically are software or membership type products. To find them on Clickbank, head to a site called CBEngine.com and scroll down the page until you find CB Recurring. You’ll also see tabs for CB Top Gravity, CB Reviews and CB Best gains, which are worth a look.
Scepticism & Affiliate Marketing
There’s a lot of scepticism with sites like Clickbank because many people don’t understand the basic business premise on which it is based. Clickbank is a “middleman” which effectively connects “vendors” or product owners, with “affiliates” who promote the products for a commission based on their sales. It can be easy to think the business model of affiliate marketing is some kind of scam. You can work really hard at it too, without ever seeing any results in terms of income. That’s because affiliate marketing is hard! It’s definitely not an easy way to earn a living, but many people do.
As a beginner affiliate I struggled for some time before even making my first sale. I thought affiliate marketing must be a scam too, until I was able to earn from it. The main problem with this scepticism is that it doesn’t lead you to the right actions if you want to build an income from it! If you’re harbouring fear and scepticism, how long do you think you’ll keep working on a business you don’t believe in? Not long right?!
But once you can leave fear and doubt behind, and find a good way to promote affiliate products online, you can build more trust in it, and this leads to bigger actions steps. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Before this can happen, it’s typical to go through a difficult phase of learning and failing with affiliate marketing. But if you think of “failing” as part of the learning curve, you’ll keep going long enough to succeed. See also super affiliate mindset and the psychology of affiliate marketing.
Summary
Clickbank isn’t a scam, no. It’s a legitimate marketplace where you can find hundreds of digital products to promote as an affiliate marketer. If you have a digital product of your own to sell, it can also offer a great place to list your product to get affiliates to promote it in a very cost effective way. Since affiliates only get paid when they sell, for vendors (product owners), this takes the risk out of doing your own marketing.
For affiliates, affiliate marketing gives the an opportunity to build an income which is independent of a job, and to become entrepreneurial. This is why affiliate marketing has become so popular. But that popularity doesn’t make it any easier. In fact the opposite is true. More affiliates means more competition. most affiliates will drop out and only something like 5% of them actually keep going and make it their living. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make.