If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may be wondering is Clickbank worth it? Clickbank is often the first place to go for new affiliates, and it was for me too. Clickbank is a great place to go if you’ve already got an online presence and get traffic in a particular niche. You can simply browse through Clickbank’s product range and choose a product which you, yourself would buy. If it’s a good product, it might be worth using it on your website.
There’s plenty of products on the site which aren’t good of course, and some will sell better than others. Ideally you should choose products which offer ongoing commissions. These are subscriptions and membership type products and they offer you the means to earn an ongoing income from previous sales.
With regular commissions from subscription products, it’s much easier to build a reasonable income through affiliate marketing. When you’re only making sporadic sales here and there, it can be a very frustrating experience however.
Subscriptions at least give you a more sustainable income when you’re starting out. See also subscription affiliate programs.
Is Clickbank Worth It – Expectations
So, is Clickbank worth it? To make money with Clickbank will take some time. If you already have a popular website, you can simply put a banner of some product on it and make a few sales. If you’re starting from scratch online, be prepared for a long journey ahead. Most affiliates quit long before they generate a regular income from affiliate sales. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
Clickbank offers digital products which means you can earn 40% and sometimes more on any sales you generate. Amazon, by contrast only offers tiny commissions of 1-11% but offers physical products which can be easier to sell than digital products.
Wherever you are in your affiliate marketing journey, it’s useful to set some expectations. If you’re going down the route of organic traffic generation, expect a longer wait for sales to start coming in, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Paid marketing can be much faster but you’re going to need to be careful of what you spend. Again, subscriptions can help you here because you will often recoup more with a subscription affiliate product than you could with a “one-off” sale.
Is Clickbank Worth It – Using CBEngine
CBengine.com is a website which you can use to help you find products on Clickbank. It’s particularly useful in that it can help you find subscription products on the site. See Clickbank passive income for more on this. Remember with a subscription product you earn a monthly income stream. With a one-off sale you need to keep on making sale after sale to make a regular income. So subscriptions are definitely worth selling. The trouble with Clickbank is there’s a lot of rubbish on the site, so it’s worth choosing a product carefully.
A good subscription product will bring in an income month after month for every member you refer. However, choose a bad product, and people simply won’t keep their subscriptions going. See also lifetime commissions affiliate program.
Your Ability To Make Sales
Your success with Clickbank, (or any other affiliate platform) comes down to just one thing: your ability to make sales.
This is a learned skill which is well worth studying. Once you can make make sales and automate the process, you can generate an income from the internet. This has huge implications for geographical, time and financial freedom. But you still need to learn how to do it and that’s no easy task.
Just because a course on Clickbank tells you how easy something is, doesn’t make it so. Clickbank “gurus” often show you their earnings from Clickbank but fail to show you their marketing costs! So it can be easy to show how well you’re doing on making sales, without illustrating the massive costs involved in marketing your products.
Ultimately it comes down to how much you really want to make a success with Clickbank. Clickbank isn’t the platform for me. I have used it and sold a few products, but ultimately it didn’t work very well for me. That doesn’t mean it won’t work well for you though. Some marketers can make Clickbank very lucrative. But that comes down to your ability to market products online. Whether you use paid marketing or content marketing will depend on your risk profile, available funds and available time.
Giving Yourself A Better Chance
With the average Clickbank product you’ll make around $40, since most of the products on Clickbank sell for $100 and pay 40% commission. 40% is a better level of commission than most physical product programs you’ll find online. But it’s still a tight margin if you want to use paid marketing to promote the products. You’ll need to spend less than $40 on your advertising if you want to make a profit. Or, focus on free marketing strategies instead, if you have the time and patience.
But the free strategies take a long time and there’s still no guarantees. So is Clickbank worth it if you’re starting out as an affiliate? If you’re going to spend months or years blogging or creating content, I’d say that, no, it isn’t. Not unless you love your topic and want to do it anyway. It’s way too hard.
An alternative is to use high ticket affiliate programs which offer multiple earning strategies instead:
- High ticket products – earn larger commissions and more easily offset your marketing budget
- Subscription products – should be used as part of a product range.
- A range of “up-sells” – choose a product range, not just a single product. That way you benefit from later purchases from your existing customers
- Multi-tier commissions – let you earn from sales made by your referrals.
With high ticket items, subscription products, multi-tier commissions and a built in sales team (closing sales on your behalf), it’s much more attainable to use paid marketing and come out with a profit. Clickbank gives you an average sale of $40. But with a large valued product range, you can earn much more from what equates to the same, or a similar amount of work.
See The SFM Digital Business System for more on this.