Many times you’ve heard about making money on ClickBank affiliate programs but you want to know what steps to undertake to run successful campaigns on social media. Most advice sounds like "join ClickBank and earn on affiliate programs", that's it. Today we are discussing how to promote affiliate products on different platforms, most notably Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Moreover, if you are just making your first steps in affiliate marketing (and do not have a website or blog), you may find very useful two simple case studies from digital marketing enthusiasts, who shared their experience about running small budget campaigns for ClickBank products on Pinterest and Facebook.
The Beginning
The beginning is as simple as… "Join ClickBank". ClickBank has been operating in the market since 1998 — yes, sounds like forever. The signup process is pretty simple — you provide your name, email, contact details, and more than 4 000 products are available for promotion. The entry barrier is relatively low, and beginners aren’t rejected.
As for the available products, ClickBank offers various categories, such as gaming, lifestyle, and entertainment niches, including numerous digital products.
ClickBank: A Brief Review of the Affiliate Network
The ClickBank network is available in more than 200 countries and offers over 4 000 products to promote. This is a huge benefit for those affiliates that do not like being restricted with certain GEOs.
Another advantage is in higher than average commission rates — up to 90%. This is possible because most products offered on the platform are digital, so companies can offer high payouts. Speaking about commissions we cannot ignore recurring commissions which are also available for some products.
A 60-day cookie policy also sounds great, particularly compared to the Amazon Associates program with only 24 hours available to affiliates.
And the cherry on top is that affiliates are not required to have a website to promote ClickBank products. Well, creating a website might be a great idea for your future growth as an affiliate, but you can begin working with ClickBank without a site of your own.
Start Promoting ClickBank Products in 4 Simple Steps
As you know, ClickBank is a huge e-commerce platform and an affiliate network. Earning commissions on ClickBank products are just in 4 simple steps from you.
Step 1. Open a ClickBank Account.
Open a ClickBank home page and click on Sign Up. Opening an account is absolutely free. You have to provide some basic information, including your contact details. When you complete the Sign Up form, click Next. Read thoroughly Terms and Conditions. If you agree, click Accept. That is it. In the nearest time, you will receive an email with confirmation and login details.
Step 2. Select a ClickBank product.
Before deciding on a product, you’d better select a niche you plan to deal with. Maybe, you are already interested in a specific industry and participate in relevant communities. In fact, the variety of products representing various niches provides you with multiple choices (see below metrics that might help with choosing a product).
To run successful marketing campaigns you need to have an interesting product to promote – it should be something that people need, want to buy, or are interested in. A low entry barrier also means many middling products. However, the platform offers advanced search features to facilitate the process of selecting a product offer.
Actually, ClickBank provides several parameters that might help you while choosing an offer:
- Initial commission/Conversion. Average affiliate commission for each conversion (without rebills for products with subscription).
- Average commission/Conversion. Average affiliate commission for each conversion, including upsells and rebills.
- Recurring commission/Rebill. Average affiliate commission for each rebill payment (only for recurring products).
- Gravity (performance). Stats from ClickBank based on the number of affiliates that earned commissions over the past 12 weeks. Note that high gravity might indicate the high competition between affiliates promoting a specific product.
Besides, consider the following three aspects:
- Landing page. Whether the landing page looks attractive and has a call to action. Moreover, landing pages with video materials usually perform better than ones without explanatory videos.
- Recurring commission. It is always nice to have a recurring commission. As a rule, you can get recurring commissions on digital products with subscriptions.
- Customer reviews. Customer testimonials on the landing page help to convince new customers to purchase the product. Social proof definitely increases the conversion rate.
Step 3. Generate Hoplinks.
Once you have selected a product, you have to generate the affiliate product link (so that a ClickBank vendor could identify your referrals). When you click Promote (you will see in red color), you will see a popup box with a hoplink generator. Copy and save your link. Now you are ready to promote the product and earn a commission from sales.
Step 4. Promote the affiliate link.
Here you are: your links are ready to be used. There are many ways to promote your links, including websites and blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
How to Promote ClickBank Products
Naturally, the question all affiliate marketers are concerned about is how to generate traffic to the affiliate offer (if possible, free traffic). Actually, free traffic generation consumes time. Some marketers prefer to invest time (uploading videos on YouTube regularly, creating boards on Pinterest, or participating in groups on Facebook), while others (usually, more experienced) prefer using paid traffic channels.
Promoting ClickBank Offers on Instagram and Facebook
The first thing that comes to mind while talking about affiliate marketing on social media is Facebook. Yes, Facebook is a colossal platform with immense possibilities for ads. You may go with paid ads and free promotion via Facebook pages and groups. However, even beginners might do well with paid advertising via Facebook Ads (read the case study from Aleks below).
If you are an active member of Facebook groups, you can generate organic traffic to affiliate offers from ClickBank. You can share your experience of using specific products and earn a commission. Although, be aware of community policies, as some groups prohibit direct ads or links. In this case, you can make posts on your personal or business page and share posts in groups.
Important: Do not get spammy. You can end up being banned from a group.
Follow community rules and share valuable content that leads to other resources (posts, articles, or videos) with affiliate links.
Many affiliate marketers combine Facebook with YouTube to generate more traffic to affiliate offers. For example, your Facebook followers are redirected (based on your post with a link to the YouTube video) to your YouTube channel where you provide a high-quality review/comparison/ranking video with an affiliate link. Hence, you add Facebook traffic to the organic YouTube traffic.
Instagram is all about visual impressions. You can get tons of engaged traffic that converts well. If you are better at photography than at writing, stick to Instagram. The platform also allows running paid ads. Or, you create and develop your own profile and promote products for your audience.
To get influential on Instagram, stick to the selected niche, create and post regularly, and keep your audience engaged. In fact, proper hashtags might serve well to make your content (and affiliate links!) visible to a wider audience as many Insta users search the platform for interesting content by hashtags.
Use Instagram Stories. They help you to stay in the front line and grab followers’ attention. By the way, hashtags can also be used for stories. You may include in your strategy promotional gifts: for example, free ebook or guide, email free course, or free webinar.
For faster results, you can go with Instagram paid ads. You can set up paid ad campaigns via Facebook Ads Manager: targeting, GEOs, campaign objectives, and so on.
Case Study from Aleks Bato: How I made $460 on ClickBank using Facebook Ads
The case study is a step-by-step guide for those who are making their first steps in affiliate marketing.
Aleks Bato, a digital marketing enthusiast, has shared his case study on making money on ClickBank products. As he describes himself, he is "not a guru nor an expert. He keeps working on his projects, learning and testing new things." Most of his projects he shares via his YouTube channel Money Is Awesome.
Aleks shared his experience of promoting an affiliate offer from ClickBank on Facebook. He mentioned that he paused the campaign which could be very profitable due to the Christmas season as during that period CPM rates spiked from $25 to $85 and higher.
He revealed that he invested only $156 into the campaign, and a single conversion resulted in $460 in profit. He planned to continue the campaign after the holiday season as it seemed quite profitable.
The good thing is that he disclosed the entire marketing funnel he used for running the offer:
As Aleks explains in his video, He recorded a video ad on Facebook promoting a free affiliate marketing course. The ad led to the landing page where he asked for an email address so that he could send the free course. Subscribers were redirected to the Thank You page (with the affiliate link) with an invitation to the free webinar (conducted not by Aleks). Webinar participants were offered to purchase the product.
As a result, he had a conversion from the purchase and the very valuable email database which he planned to monetize later.
In his video, Aleks mentioned that the promoted product was relatively expansive, so his Facebook Ads campaign was targeted at the audience aged 35-45. He considers this experiment as very successful because he collected many email addresses for further promotions and a single conversion (don’t forget that he paused the campaign due to the increased CPM rate for Christmas) resulted in a $460 payout.
Promoting ClickBank Offers on Pinterest
Some time ago, Pinterest was ignored by affiliate marketers. That was a huge mistake, huge. The visual platform that was previously considered as a ladies' shopping ideas site represents a very powerful marketing tool.
The basic principle for promoting affiliate products on Pinterest remains the same: select a niche and a Clickbank product you are going to promote. Create a unique and catchy pin for the product and include an affiliate link in the description. Again, SEO is crucial because Pinterest is a search platform as well. If you use the right keywords in the description to your pin, your pin and a link will be more discoverable.
Another step to promote your pin is joining Group Boards. In fact, group boards help to connect with other Pinterest users and indeed boost your account.
Keep posting, sharing, and pinning to keep your pins visible to other users. Attractive landing pages with a call to action will result in earning affiliate commissions.
Do you have a Pinterest account?
1 vote
Case Study from Emre Karaçor: $1 292 with Pinterest Ads and ClickBank
Emre Karaçor, an affiliate marketer from Turkey, shared a video on his YouTube channel that tells how he made $1 292 by promoting one product from ClickBank on Pinterest. Well, this case study is targeted primarily at beginners who cannot invest significant amounts into large-scale paid campaigns but would like to try Pinterest for the promotion of some ClickBank products.
Emre tried one of the digital products from ClickBank and decided to run a testing campaign on Pinterest. He mentions that in his experience, the Pinterest audience converts better than the Facebook audience when it comes to digital self-development products.
In the video, he shared several creatives and landing pages he used for the promotion of the product. Here is one of the tested variants that worked pretty well:
For landing pages, he used the story-telling format. Success stories with simple quizzes to make people curious converted quite well.
The screenshots below show the campaign duration and the conversion rate:
Emre also shared his results: an average purchase was around $45, but he also got several upsells and considered continuing the campaign after some adjustments. The total profit was $1 292.
Promoting ClickBank Offers on YouTube
If you are more into vlogging and making videos you can earn on promoting affiliate offers via YouTube. The platform is huge; its audience includes all age groups and GEOs (ok, we all know that YouTube is the second largest search engine). What you need is just some decent video recording equipment. Another benefit of promoting affiliate programs via YouTube is lower competition — the number of affiliate vloggers is much lower than the number of bloggers and webmasters promoting affiliate programs via sites and blogs.
You can select one or several formats for your promotional YouTube videos:
- video reviews,
- product comparisons,
- product rankings,
- unboxing,
- guest expert interviews and reviews.
Important: As with any search platform, you should pay special attention to SEO and optimize titles, tags, video descriptions to generate more traffic. This approach requires keyword research but the time spent on searching for the right keywords pays off lavishly.
Reminder: Do not forget to include a Call to Action (CTA) in your videos and explain where users can find links to the products you advertise or review. However, you have to make a disclosure about affiliate links. You may use tags #ads or #advertising, announce that you receive a commission from purchases within your video, or mention it in the description.
How often do you click on affiliate links on social media platforms?
2 votes
Conclusion
As you see, to earn via affiliate marketing you shouldn’t necessarily own a website. You can join ClickBank and promote various products on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. Whether you decide to generate organic traffic or stick to paid ads on these platforms, there are multiple options to run successful and profitable campaigns.
