Earning Money with Clickbank

Signing Up as a Clickbank Affiliate

As a Clickbank affiliate, you can send traffic to other people’s products and get paid a commission. You don’t need to manage support, customers, websites or products; all you need to do is generate sales.

In general, you can expect to be paid anywhere between 40% to 75% of the product’s sales price, minus refunds.

The first step to getting started is to sign up on Clickbank as an affiliate.

Step 1: Navigate to the Signup Tab

To get started, click on the “sign up” tab at the top to access to affiliate registration page.

Step 2: Fill Out Your Information

Here, you’ll be presented with a form to fill out with your information, including phone number and address.

One thing to keep in mind is your account ID. Pick something that’s generic, rather than something related to a product you want to promote.

If you plan on promoting horse training products for example, don’t name your account “HorseLover101” because the name cannot be changed later and may very well hinder your ability to sell products in other categories later. So pick something that can be used across multiple fields and niches.

Step 3: Confirm Your Account

Go into your email inbox and open up the email from Clickbank. You should have received this email within 5 minutes of completing the signup form.

Highlight the first confirmation code (labelled #1 above). Right click and select “Copy” or press CTRL+C to copy your confirmation code to your clipboard.

Then click the confirmation link (labelled #2.)

You’ll land on the confirmation page. Right click and select “Paste” in the first box where it asks you for your confirmation code. You can also press CTRL+V to paste.

In the second box, input the text from the image and click “Finish.”

That’s it! You’re now a Clickbank Affiliate.

Setting Up Your Payment Details

One of the first things you should do once you get your Clickbank account is to setup your payment. If your payment details aren’t setup properly, you simply won’t get paid.

Step 1: Signing In

One thing that often confuses first time Clickbank users is their password. Since you didn’t choose a password during your signup, what’s your password?

Your password is your confirmation code. These are usually a combination of letters and numbers like “ZYZMB22K”. Unfortunately, you cannot change your password with Clickbank.

Find your password in your confirmation email and sign in to access the affiliate page.

Step 2: Go to Your Account Settings

Click on Account Settings to access your payment options.

Step 3: Edit Your Account Information

Once you’re in Account Settings, you’ll see several tabs of information to choose from. Click on Edit above the Account Information tab.

The most important thing you change in the Account Information tab is your Tax ID. If you don’t have a Tax ID on file, Clickbank can’t report your income and therefore cannot pay you.

If you’re incorporated, your Tax ID will be your Federal Tax ID or your Employee Identification Number (EIN.) If you’re a sole proprietor, your Tax ID will be your social security number.

NB – Providing your Tax ID is only relevant if you reside in the US.

Note that Clickbank uses a 256 bit encryption, a very high level of security. This means all your personal data is made unreadable before it’s sent through the internet, so nobody can intercept any personal information that’s sent.

Once you’ve added a Tax ID, make sure your address is correct. Having a wrong address won’t keep them from sending you a check, but if they send you a check and you don’t receive it, it’s a real pain to have them cancel the check and resend it again.

Make sure you have the right address so your check will arrive at the right place. Then, click “Close” to go back to the Account Settings page.

Step 4: Edit Payment Information

Once you’ve got your Account Information setup, the next step is to setup your Payment Information.

Scroll down to find the Payment Information tab and click Edit.

You’ll be presented with a page where you can select your payment threshold and your payment method.

Your payment threshold is how much money you need to have in your account before you get paid. If you’d rather not receive a cheque until it’s at least $250 for example, then set your payment threshold at $250.

If you’d rather get paid right away, regardless of how much is in your account, then select $10.

Your Payment Method is how you’re going to get paid. The two primary methods are cheque and direct deposit.

When you’re just starting out, the only option is to receive a physical cheque. This is important for anti-fraud purposes. Once you’ve cashed two paper cheques, Clickbank will enable the direct deposit option on your account.

At that time, simply come back to this page and change your Payment Method to Direct Deposit to have the money transferred straight into your account without needing to cash a cheque.

Step 5: Fulfilling the Customer Distribution Requirements

Once you’ve got your payment information setup, you’ll need to make a fair number of sales before you can actually start getting paid.

In order to receive your first check from Clickbank, you need to:

Have five orders from different credit cards (not including Clickbank), and

Have made sales with 3 different payment methods, including Visa, MasterCard or PayPal.

Again, this is also part of Clickbank’s anti-fraud policies.

Unfortunately, this can make it a little more difficult for first time affiliates to get their first cheque.

Fortunately however, you only have to go through this once. Once your account has passed these two requirements, you can receive your cheque no matter how many people buy as long as your account balance is above your Payment Threshold.

That’s it! If you’ve setup your Account Information, Tax ID, Payment Threshold and Payment Method properly, then once you fulfil the Customer Distribution Requirements you’ll soon after receive your first cheque.

Finding Products and Creating Links

The first step towards making your first few sales is to find 1-3 great products to promote and generate affiliate links for those products.

Step 1: Go to the Marketplace

At the navigation bar, click “Marketplace” to go to the listings of affiliate programs you can promote.

Step 2: Choose a Navigation Method

When you land on the marketplace, you’ll see a page that looks something like this:

There are two primary ways to find affiliate programs to promote are to either browse the categories, or to search for a specific program.

If you know the exact name of the program you want to promote, just type it in the search bar above. You can also just type in a keyword and see what you find.

Alternatively, click on one of the links on the left to start browsing programs.

Step 3: Choose a Program

After you conduct a search or select a category, you’ll be presented with a page with a list of affiliate programs that matched the category or search.

On it there will be a bunch of information you can use to help make your decision. Here’s an example of what this page will look like:

Here’s what the various statistics mean:

Avg $/sale: About how much you can expect to make per sale. This number already takes into account Clickbank fees. The number can vary however, depending on upsells and how long customers stay on continuity. The average profit is the number shown here.

Ave %/sale: This is the percentage of the profits that the publisher is offering affiliates. The higher the percentage, the better for you. The highest commission Clickbank allows is 75%.

If you become a “super affiliate” doing over 1,000 sales a month however, you’ll often be able to negotiate extra payments on top of the Clickbank payments directly with the publisher for commissions as high as 85% to 90%.

Grav (Gravity): Gravity is a somewhat complex rating system that ranks affiliate programs based on how much volume they’ve produced in the last month. It includes several factors like how many were sold and how many affiliates promoted the product.

In general, you want to aim for products that have Gravity of between 20 and 80. No lower than 20 because those products haven’t proven that they can sell, no higher than 80 because those products tend to be highly promoted and highly competitive.

That said, if you already have a website getting traffic for an industry related to a high gravity item (like make money online,) then go for the highest Gravity item because they tend to have the highest conversions.

In other words, don’t compete for traffic to send to high gravity products. If you already have a traffic source though, send it to high gravity products for the highest conversions.

Step 4: Generate Your Affiliate Link

To generate your affiliate link, the link that lets Clickbank know traffic sent through it came from you, simply click the “Promote” button next to any affiliate program.

Once you click promote, a box like this will pop up:

Your account name will automatically be filled in. The Tracking ID is an optional addition you can add to your link to help you track where your sales came from.

For example, let’s say you have 3 places on your site where people might purchase a product: From the front page, from the sales page and from an email you sent.

Instead of just guessing where your sales are coming from, by using Tracking IDs you can know for a fact where your sales are coming from.

For example, you could have the three Tracking IDs: FRONT, SLS and EMAIL1 (then 2, 3, 4, etc.)

Then, when you make a sale, you’ll be able to attribute it back to where the sales came from.

Here’s what the page looks like when you click “Create”:

Simply copy the link above and use it as a hyperlink anywhere on your site or in your emails. Whenever someone clicks on the link, Clickbank will know it came from someone you sent. If they buy something, you’ll make a commission.

How to Read Clickbank Reports

There are three primary reports you should familiarize yourself with as a Clickbank affiliate: Paychecks, Transactions and Analytics.

Paychecks – This gives you information on when you were paid, how much you were paid and any balance Clickbank owes you

Transaction – This gives you information on when people bought from you

Analytics – This gives you a wide variety of information on your customer’s behaviour

Here’s how to access each one and how to read each report.

Finding the Reporting Tab

The reporting tab is slightly counter-intuitive, since it isn’t visible from the front page. Here’s how to find it.

First, click on My Account at the top bar.

Then click the Reporting tab.

Now you can choose from one of the three types of reporting.

Note: Shipping only matters for shippable media, meaning CDs, DVDs, books and other physical products. These are incredibly rare and as a rule of thumb you won’t need this tab.

How to Read the Paychecks Report

When you open the Paychecks report, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Seeing this for the first time can be a little intimidating. Here’s what the most important columns mean:

Pmt Freq: This is how often you’re getting paid. BW means Bi-Weekly, W means weekly

Balance Forward: If you weren’t paid in the previous pay period, your balance is forwarded to the next month

Credits: Revenue generated from sales

Debits: If you don’t generate sales for a while, Clickbank starts to charge you for your account. It’s usually only $1 per pay period, but it can go as high as $5 if you just let money sit in your account for a while

Release: How much you were paid in a payment period

Payment Net Balance: How much is in your account

Date Sent: When your payment was sent

Payment Method: How your payment was sent (check or direct deposit.)

How to Read the Transactions Report

When you click the Transaction tab, you’ll first be taken to a page that says “Transaction Search.”

If you want to just display all your transactions over a period of time, just select your start and end date to do so.

On the other hand, if you want to make a more specific search, you can do that as well.

You can search by:

Receipt: Search by a specific Transaction ID

Credits: Search for sales and bonuses

Debits: Search for refunds, charge backs, charges and bounced payments

TID: Search by Tracking ID

Last Name, Email: Search by name or Email

Vendor, Affiliate: Search by the vendor (if you’re an affiliate) or by affiliate (if you’re the publisher)

Item: What’s being sold.

Once you do a search, you’ll be presented with a report that looks like this:

Here’s what the various columns mean:

Receipt: Transaction ID

TID: Transaction ID for this purchase

Pmt: How they paid

Currency: What kind of currency they paid with

Amount: How much was charged / paid

Vendor: Who was the publisher for the product

Although there is a fair bit of data on the transactions page, once you start to use the interface it should be come pretty self explanatory after a while.

How to Use the Analytics Interface

When you click the Analytics tab, you’ll be presented with a ton of options and data:

Let’s start by going over the interface. There are two places you use to select what kind of data you want to see.

First, start by looking at the bar across the top.

Here’s how these options determine what kind of data you’ll see:

View As: You can see reports for your activities as either an affiliate or as a vendor. If you’re primarily sending affiliate traffic, make sure to switch to affiliate view, as it shows vendor view by default

Timeframe: Do you want the data on a daily basis or an hourly basis?

Compare To: If you want to compare two sets of data, for example “Order Form Impressions vs. Hops Per Order” to see if there’s a relationship, you can do that there

7 Day Average: Instead of just viewing daily, you can look at the 7 day average as well

Date Range: What dates the data is showing for

Select your options for the top bar first. Then choose your options on the left bar.

On the left bar are several categories, within which you can get more specific data.

Hops: Get data on what happened when people clicked on your links. A “hop” is basically a click. Under the Hops tab, you can get data on how customers behaved with each vendor, each tracking ID and each country

Order Form Impressions: Get data on people who landed on an order form. View it by product, vendor, Tracking ID and country

Sales: Get data on your sales. You can sort by vendor, tracking ID, product, billing type, currency and a lot of other options

Subscriptions: Get information on your recurring billing customers

Saved Reports: Have a very specific query? You can save that report and just repeat it rather than have to set your report criteria every single time

The Clickbank analytics system can give you data on just about anything you’d want: From information on visitors that never bought anything to data on where each of your sales came from.

Spend some time experimenting with each of the three reporting types. Get to know them. The data you’ll get from your reports are essential to your success.