When it comes to making money online, affiliate marketing is at the forefront for most people.
And when it comes to affiliate marketing, specifically affiliate marketing networks, ClickBank is the biggest name out there.
With ClickBank, you have access to hundreds of thousands of digital products that you can promote as an affiliate and make money.
Normally, when people talk about making money with ClickBank, they assume you have a website of your own.
But what if you don’t have your own site to promote products on?
Are you doomed?
FreeCash: Earn money testing apps, playing games, and completing surveys. Up to $497.82 per offer! Start earning now!
Earn Haus: Get paid up to $25 per survey, plus enjoy same-day payments via PayPal, Venmo, or check! Join Earn Haus Today!
InboxDollars: Over $57 million paid to members for watching videos, shopping, and completing surveys. Get $5 instantly when you join!
iPsos iSay: If you’re only signing up for one survey site, make it Ipsos – high-paying surveys await! Join iPsos today!
KashKick: Get paid to watch videos, shop, surf the web, and more. Receive PayPal payments directly. Start earning with KashKick now!
Swagbucks: Watch videos, shop online, take surveys, and more. Join now and get $10 instantly to start!
Not really!
There are actually ways anyone, with or without a website, can earn money as an affiliate marketer through ClickBank.
In this post, I’m going to give you a step by step guide on how to start making money promoting ClickBank products without a website.
Table of Contents
What Is ClickBank?
For those unfamiliar, ClickBank.com is a marketplace where product owners list their products in hopes of attracting affiliates who would promote their products in exchange for the commission.
You can earn as much as 75% commissions on certain products.
One reason for such a high payout is that they focus purely on electronic content (Digital Products, e-books, etc…).
As the distribution cost is practically zero, product owners are able to expand the commissions for the affiliates.
Now, there are actually 2 ways to profit from ClickBank:
- Make money promoting CB products as an affiliate.
- Sell your own products on CB.
This post is mostly about a method I used (and still use) to profit as an affiliate marketer promoting other people’s products. But I will also briefly touch on the second option.
1. Making Money with ClickBank as an Affiliate Marketer
Here’s how you can get started making money as an affiliate marketer with ClickBank.
Advertisements
Getting Started
Whether you have a website or not, to make money with ClickBank, you have to pick a product and promote it.
But before you can promote any of the available products, you need to sign up with CB (which is free.)
To get started, visit ClickBank.com and create your free account. It will take you less than a minute.
Once you signed up, you can access every product available on ClickBank.
Go ahead and familiars yourself with the interface and how everything works.
Find a Product to Promote
Once you get access to the humongous database of products, sift through the collection and figure out a really good quality product for you to promote.
Find a product that you are already familiar with (even if just barely,) or better still, find one that you know a lot about it or the niche it belongs to.
If the above is not an option, then pick on with High Gravity.
High Gravity is an indication that the product has successful track record among other affiliate marketers.
Write Articles
Writing articles online and using them as a way to promote things is an effective strategy.
Sit down, do some research about the product you have chosen in step 2 and write a few articles about it.
The sales page of the respective product should be a good source that you can use for your content.
Keep in mind that you are not at this moment trying to push for a sales pitch.
All you want is to have the articles generating enough interest for your readers to click on your link so that they can learn more about the product.
These articles will play a central role to your online money making strategy.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to successfully entice readers to click the link on your articles so that they can be led to the product’s sales page.
Certain article directories allow you to incorporate your link within the article text itself, while others restrict the link to be included right at the end of the article.
No matter what the rules are, your objective is to embed that link and have a call to action.
It is worthwhile to point out that there are article sites that prohibit any affiliate link. What you would do in this case is to create a free blogspot blog and have your link embedded there instead so that readers can still be led to the sale’s page, without contravening the rules.
Start an Article Marketing Campaign
Once you are done with your articles, you are going to submit your article to various article directories.
This is where your traffic/customers are going to come from.
Remember, you don’t have a website of your own, so we are using article directories to promote our product(s).
I would try to submit to the top 5-10 article directories manually, then find someone on Fiverr, pay them $5 to submit to a few hundred other directories.
Make Sales & Money
Once your articles are approved and published on these article directories, slowly, but surely, you’ll start to see sales.
It won’t happen instantly, but if you write enough articles and submit to enough sites that get decent traffic, it will happen.
You will get sales and you will make money.
My Own Experience
This is one of the first methods I used to make money online.
I had no website and I just happen to come across a forum post explaining how another person was doing this with success.
So I started doing it, and sure enough, within weeks I started making sales.
These days, I have my own sites and don’t do much of a ClickBank marketing, but plenty of other people are still making a lot of money with ClickBank using this and other techniques.
What I like about this method is its simplicity. It won’t take you that long to write a few decent articles and have them submitted to a few article directories.
In fact, if you have the money, you don’t even have to write the articles yourself!
You can outsource them to a freelance writer.
There are plenty of decent freelance writers on websites such as freelancer.com and Fiverr, at a reasonable rate.
Other Promotional Techniques
If you want to take this one step further, you could also promote the product you have chosen on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
There are some people who also put ads on Craigslist in related categories and draw traffic to the product’s sale page that way.
2. Making Money as a Seller on ClickBank
If you have digital products of your own, CB can help to facilitate sales.
For example, if you’re a good writer and want to make and sell eBooks, you can sign up with CB and add your eBook(s) to the marketplace so other affiliates can promote it for you.
ClickBank is a great place to find affiliates how can sell your eBooks to more people than you could ever do on your own.
ClickBank charges a one-time fee of $49, and for every sale they help to make, they will take away 7% as their commission.
It is entirely up to you how much you want to sell your products.
You also decide how much to pay your affiliates.
Clickbank Isn’t a Scam
Some argue that the whole thing is just a massive scam as they claim to never get any payment from them.
Sure, there may be a few people here and there that may have been cheated a few times, but I think the majority of those who claim it’s a scam do so because they fail to take any action.
They for some reason have this idea that all it takes for them to make money is to write one or two articles and put them out there without doing any promotion.
Well, bad news…
You ain’t gonna make any money that way!
It takes serious planning and effort to draw traffic and then turn that traffic into sales, no matter what platform you are on.
In Summary
The biggest draw for me about ClickBank is that it is entirely possible to make money without a website, and the process of doing so is straightforward.
And there is no reason to restrict yourself.
Sure, there are some not-so-good products that I wouldn’t want to associate with. But there are also tons of fabulous products that I would be proud to promote.
ClickBank is no get rich quick scheme. You need to work hard in order to make sales so you can earn commissions.
But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort needed to reach ClickBank success, you will make money without a doubt.
Great article…..I plan doing this, as I am a clickbank member…..Do you think the long, odd, clickbank affilate links are a hinderance?……I am a beginner, the links are so long, doesn’t look totally click friendly…thanks
Thanks John, glad you liked it.
To be honest, most people don’t even notice links.
That said, you can always use a plugin like PrettyLink or even your own php script to make those long ugly urls prettier, cleaner and easier to remember.
I am only a 14 years old student 3rd year high school i am a clickbank member and i want to be rich in easy way and not to work hard so that im researching some techniques to earn in clickbank fast this article help me to my persutive knowledge in earning money
If making money and getting rich was easy and you didn’t have to work hard for it, don’t you think everybody would be rich by now? ClickBank is a great way to make money but you do have to work for it. You have to put a lot of time and efforts into promoting whether product you choose.
Hello,
Satrap actually I am new in affiliate marketing can you please help me to tell that the article directory are free as if we submite our articles.And also can you please provide some names
of article directory.
Thanks
Poja Sharma.
Poja, most article directories are free. There is a handful that you have to pay. But you’ll be able to notice it since the paid ones require you to pay before you can submit your articles.
As for a list, check out this: (link removed since the page no longer exist).
Update: Since a lot of these lists come and go, I am not going to link to any particular one. Here’s an easy way to find more current lists. Just do a quick search on Google for “Dofollow article submission sites” and the first few results have big lists that are available for free.
Hey Satrap,
The above link seems to be broken. Anyway, I can get a working link. Thanks much.
Thanks for the heads up Sam. I updated my original comment. And yes, you can find current ones with a quick Google search.
Hi Satrap,
Great Info. Do you know if they charge a fee for every e-book you sell or is it just a one time setup fee for all products you add?
Hey Jonathan,
You pay a one time fee of $49.95 once your product is approved to be sold on CB. Then, every time a book sells, ClickBank takes keeps 7.5% plus $1 transaction fee, and the rest is yours.
Hope that answered you question. Thanks.
I heard article directories are useless in 2015
Jason, what you’re referring to is the use of article directories for SEO purposes. And you are right, they are pretty much useless for link building and SEO. But you can still use them to get traffic.
can u tell me where do i post the link of click bank i dont have my own website
You would put it in your articles that you submit to content sites.
Hi Satrap,
I’ve been a Clickbank member for years and have never made a $. I’m now using Stud Ads for my ad campaigns for products at Clickbank and am getting lots of visits to my ads, more than a million in a month and just over 500 clicks but NO conversions in 2 months!! Will I ever get conversions? Thanks
Tassaace
Well, it all depends on your traffic and of course your landing page. Are you targeting the right kind of traffic? Are the keywords you are betting on, targeted towards your offer?
If you are doing everything right, yet not getting any conversions, it just might be the offer itself. Not every product is a winner. That’s why its important to test different products and offers. Switch to a similar product and see if that converts better.
If you have tried something for a while and it not working, you need to change something or do something else entirely. try changing the product you’re promoting or try doing something different with how you promote. Like many things, internet marketing requires lots and lots of testing. You just have to leep making changes until something works.
Good Luck
hi Satrap,
I am trying to promote clickbank products via facebook! Can you please help me out..
Sure. What can I help you with, Ben?
i am about to start with clickbank sending traffic from social media sites. do you think i need to register as a s corp or llc before doing buisness?
That’s a question to ask your accountant or CPA.
Great advice. Decided to start getting into this as my 2016 goal of making some moola on the side. What do you feel is a good niche to start with?
Michael, there are literally hundreds of thousands of niches and sub niches. So it really is hard for me to pinpoint one for you. If you are just starting with ClickBank (or affiliate marketing in general) I’d find a very small niche, preferably one that you have some experience with or know a little about. That last part is not necessary but it helps you keep going in the beginning when it’s hard to see any success.
hi satrap , i have been a 3 month old clickbank member. i am struggling my best to sell the products without any websites. i tried promoting some products in twitter, some in fb and some in hitleaps. but none of them worked. can u please sort me out a way where i can get huge traffic that will convert into sales. please help
Amlan, the only way to get huge traffic fast is using paid traffic like PPC and media buys. Other than that, you are going to have to do the normal methods, building good content, social media, etc. I am afraid there is no shortcut.
Hi Satrap,
im John from Philippines how do you shorten the affiliate link of the product that you promote , for some reason I tried to start my first campaign using google adwords but it only accepts 30characters while the url of the affiliate links has 52 characters how do we deal with that?
John, there are free (and paid) tools that can shorten aff links. A quick search on Google will help you find a few.
Another way is to use a plugin that lets you create short and pretty links.
By the way, you will get your Google Adwords account banned by using aff links directly in your ad. I don’t think they allow that.
Hi Satrap,
Am from am just beginner to affiliate marketing and I don’t have a website to promote products which all are effective way other than own site/blog ?
The whole idea of this post is to explain how to make money with ClickBank without a website of your own. So I must have not done a good job explaining it. Sorry about that.
That said, the best way would be to use article directories.
Hi Satrap, thank you for the article. I see the post was almost a year back; is it still valid now? I’m looking into the online marketing affiliate business with clickbank but can’t get my hear around it. When you said write an article, do you mean just write it using MS Word and submit it to the content directories? Thank you. Look forward to your response.
Martin, yes, except a few small details that some sites might have changed, the process still remains the same and it works.
As for the articles, you can write it anywhere, even in a simple notepad. The important part is getting it published on platforms that get you exposure, be it on article directories or your own website or blog.
This is good.. i am not good in blogging am a new clickbank member I want to earn for my study .. but I try too many times but got failed what am I supposed to do.. without spending money
It takes a lot of work and dedication.
is there any free traffic method for beginners to start selling then buy a paid traffic as i notice that the most important thing in clickbank is to bring traffic to have sales >>
please answer me
Yes, social media, search engines optimization, forum marketing… these are all free ways to get traffic.
Hi! Satrap
Is this good to join Programs like affillorama, 4 Percent etc?
Are you talking about their membership program?
How many article did you have to right before any money started coming in?
It’s not about the number of articles, it’s more about the quality of the content and how much you promote it.
Hello sir,
Please tell me how and where to use hop link of clickbank products to start earnings i didnt get that where to paste that hop link and start earnings please help me.
Some articles directories allow you to post your own affiliate links within the article. That’s where you add your hoplink. Keep in mind that this post was written a few years back where articles directories did allow aff links. These days most don’t, so you’ll have to create a blog (even a free blog on Blogger or WordPress.com can be good) and add your hoplinks there, then direct people to your blog by linking to it from the articles you submit to article directories.
HI SATRAP i have a blog but i dnt knw how or where to add my affiliate link i am new i got a free blog frm blogger.kinda confusing.pls explain thanks your article is amazing helped me alot
You can add you aff links within post related to that affiliate offer.
It a worth of my time to read your article as it is a great help to me as new affiliate marketer. I’ve been doing affiliate marketing and wishing to see more sales. Thank you for being the light to my online journey. Hope to read more from you soon.
Hello Satrap,
Excellent article!
Will the methods mentioned in the article still work after one year?
Thanks
These days, article directories are kind of dead, but you can still use social media and other means.
so i am promoting on clickbank can i just take the product link and put it on social media’s?
Yes. As long as you are not spamming, I don’t see why they would have nay issue with that.