Several Thousand a Month With Clickbank: My Simple Strategy That Works

Clickbank is a site that everyone knows about, but most people never really figure out the winning formula for making consistent commissions with Clickbank.

That’s not to say there’s only one technique that works, because we all know there’s not.

I’ll spare showing you a Clickbank screenshot (which are almost always fake), and I’ll just tell you that I don’t make millions from Clickbank. I have several of my own products in small niches on Clickbank, and then several sites where I just promote Clickbank products as an affiliate. These sites add up to four figures a month for me (I’m getting close to five), and I’m obviously working on growing that.

In this post, I want to share with you the simple strategy I use to promote Clickbank products as an affiliate.

It works, it has always worked, and it will always work.

My Clickbank Affiliate Strategy

I’m going to skip the info on finding a niche, keyword research, and getting traffic because I cover that in my free training modules.

There are 4 steps to make this work:

• Choose the product you’ll be promoting
• Create a freebie to get people to opt-in to your list
• Create a squeeze page
• Load the autoresponder with messages that sell
• Watch commissions come in…

Those are the basic steps, now I’ll go over each of them in more detail. One more thing, those steps assume you have an autoresponder service to use, and if you’ve just been putting affiliate links on your site without collecting email addresses, you probably know by now that it doesn’t convert that well, AND… you’re missing out on building a list at the same time. I recommend you use iContact is you’re just starting out.

Choose the product(s) you’re going to promote…

The two main things I look for in a product that I’ll promote are a decent gravity score (above 15), and good affiliate resources from the vendor. The reason for the gravity is obvious, and the reason I want resources from the vendor is simply because I don’t want to have to write a bunch of my own autoresponder messages just to promote a product.

Creating a freebie to get opt-ins…

This is arguably the most important part of the process because if you don’t have opt-ins, you don’t have a list. Now, a lot of vendors have brandable PDFs that you can give away as a freebie. I’ve tried those, and they didn’t get as many opt-ins as my own freebies that I’ve put together, and the other problem is you miss the opportunity to “connect” with the person who just opted-in, and you don’t give them any reason to trust you.

The freebie doesn’t have to be this huge project that you agonize over for a week. My free training on this site took a decent amount of time to put together, but on my affiliate sites I never spend longer than a few hours writing up a freebie.

I highly prefer a PDF, or the written word as a freebie. I’ve tried videos, but I’ve had the most success with PDFs. A simple strategy that always works for coming up with a title for your freebie is some variation of “The 3 biggest secrets to ______”. Something along those lines works well, and you should obviously test different things out.

Having a cover that looks good is just as important as the title. Thanks to Fiverr, it’s easy and cheap to have a cover made. If you know Photoshop and you do these on your own, more power to you.

Creating a Squeeze Page

This is something that is hard for a lot of people, because building effective squeeze pages takes either paying someone to make one for you, or having enough WordPress/html/css knowhow to do it right yourself.

I’m going to shamelessly plug the Profits Theme now, because I used to spend literally hours trying to make my own page template in Dreamweaver and then upload it into my cpanel, and then try to create a squeezepage on my WordPress site.

It sucked, it drove me insane, it took a lot of time, and my squeeze pages still looked crappy.

Two weeks ago I finally decided to pay $97 American dollars for the Profits Theme, and it’s the best, most time-saving money I’ve spent in IM. With the theme, you can create squeeze pages in about 5 minutes that look like this.

With a few clicks your header and navigation is gone, and you have dozens of buttons, graphics, and squeeze page layouts to choose from. And it builds membership sites without requiring any third party plugins, but that’s another post.

Anyways, the bottom line is you need to setup a squeeze page to send people to where they opt-into your list. I’ve made it clear how I build mine, but you can get it down however you want.

Load your autoresponder with messages that sell…

Here’s what I do: When someone opts-in, actually, instead of a PDF now, I use the profits theme to create membership-site type modules that aren’t password protected, and when someone clicks the confirm link after they’ve opted-in, they are taken to that main page that has the freebie information. I like this better than a PDF because links in PDFs sometimes don’t work right, and it keeps them on my site.

But, if you are giving away a PDF, you have a thank you page where they can download the PDF. Then, you the first six emails in your autoresponder should be set up like this:

• Emails 1-3 should just re-iterate the information in your freebie
• Emails 4-6 should start promoting the affiliate product, and email 6 should just be a straight sales pitch (use stuff from the product’s sales page)

Set those first 6 emails to be sent 6 days in a row. After that, take articles that the vendor provides, and load those in your autoresponder and set each one 4-5 days apart.

If you can get 3-4 products or more all with some articles from the vendors, you can easily and effortlessly set up a 6 month sequence or longer. And, everyone once in awhile you can send out a broadcast promoting something else… you’re the boss  .

Watch commissions come in…

I just wanted to put that in here.

That’s the process… simple, huh?