ClickBank Reviews + 5 Ways to Make Money with ClickBank

If you’re looking to make money online, you’ll inevitably come across ClickBank and then hopefully start looking into ClickBank reviews before you get started. You’ll probably start reading eleventy hundred posts about people making thousands of dollars a month as a ClickBank affiliate.

That leads us to wonder: Is ClickBank legit?

That’s fair and you should have a healthy level of skepticism any time you read about someone making that kind of money with anything on the internet.

ClickBank is an online resource that allows creators and bloggers and others to earn commissions by promoting products or services that they love. It’s super easy to get started, but It pays to dig a little deeper before you dive into something and make sure you have the right approach and strategy.

Becoming a ClickBank affiliate is easy, but developing the right approach and strategy is not as cut and dry. Based on a few other ClickBank reviews plus our own knowledge and experience with ClickBank as well as many other affiliate marketing programs, we’re going to share what you need to know.

Here’s what we’re covering in this ClickBank reviews article:

What is ClickBank?

ClickBank is an affiliate platform where companies can offer their products up for sale to affiliates and affiliate marketers can find products to sell to their audience. Depending on the product, affiliate marketers can earn a single-time payment or recurring commissions.

For more than two decades, ClickBank has been online and empowering vendors to offer a wide range of digital products for sale.

The products available on ClickBank vary between niches and can include eBooks, software, website templates, apps, courses, webinars, games, guides, and more.

As an affiliate marketer, you can find great products to promote, promote those affiliate products to your audience, and then get a commission off of the sales of products purchased. The value of the commission is usually posted upfront before you decide to promote a product.

On ClickBank, you can often find freebies to promote that contain upsells inside. This is another great way to offer your audience free value and then potentially collect on a sale later on.

The quick route to being successful is to build up a loyal audience and then find a great product that fits them. But we’ll talk more about strategies and tactics later on in this article on ClickBank reviews.

The beautiful thing about affiliate marketing on ClickBank is that you have no inventory, customer lists, customer service, or hassle!

ClickBank also allows affiliate companies (or bloggers) to create their own listings on the site and receive commissions for sales generated by others. We once offered our Pinterest course as an affiliate product on ClickBank when we first released it.

In today’s social media-based world, being shareable is a great way to diversify your strategies. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up spending too much time (or money) on paid traffic and endless link-building.

Offering your product up for affiliate sales is just another way to get extra eyeballs (and sales) for free.

So is ClickBank legit? The simple answer is yes! But don’t expect to get rich overnight. There are also still a lot of pitfalls you have to watch out for in order to be successful in this affiliate marketplace.

The truth about being a ClickBank affiliate that not enough people talk about is that a lot of research, hard work, and dedication are involved. 

Is ClickBank Worth Signing Up For?

If affiliate marketing is part of your monetization strategy, then the short answer is: Yes.

The ClickBank affiliate network is a great place to get started with affiliate marketing because it has a pretty low barrier to entry, but because of this, you need to be wary when searching for products to recommend to your audience.

There are a lot of shady products and shady people on the platform looking to make a quick buck. This is the same with most affiliate platforms, but with lower barriers to entry, ClickBank is known to have more instances of this.

If you’re looking to start promoting products from ClickBank, the first thing you need to do is make sure your blog looks professional and offers unique content. Otherwise, it won’t get much traffic and will likely be ranked lower in search results.

You should also consider the Gravity score, which is something we’ll discuss later on.

Some people join as many programs as possible and try to spam people with affiliate links to make money. This isn’t a great strategy, obviously. If your affiliate sales lead to refunds, you won’t be making any money either.

So, the first step is to start a blog and start writing content if you haven’t made it this far yet.

ClickBank makes it easy for first-time affiliate marketers to get started. You don’t need to be approved for most products, so you can start selling right away. This is why it can attract some shady folks.

The key is to select the products that are best suited for your audience. For example, if you’re a yoga blogger, it’s likely that a product like the Yoga Burn Challenge would be a great product to promote.

Using ClickBank as an affiliate company that is offering a product can also be a great way to increase traffic and make money. ClickBank has more than 10,000 active product vendors, and more than 100,000 affiliates promoting their products. 

How Much Can You Make on ClickBank?

The commissions on ClickBank can vary but can range from as low as 20% to as high as 90% of the sale.

So if the product is $100 and you get 90%, you will earn $90 from every sale.

Why would anyone offer a 90% commission?

Because these vendors know the key is to get people on their email list. By offering a large commission on an initial sale, they understand more bloggers will promote their products.

Then, when that customer buys something else, the vendor will get the full profit from the sale thanks to the work of the affiliate who brought them to their website in the first place.

It’s a win-win for all parties involved.

It’s also that high because the affiliate marketer is the one doing a lot of the leg work. After a product is completed, there isn’t usually a lot of upkeep to that product besides updates and customer service (if you design your product right).

The affiliate marketer is doing a lot of the hard work, which is bringing the buyer to the product. Building a traffic strategy takes time and affiliate marketers are rewarded for this.

What do you need to start earning money on ClickBank?

Most ClickBank reviews will probably tell you that you don’t need anything to get started. Just sign up! That’s technically true, but you’ll need more if you want to actually make money with ClickBank.

In order to start earning actual money, you’ll need to do the following:

• build a list of subscribers
• build an SEO strategy or other traffic source like social media
• add affiliate links to your articles or run an email marketing or social campaign

The competition can be fierce and it takes time to build a following. You should focus on building an audience first before you get on the platform because there is some time pressure to make your first sale – and to keep sales consistent.

As ClickBank explains, “ClickBank sales accounts with a positive balance, but no earnings for an extended period of time, are considered dormant. Dormant accounts are subject to a charge of $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings, $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings, and $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings.”

You won’t get charged anymore when your account balance reaches $0 but the charges can come up again if you earn more and then go dormant again. You need to earn quickly and consistently.

You’ll get this message when you reach too much inactivity:

We’ll talk more about creating a monetization strategy later on.

Can Anyone Use ClickBank?

Yes! Well, sort of. Most people can. This might seem like an obvious question at first but what some other ClickBank reviews might not tell you is that some networks are harder to get into than others.

While ClickBank’s dormancy fees might seem harsh, some other affiliate platforms, like Amazon Associates and CJ Affiliate, will deactivate your account if you haven’t earned a sale within a specified time period – 90 days for Amazon and 6 months for CJ.

Once you hit the dormancy period for CJ Affiliate, they also deduct a $10 fee from any current unpaid earnings you have in your account.

So, while anyone can use ClickBank, only people with an actual following, traffic, or ability to earn sales should sign up for it.

In addition, ClickBank has an internal list of restricted countries that they do not disclose or do business in. If you live in one of these countries, your application will get rejected. You can usually find some lists of ClickBank-banned countries if you do a general Google search.

The ClickBank marketplace is a global affiliate network suitable for both beginners and veteran digital marketers.

It has tons of beginner-friendly features. You can find a variety of affiliate offers using the search bar on the ClickBank website. The platform is like a megastore, with millions of digital products available to promote.

But some of those products might not be a good fit for your audience, could be outdated, or could just plain suck. This is why it’s important to do some research and potentially buy a product before deciding to promote it to your audience.

Read the actual product reviews – not just the ClickBank reviews – for any potential product.

We’ve been burned from this in the past – specifically with a product on ClickBank that we didn’t try before we buy. More on that story and lesson learned later.

What Kinds of Affiliate Products are Available on ClickBank?

When searching in the ClickBank marketplace, you will notice a ton of categories that you can choose from when trying to select what product to promote, including:

ClickBank has a wide range of products to promote that can be highly profitable.

For example, let’s say your audience is among the many looking for healthier options to use when cleaning their homes. Many consumers are realizing that products on the shelves are full of unhealthy chemicals and want to switch to a greener option.

If you’re a blogger, you can write a blog post about using healthier and more environmentally friendly products. In that post, you can link affiliate products from ClickBank.

Copy and paste this strategy with social media, email marketing, etc.

This is just one example of a popular and profitable category on ClickBank. It’s important to choose the right niche, which we will get into next. 

Are Some Blog Niches Better For ClickBank Than Others?

If you want to make money on a blog, you have to decide which niche to focus on.

The best way to find the right niche is to research it thoroughly. Doing so will help you find a topic that is related to your own interests but can also be helpful to others.

Photography, for example, is one of the most lucrative niches, with thousands of affiliate marketing opportunities. While most photographers are hobbyists and amateurs, a number of people have built successful blogs around their photography with sites like ClickBank.

Some photography bloggers have found success in this competitive niche by writing about the products and services that photographers need. Those products are all associated with affiliate links that bring in affiliate revenue.

A blog that specializes in a particular topic will generate more traffic than one that focuses on a broad topic. This is because it’s much easier to rank for relevant keywords when you’re honing in on something specific.

This is called “narrowing down your niche” and it’s important with any products that you sell — affiliate or not.

Keyword research is the name of the game when it comes to organic Google traffic and a big factor in your potential for success here is the level of competition you have.

Ideally, you choose a niche that isn’t ultra-competitive and work on medium or long-tail keywords that have a better chance at ranking. But that’s a rabbit hole for another blog post.

If you want to learn more about this, you can read more about building a Google SEO strategy or our favorite SEO tools.

For now, the important thing to keep in mind is by researching your competitors and analyzing the blogs in your niche, you’ll be able to find the best affiliate products to promote.

You can learn more about driving traffic to your affiliate products in the ClickBank video below:

How Do You Make Money with ClickBank?

As you will quickly see, making money with ClickBank is quite simple. You are being paid to promote products, which is something a lot of people will do naturally — might as well get paid for it.

Think of it this way: you just purchased a great new gadget for your kitchen. You know all the cooks in the family will love it, so you tell them about the product and send them the link to where to buy it!

Only, as an affiliate partner, you will be using a personalized affiliate link provided by ClickBank. Here are the steps to get that link and make this work for you.

1. Choosing a Category

With ClickBank, you click on the category you would like to promote.

So let’s say you are wanting to promote a product in the Home & Garden category.

You’d go to the ClickBank site, select the Home & Garden category, and click on the product you want to promote. You will then be able to see what the compensation is per click on the link provided.

From here, you click promote to create your unique affiliate link.

If you see a kitchen gadget you have tried, loved, and want others to know about, all you have to do is share your referral link.

For simple math purposes, let’s assume ClickBank says you will receive $5.00 per order with your link. If you get 20 orders per week, you’d earn an extra $400 per month!

This is easy to do if you have a blog with a good following, or even use social media platforms such as Facebook, Tiktok, or Instagram. 

Look for products that you believe in and are passionate about. This makes the selling process so much easier and generally a lot more effective.

2. Marketing and Analytics 

If you want to make money on ClickBank, you need to know how to market the products. ClickBank offers various marketing tools and analytics reports that will help you analyze your marketing strategy and build on it.

As an affiliate, you can watch your commissions grow (or not grow). Thankfully, ClickBank allows you to create unique tracking IDs with your links, so you know exactly where your sales are coming from.

When you add an affiliate link to a blog post, you can use the post name in your tracking ID so that you know that your sales came from that particular article. Repeat this process for specific emails, social media campaigns, etc.

When your sales are increasing from a particular source, you know you’re doing something right. All you have to do is work on scaling that process or improving it to increase conversions.

Good analytics are important for any affiliate platform you plan to use as a big part of your monetization strategy. Without it, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping things are working without knowing what specifically is working or not working.

3. Digital vs Physical Products

If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to make money on ClickBank, you might want to consider selling digital products rather than physical ones.

Digital products are often easier to sell because they tend to be more subject to impulse buys. People love that instant gratification.

This makes it a great way to make money online.

The key to successfully selling a digital product is to create value-based and sales-centered content, which is just a fancy way of saying create content designed to help sell the product.

If you’ve selected a product on healthier cleaning supplies, you can create content around why it’s important to remove toxins from your environment and how to remove those toxins.

You can also create an entire email campaign around educating your audience about this problem and then helping them solve it. That’s how we successfully sold our first affiliate product on ClickBank (a yoga program for weight loss).

4. Successful Affiliate Campaigns

Creating a successful affiliate campaign – and then replicating that process for other affiliate products – is important if you want to start earning more and scaling your efforts.

Find new products to sell, create more sales-centered content and/or email campaigns, and then check your analytics to see how it did.

Don’t forget that having a targeted audience is key for this. You can create specific lead magnets related to the product that you chose to make sure the right people are coming in the door.

For example, you can create a lead magnet with a free giveaway for something related to household toxins and healthy products. More on building an email list here.

Once you have a system that is converting well, all you have to do is throw more traffic at it. One way to do this is through paid ads.

It’s not easy but it can be really lucrative. You can learn more about this strategy in the video below:

5. Create Landing Pages

Another way to make money with affiliate marketing is to create landing pages that introduce the product and provide reasons why someone should buy it.

If you’ve never created a landing page before, make sure to get some help or guidance before you do. It’s important to have it be the right length and present the right information.

Your landing page, in this case, shouldn’t be too long because you’ll still have to direct that person to the actual sales page for the product. You’re just doing a little “pre-selling” here.

In our Launch Your Blog Biz Course, we have an entire section covering everything you need to know about this process and how to be successful with affiliate marketing.

Best Practices to Succeed with ClickBank

Next up in our ClickBank reviews article is a summary of some best practices on ClickBank. Keep these in mind for optimal success. Consider the following before you get started with ClickBank. 

1. Look for a Good Gravity Score

While most people will scroll through ClickBank to find the products with the highest commissions, this is not always the best strategy.

You will see that there is information about each product and the bottom of the description. This is where you will find what is called “Gravity score”.

Gravity Score is an affiliate tracking metric based on your last transaction with the merchant. The gravity is the number of affiliates that have sold the particular product in the last 12 weeks.

The higher the number, the better! Although gravity can be useful in determining your success, it’s not an indication/guarantee of success.

The same gravity score may earn you one sale, or you could make 100. Gravity is calculated over the last 12 weeks.

A product may have a high gravity if it’s recently launched or heavily promoted. Or, a vendor could have many other products in their Marketplace account, which could affect their stats.

Gravity Score is a key metric that ClickBank uses to determine how popular a product is among affiliates. You can learn more about it below:

Beware of products with a low gravity score. A product that is popular and is getting high sales is usually more promising than one with a low gravity score.

2. Find Products That YOU Think Are Great

Finding a product or service you are truly interested in can be a big plus. We mentioned before that it usually makes it an easier sell for you, which makes your marketing better, which makes your audience more likely to buy it.

You would never want to promote a product that you don’t believe in because you can’t truly support it.

At best, talking about a product all day you haven’t actually tried will get tiring and often lead to bad copywriting. At worst, your audience will hate the product, ask for refunds, and lose trust in you.

I speak from experience here. It was a diabetes product and it looked great from the initial metrics. The problem was that we didn’t buy it to try it before recommending it to our audience.

We only bought it after the initial feedback and wave of refunds came in. Turns out the product was pretty sh*t – despite having a great sales page.

There’s nothing worse than watching your affiliate sales get reversed after the initial celebrations that you finally found a system that “worked.”

This was a huge lesson learned in affiliate marketing for us and it changed the way that we approach our product selection and selling process.

Here’s a quick overview:

1. Look for categories related to your blog niche.
2. Choose products you know you can stand behind (buy them if necessary – it’s a business expense).
3. Create sales-centered content around the main topics your product is about.
4. Create a targeted lead magnet and email campaign for this product.
5. Use unique IDs for all parts of your campaign and check your analytics.
6. Optimize your process when you can. Rinse, repeat, and scale.

This is how to be successful with ClickBank.

And as for trying before you buy… You can also try to reach out to vendors and ask for samples. Sometimes they will give you a freebie or deeply discounted product if you’re considering promoting them!

3. Consider Trending Products

You can also use it to find products that are trending in the market and are new to the market. 

This also means that you might have an early chance at writing some Google SEO content that could rank a bit quicker.

For instance, if you’re interested in a vision supplement, you can try something like Ocuprime. At the time of this writing, Ocuprime is being billed as the number one eye formula on ClickBank.

If you plan on using media such as native ads on YouTube or Facebook, Ocuprime might be a great product to promote.

Another product, Exipure, which launched in October 2021, has been on the ClickBank marketplace for a few months and has been at the top spot too. It’s a proven offer and it’s generating more than $650 million in revenue for its creators.

At the time of writing, the product offers affiliate resources and shares commissions of up to 85%.

As a final example, there’s also Dentitox, a popular dental product that has climbed the ranks on ClickBank. The product’s ingredients contain naturally occurring vitamins and plants that promote healthy teeth and gums. 

ClickBank also often shares information on their top products each month in their blog and on their YouTube Channel:

The point is, whether you’re looking for a health solution or a spiritual one, or something completely different, you can find a product on ClickBank that appeals to you. 

Find products that are relevant to your audience and ideally ones that you would take and can fully support.

4. Affiliate Promotions Tool Page

One other factor that can improve your chances of success is access to affiliate tools and other promotions.

Affiliate tools include banners, product images, videos about the product, outlines for email marketing campaigns, specific SEO keywords, pre-made landing pages, and even customer demographics that you would be trying to promote the product to. 

Look out for products on ClickBank that offer any or all of these additional promotional materials. This will make your life much easier and could also make your sales come easier.

It can save you time and effort and also help you find good products. I’d like to say the more promotional tools available, the more successful the product will be. But this isn’t always the case.

But it is true that in most cases, the more successful companies are the ones that are investing the time and energy into creating these promotional materials.

Even if the commissions are slightly lower than others, you could make up for it with increased conversions.

What to Watch Out for on ClickBank

We all need to make a living in this world, especially with the rising costs of everyday goods. Everyone is out to make a quick buck, and that includes the sellers on ClickBank.

Unfortunately, not all ClickBank offers are that great. Some offer low commissions, even as low as only a few cents. And then you will find great commissions on terrible products.

But there is really only one main thing that you need to watch out for on this platform and that is scammy or sub-par products.

Watch out for products with fake reviews. Always seek other sites or even Youtube videos with product reviews to ensure the product you are selling is worth it to the consumers.

If you notice a product has thousands of 5-star reviews with no context, they are most likely fake reviews. This means the product could be junk and/or something that you would not use yourself. 

When you find a product that you want to learn more about or potentially promote, try Googling it first. This is also a good idea to find out what kind of competition you are facing.

For example, I Googled the popular product, Ocuprime, that I mentioned earlier. The Google results were a little worrying.

But upon further review, these articles were not actually exposing scams, despite their clickbait headlines. They were actually recommending the product but using some shady tactics to do it.

There is a lot of this on ClickBank and also other affiliate marketplaces like it.

I personally prefer to stay away from any products that are associated with shady content because it’s going to sketch out your audience.

Always check reviews for ClickBank products before you think about promoting them.

How Do I Sign Up With ClickBank? 

Signing up with ClickBank is pretty easy. It is free and you only need a few key pieces of information such as your name, email address, and social security number (necessary for tax documents).

In order to sign up, you do need to be living in an eligible country and enable cookies on your browser as part of the onboarding process.

On their homepage, click “Start Here” in the top right-hand corner of the page. Then, just follow the prompts, and based on your answers you will either be brought directly to their offers pages, or they will bring you to their education page.

Their education page is called Spark by ClickBank, and it literally walks you through everything you need to know about making money with the platform.

Getting Paid with ClickBank

When you sign up with ClickBank, you can choose to receive your payments in one of two ways:

• Paper check mailed to you (slow method)
• Direct deposit, which takes 1-2 business days to reach your account. 

You can also select a wire transfer to receive payments from countries that don’t have direct deposit services. The wire transfer method can take up to 5 days to become available in your account.

Once your payment and tax details are squared away, you are all set to start promoting as an affiliate!

It’s important to note: ClickBank does offer a 90-day money-back guarantee, which means that customers can easily return any product they don’t like.

Some people may abuse this policy in order to get free stuff, but you’ll also see higher refunds when you’re not doing a good enough job at matching the right audience to the right product – or when the product itself just isn’t great.

Keep this in mind when you’re counting up your money and setting expectations on when to receive it.

Get Started with ClickBank

If this ClickBank reviews article has helped you decide that you want to get started, then great! Don’t forget to prioritize building your traffic strategy first so that you have an audience to sell to.

There isn’t much point in joining the ClickBank network if your account is likely to go dormant due to a lack of sales anyway.

Here are a few other articles to help you on this journey:

• Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers
• 50+ Best Affiliate Marketing Programs
• How to Make Money Blogging

We hope this ClickBank reviews article helped you get some more insight into this popular money-making platform. Have any questions? Let us know in the comments below!