Clickbank Affiliate Program

My affiliate marketing post in January: Affiliate Marketing, What Next? highlights the current problems with Google rankings and affiliate content, basically Google hates thin affiliate content and quickly removes it from the Google search index!

If Google hadn’t removed all my automated (datafeeds = big sites fast) affiliate sites from it’s index I’d probably be making well over £200,000 a year just from affiliate and Google AdSense revenue by now.

But it did and so I have to move on.

At first I looked for ways to make thin affiliate sites that use a datafeed unique, which wasn’t that hard in most cases, but still 3-6 months in Google removed them (manual removal most likely) and so using bog standard thin affiliate content that’s found on 10,000 other sites is NOT a long term solution to my plans to be on a beach somewhere in Spain while affiliate revenue sustains my opulent life style :-)

And guess who comes to the rescue? My 15 year old son and the ClickBank Affiliate Program.

Clickbank Program

I’ve looked through many affiliate programs, but never tried ClickBank. Think it’s because most Clickbank partners use scam like marketing pages (I hate those with a vengeance), so Clickbank was over looked until now.

My eldest son’s been trying his hand at making money online, first it was grand ideas like start a mobile phone shop with me paying for the stock of course (don’t think so son!!!).

Eventually I convinced him to start small, look for a niche market you have an interest in and find a suitable affiliate program. This way he doesn’t risk any serious money and if he finds a good market later there’s the options to buy stock or something.

Perfect for someone who doesn’t need to make money to eat!

So he started a Wordl of Warcraft website with an aim to create the best resource of World of Warcraft Quest Guides online. He could then add AdSense and other advertising/affiliate programs.

To cut a long story short he found a quality product through ClickBank called World of Warcraft Ebook about power leveling and wrote a review.

Basically the product is highly relevant to his World of Warcraft site and is very good: we’ve both used it while playing the game (yes I play World of Warcraft) and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Now most affiliate programs I’ve tried pay between 4% and 15%. Made most of my affiliate cash through Amazon which starts at 4% and so you have to sell a LOT of products to do really well.

For example since starting selling via Amazon’s affiliate program my sites have sold $382,979.30 worth of products for Amazon.com (also use Amazon.co.uk affiliate program and France, Germany and Canada but only sold a fraction of the above amount with those). From the 20724 products sold that make up the $382,979.30 revenue my share is just $31,193.23 (below 10%) (screenshot below).

ClickBank affiliate partners on the other hand regularly pay out 50% and some as high as 75% revenue share! Basically through Clickbank I only have to make a 1/5th of the sales/revenue to match my Amazon affiliate revenue.

After realising this (sometimes I’m a slow learner :-)) I created my own World of Warcraft leveling Ebook Review and expanded to a second related leveling Ebook Review to take full advantage of the market.

It’s early days, but we are doing really well considering the lack of SERPs (we have some easy SERPs), my son had his first sale on May 5th, and as of yesterday (June 6th) we’ve made 32 sales totalling $524.54 (screenshot below).

This means we’ve sold around $1,200 worth of World of Warcraft Ebooks in a month from a few new pages!

So Clickbank looks like a great way to make affiliate revenue and since our review pages are 95% unique Google shouldn’t ban them 3-6 months from now.

I’m off looking for more Clickbank niche products that I can market.