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.
15 responses to Clickbank Affiliate Program
This clickbank affiliate sounds interesting. My father told me about this and i’ve read breifly about it. I wanted to hear from people who have actually tried it. My question is : do you have to sel your own things ( or niche) do they have things to sell as well. I’m really interested in this if I can make money. Even if its just an extra 200 dollars a month.
Clickbank Affiliate Program
No you don’t have to sell your own products on the clickbank program, I for example don’t have a clickbank product (yet, you never know the future :-))
As you can see above in our first month we made over $500, most of this is from one niche clickbank product. Now we are selling two niche products and 2 days from the 2 month point we’ve made over $1,150.
The success appears to be due to putting a lot of effort into the pages that sell the product, we both wrote very detailed and honest reviews of the products (they are very good products as well) and this has resulted in a steady stream of sales from what I consider a low amount of traffic.
I’ve also tried selling clickbank products without a review and so far over the last month not made a single sale!!
So my experience is you really have to put some time into supporting the clickbank products you want to sell, otherwise you won’t made any money!
David
Clickbank Affiliate Program
Hi
How can I have a Clickbank ID.
I am not leaving where Clickbank is working.
A warm thanks, from a freezing Montevideo.
Thank you very much.
Hi
how can I get an Clickbank ID.
Here Clickbank is not working.
Warm thanks from a freezing Montevideo.
Bernardo
It is interesting to read about your success with Clickbank. I may have made a mistake. Just recently I put my clickbank stuff on the back burner and have been promoting Affiliate programs only. I am doing it differently and started using WEB2.0 and add content to it daily, usually reviews and the like. I learned quickly the search engines hate copy cat affiliates sites but they live open source sites with fresh content added frequently.
lthough, seeing your success I may change my mind and possible start a new site selling Clickbank products. Figuring out where to start and what products to seel will be my biggest hurdle.
Thank you for the informative post.
Clickbank Affiliate Program
Something to keep in mind. Google LOVES resource sites. A resource heavy site with some targeted anchor text links will out rank a non resource web site that is ranking on large link numbers alone.
Utilize the title, description, header and sprinkled relevant text into the body of new pages until you rank where you want to and then keep doing it. It works every time. It may take some time, but it will work.
Clickbank Affiliate Program
I enjoy Clickbank too. Once you find a good product to promote effectively – recurring payday is inevitable. I also enjoy clix galore and paydot.com
I think the aspect of reviewing the clickbank product is the best advice you could give. I also have clickbank products on my site, yet sales are few and far between. Also, the problem with some clickbank products is that they drive visitors away from your core solution, as some are dodgy in there own rights. I think the trick is to pick the optimal solution, review it, and post.
Clickbank Affiliate Program
The secret of success with Clickbank and affiliate programs is keyword / niche research. Find markets that aren’t saturated, and go after those!
I MUST SAY THAT CLICKBANK IS GOOD AND RELIABLE I LOVE TO DO BUSINESS WITH CLICKBANK THANKS………
YOU ARE A FRAUD! THAT’S ALL!
No one can make that much in clickbank or amazon. If they do, they would have been featured in newspaper and so on. You are just a FRAUD.
LOL zzz,
Currently I make very little from AdSense because Google kept filtering my Amazon stores.
I make more from Clickbank now though, I made almost $6,000 in November 2008 and almost $4,000 in December 2008. That includes AdSense income.
I’ve been posting my monthly affiliate revenue at http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/money/revenue-reports since June 2008 and have just remembered I haven’t done the January one yet.
If you don’t believe I’m making this a month that’s sad as it’s not that much money (I make far more from my SEO business, this is a hobby). There’s thousands of affiliates who put far more time into this sort of stuff than I do and easily make over $100K a year.
How the hell do you think Clickbank makes it’s money? Affiliates bring in the vast majority of their and their partners revenue.
David Law
Clickbank Affiliate Program
Clickbank program is no doubt one of the best affiliate programs that every marketer should join. I love this program and I have earned commissions from this.. Very nice..
I will follow this tips and hope my adsense earnings will improve in the future. I will report back and tell you what happend to them.
Have you used PPC?
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