ClickBank Affiliate Millionaire Shares Top Secrets to Success

 

 

Join me for another post coming straight from Bose, Idaho at no place other than the ClickBank headquarters.  

Today, I’m sitting alongside Thomas who is part of business development at ClickBank.  Follow as I ask him all of the questions I’ve always wanted to ask an affiliate network!  Let’s make bank! 

Q: Let’s make bank is a motto around here, right? What are some others?

A: Haha, yes it is!  Oh gosh, let's see.  We’ve got “lets make bank” and “what makes you click”.  Those are the main ones.  

Q: Can you give us a quick rundown, in case there are people listening who are not familiar with what an affiliate network is, what is ClickBank?

A: ClickBank is unique in the affiliate network space.  An affiliate network is typically a place that houses offers that brands have.  From there, the affiliate network keeps track of all of the commissions for the brands affiliate program.  ClickBank is a little different because it is actually an internet retailer, much like Amazon.  Brands that leverage ClickBank actually use Clickbanks’ checkout cart.  This means that ClickBank is responsible for paying the affiliate, remitting taxes, and 1099 contracts.  It takes a lot of backend work off of the brand and it guarantees that the affiliate gets paid.  

Q: How many people — or affiliate marketers — are a part of ClickBank and how many brands utilize ClickBank’s services?  

A: We’ve got roughly over 100,000 affiliates running traffic to offers and over 10,000 offers themself that receive the traffic.  There are thousands of sign-ups a day, usually for affiliates, and it's growing every day.  We play matchmaker between affiliate and offer. 

Q: Is it okay to mention some of the brand stories and how they have succeeded by promoting B2B on ClickBank?

A: Yeah we can talk about some! I think one misconception about ClickBank is that because we’ve been around for 23 or 24 years and because we started in the digital downloads space, that that is all we do.  Well, about 6 or 7 years ago we started working with Organifi.  If you haven’t heard of them, they are a company that was able to scale to 8 figures off of green nutrient powder that you can add to smoothies and whatnot.  Organifi put the flag in the sand and now the supplement niche is our best performing.  We power way more than just digital products; physical products absolutely outweigh the digital.  Our growth over just the last three years with physical products has been tremendous.  

We are also really big in weight loss, self-help, survival, and how to make money online niches when it comes to digital.  Eventually, we hope to look into the e-commerce realm and offer some sort of digital education.  We have a great little cornerstone in the market and we’d love to continue to offer different types of value.

Q: I’m not sure if it's fair to ask you this question because it’s so broad but what is a good offer? 

A: A good offer to me in one that converts well and also pays well.  When I say pays well, I mean how much the program gives in commissions.  The ClickBank marketplace actually ranks affiliate programs and offers based on their performance.  Stats like how many affiliates are actually making sales from an offer are considered.  The higher the gravity score (a number that comes from a formulated equation), the more success an affiliate will probably have.  

The gravity score is based on the past 12 weeks to factor in recency.  Refund and chargeback rates also go into the equation.  

Offers are always trending up and trending down. This is in part because affiliates are fickle.  They love trying and testing new offers and replacing old with new ones.  

Q: Is there anything relating to data that makes a good offer?

A: Yeah, I’d love to nerd out for a second.  We did a poll last year to see what the top 100 offers were doing as far as conversions, front-end price point, checkout cart price, average order value, etc.  Then we took a closer look at the top 20% of the 100 to see what they were doing differently.  

We chucked our findings into physical vs. digital offers because physical had a much higher cart value which skews the numbers a bit.  Once we paired that back, we found that an average price point for a digital offer was in the $37 range and the average price point for a physical offer like a supplement was in the $47 range.  

That being said, the AOVs would change drastically.  Gross AOV for a digital offer capped out around $60.  The supplement funnels that we saw going really well were getting anywhere up to $200 AOVs.  They were doing a great job at bundling on the front end.

 

All of these offers were converting anywhere from 1.5 to 3 percent at scale. 

 

Q: I’m curious to get your perspective on this one.  Is there enough room for me, you, all of your followers, and all of my followers to promote the same offer and make money?  Is there saturation?  Is there a limit?

A: In my opinion, it varies between niches and product types.  In general, there's not really a cap.  We see fatigue because offers don't get enough exposure to traffic sources, not because they are getting too much traffic.  Just think about how many billions of people are on Facebook.  Are you really going to saturate Facebook?  

Where this conversation gets interesting is when you are talking with an offer owner who is getting a really good scale on a traffic source all from an affiliate.  It can be beneficial on the owners behalf to gate that offer to other affiliates.  Yes there is enough space.  However, if a company has affiliates that are using spy tools or who are ripping the same copy and landers from others, it's going to make it harder for them to scale as aggressively as they would like.  

A lot of people question whether or not they should even put their offer onto ClickBank for the fear of the market being too saturated; we see this a lot in the weight loss space.  What they don't realize is that a lot of these top offer owners are super affiliates themselves and actually promote other weight loss products through their email list.  They know that a weight loss buyer is probably going to purchase multiple things that will help them accomplish their goal.  It’s a lot like the make money online industry; there’s a pretty low chance that you’ll learn everything you want to know from one course.  As opposed to competition, I think of it more as collaboration behind the scenes. 

Q:  I’d like to talk a little more about the other side, the affiliate side.  You said you have over 100,000 affiliates that I’m sure make varying levels of profit.  Let’s start at the top.  What are those affiliates doing?  How do they work with ClickBank so well? How are they doing it?

A: There are a few different ways.  The top affiliates we are looking at are either scaled media buyers or people with very large email lists.  

Q: What is a lot of emails to you?

A:  There are a few people out there that have lists in the millions.  Most of those people are either part of a business with buyers or have some sort of email list manager to keep track of their audiences.  

Q:  What does a good email that promotes a ClickBank offer look like? 

A:  A good offer provides affiliates with proven email swipes.  They provide the demographics of their audience, the top subject lines, and top converting swipes.  All the affiliate has to do is put in their links and personalize the template.  You can also go to the affiliate tools page and use the swipes or copy you are given.  If you can’t find this page, there is usually a spot to contact the offer owner to get said material.  

The core structure includes an attention-grabbing subject line that drives curiosity.  Story-driven copy with a call to action to click is always what does best.  

Q:  Let’s talk about the bottom part of the 100,000 affiliates.  What are they missing?  How do they get to the top?  What do they need to learn?

A:  There are a lot of people that are really interested and who want to have success.  Many of them take very minimal action if any.  They are dabbling, for lack of a better term.  If I had to give them advice, I would tell them to pick a single traffic source, pick a single niche, and go deep.  You might not find money on day one or even month one.  However, if you stay focused on one thing and learn it really well, you will see success.  

Q: So, to recap, when someone goes to sign up for ClickBank, they will automatically get all of the inside information that we talked about above?

A:  Yes!  If you are interested, go to ClickBank.com and sign up.  It’s completely free to create an account and only takes a second to set up.  I would also recommend that you check out our YouTube channel.  We have a lot of educational content around how to use the marketplace, the newest top offers, up and coming offers, etc.  Hopefully, those videos will help get you started on the right foot. 

I’d like to thank Thomas for sitting down with me and for letting me ask him the questions I’ve always wanted to ask!  It’s been absolutely fascinating to learn about the world of ClickBank!

If anything you learned today made an impact on you today, be sure to drop a comment.  I’d love to have a discussion about it!  As Thomas said, go check out ClickBank's YouTube channel for tons of free knowledge and education. 

Thanks so much for reading. 

Peace and God bless (and make bank!).