As an affiliate, you can use blogging, email marketing, social media, product review pages, and many other ways to promote products and services online. In this post, I will show you how to promote Clickbank products without a website or blog step by step as an affiliate to make money online.
First, What Is An Affiliate?
An affiliate is someone who uses an “affiliate link” to send website traffic to a vendor’s site that sells a product. If a sale is made upon that visit, or within a set time of that initial visit, the affiliate receives a commission (a pre-determined portion of the sale price).
In the Clickbank, you’ll receive an affiliate commission if the prospect buys within 60 days of the initial visit. This is referred to as 60-day cookies (cookies is the internet term for keeping track of website visit history).
Why Clickbank?
The reason I recommend Clickbank is that they approve almost everyone to promote their products and they will pay you every Wednesday. If your country is not in the list of Clickbank approved countries, you can check out alternatives to Clickbank here.
But the information from this page can be applied to promote any affiliate product from any company, just remove the word Clickbank and put your affiliate network name and you will be set.
Without any further due, here is how you can promote Clickbank products step by step without a website.
Step 1: Create a Clickbank account
The first step is to create a Clickbank account, if do you have one you can skip this step.
To create a Clickbank account go to:
https://accounts.clickbank.com/signup/
You will find a page like this one below
Just fill in all the required information, you need to put your real information, including your real name, your real address and your real email (I know it sounds obvious but I know people who put fake information), this will save you from troubles when Clickbank pay you in the future.
Then click next, and fill up your correct bank information, after finalizing everything you will have to confirm your email and you are set to go to the next step.
Step 2: Pick a product to promote
After finalizing the creation of your Clickbank account you will need to pick a good product to promote.
All you need to do is to login in your Clickbank account and then click marketplace, that will take you directly to the Clickbank marketplace.
In the marketplace you will find a search bar, if do you have an idea of what niche do you want to promote just type it in the space ( for example I was going to promote keto diet products so I typed ‘keto’, if you don’t know yet what niche to promote just leave it in blank and then click the search icon as shown in the image below.
When the search results appear, click in the drop menu and choose sort by gravity
For those who don’t know, Clickbank gravity is an estimated matrix that indicates the number of an affiliate who has made a sale promoting a product in the last 12 weeks, for each affiliate who made a sale the product is given a number between 0.1 and 1 depending on when the sale was made.
All you need to do after that is looking for a product that you do want to promote, for me these are the things I look from the product.
Gravity
Most people will tell you that you need to promote products with the highest gravity, Personally, I think this is a myth because higher gravity does not necessarily mean it is a good product and because everyone and his dog preach about promoting high gravity products most affiliates especially new ones tend to promote these products and create unnecessary competition also Clickbank gravity can be manipulated.
I will say choose a product between the gravity of 10 to 50 if this is your first Clickbank promotion stick with between 20-30 if there is no product in that range you can go a little bit low or high depending on the niche.
Initial Sale
This is the amount of money you will make when people buy a certain product by using your affiliate link, I tend to choose products with initial sale equal to or above 20. This means if I make at least one sale per day I will be making at least $20 day, it is not a bad thing.
Avg $/sale
This is the amount of money you will make on average for every sale you generate if Initial sale amount=Avg $/sale this means that the product does not offer any Upsales or people just don’t buy them.
Avg Rebill Total
If this number is $0.00 means the products do not have recurring payments so you will not make any money after the initial sale, if it is bigger than 0 means it has a recurring income.
Avg %rebill
This number represents the average affiliate commission percentage for a sale, including only the rebill commission.
For me, the most important factors are gravity and initial sale, for that reason that is why I selected the second product in this list (see the image below).
But that is not all, now you have selected the product you need to check out their sales page or sales video, you need to make sure that it is a nice and clean sales page/video, no link to other websites, no gimmicks or false claim and you need to ask yourself this question, I would buy this product for myself? if the answer is yes and you have money then buy it, if you don’t have money but the answer is yes you can also promote it, but if the answer is no, don’t promote it and chose another product.
It is always good practice to buy and use the product yourself before promoting it.
Step 3: Get your affiliate link
So now you did all the work and you found your product, you need to get your affiliate link, this is easy, just click the promote button (the one below Avg $/sale and this popup will appear in a new window.
In, enter your information part you should have your Clickbank nickname there, if you clicked from inside your Clickbank account it should be there by default if it is not there just type it, make sure it is correct so that you can be credited for the sales you will be generating.
Also I will encourage you to enter your tracking ID, this is optional but it is useful because it will tell you where the sale came from and it will help you to decide which traffic generating method to focus on, in this article I am going to use the blog commenting method (spoiler alert) that is why I put BC for blog commenting, you can put anything you want there.
Ather that click generate HopLink and Clickbank will generate one of the ugliest URLs you will ever see, just click to the icon in the right-hand side of your link to copy it and paste somewhere you can remember like in notepad and save it in your computer.
Step 4: Mask your link
Now you need to mask your link and in this step, you will need to use some cash, I know this guide is supposed to teach you how to promote Clickbank products without a website and for free but, you will need to spend a little amount of money.
The method we are going to use to promote this Clickbank product is called direct link, this means you send your visitors directly to the sales page or sales video, there is no presale page or landing page.
Benefits of this method
The main benefit of this method is that you will get 100% CTR, CTR means Click Through Ration, in simple words means all people who will click to your link will go directly to the sales page or sales video.
The bad part of this method is that you’re not preselling or building your list, that means you’re not building a foundation of your online business.
My recommendation is that do this method, make some cash on demand and them invest some of that money by buying hosting and some other tools to build a real business online, for starters it is a good starting point.
Why you need to mask your affiliate link
it is ugly
As you saw above, the link you get from Clickbank is very ugly, imagine a friend telling you he/she wants to check out the product your promoting and she/he wants your affiliate link, how are you going to tell him/her that my link is atfghf35ftyy.clickbank.com they will think you’re crazy, the best thing is to mask it with a memorable domain name like johnrecommends.com, assuming your name is John.
And when they click to johnrecommends.com it will take them to that ugly link.
Most websites hate affiliate links
It does not matter if you’re going to promote it on facebook, twitter, Instagram or by commenting on authority blogs, if they see it is an affiliate link, they will not let you promote it, masking it reduces that risk.
It protects you in the future
Let say you’re going to dedicate at least two hours to do the method I am going to show you, after one month you will generate a lot of clicks per day and if for any reason the vendor is out of business, you can just go in your domain registrar and change the affiliate link and promote the related product, if you don’t do this you will have to search for every place you left your link and change it, it can take days or you will lose your traffic overnight, be smart.
How to mask your affiliate link
You need to buy a domain name, my highest recommendation is Namecheap as they are a very reliable domain register company, but the initial price is around 9.
If you don’t have that amount of money you can google for ‘GoDaddy one dollar domains’ you will be able to buy a single domain for just $1.
Yes, that what it will cost you to start making money with Clickbank using this method.
So since I am using Namecheap that is what I am going to use to show you how to mask your affiliate link.
Just go to namecheap.com and type a domain name do you want to buy, it can be yourname.com or yournamerecommends.com.On my case I decided to go with ketodietlowcarb.com just be creative and don’t waste more time in this.
Just click the search icon, if a desirable domain name is available, then add it to cart, if you don’t have an account they will ask you to create one, pay for it by using Paypal or debit/ credit card then you own a domain name for one year.
After you complete the process above you will need to log in into your Namecheap account and click domain list then manage as shown in the image below.
Make sure that in nameservers it is Namecheap BasicDNS (it should be like this by default) and then click Advanced DNS.
Click on the drop menu where it says A Record, in the menu choose URL Redirect Record as shown in the image below.
You will have something like in the image below, in the host, space write the symbol ‘@’, in de destination URL copy your ugly link from Clickbank and post it there, in the drop menu choose Masked and then click the save button (in the red circle).
After that you will need to click add a new record then select URL Redirect Record, this time in the host space write ‘www’, in the Destination URL post the same link from Clickbank, choose Masked in the drop menu and then click save.
If everything is done right, your record should look like the image below.
It may take up to 48 hours to update the host records, so if you test out and it does not direct you will need to wait a bit but after than any person who clicks or types your domain name will be directed to your affiliate link.
Now let us move to the last step of this tutorial, to drive traffic.
Step 5: Use a Trojan horse traffic method to drive free traffic
I first found out about this method about three years ago, I brought a product called Operation 10K by Desmond Ong and as a bonus, he teaches this method and he calls it Trajan Horse Method.
The method is very simple and it is in three steps.
you find 5-20 authority blogs in your niche.
The simplest way to do this is to use Google, you can just Google ‘your niche+best blogs’ for example in my case it will be ‘ keto diet best blogs’
For better results I will recommend doing your search in incognito mode as if you the normal browser, Google will show you results depending on your search history and other user-related behaviors, you need to see natural results.
Find blogs with these three characteristics
You need to find between 5-20 authority blogs that have these three characteristics, one, the blog needs to have constant updates if the owner of the blog does not update his/her blog regularly there is no need to comment on it because probably you will not get traffic.
The blog needs to allow comment with a link, this is important because we are going to live a comment and then leave our link there if they don’t let you do this don’t waste your time on them.
The third and last characteristic is that the body must have active readers, you can check this by checking if there are some people commenting on the blog or if it has many shares in social media.
As I said find 5-20 of these blogs and keep them in the notepad.
Leave a helpful, respectful comment
You need to write a good comment, you need first to read the whole article, find some points that you can comments on, leave your comment, your name, and your link.
For example in my case, I found a blog named ketogasm.com, they meet all criteria I mentioned above, all I need to here is to write a good comment, select save my name, notify me on follow and notify me of a new post then hint submit a comment.
What will happen is that if I write a good and helpful comment the owner of this blog she will approve my comment and when her readers see it, they will want to click on my name and they will be redirected to my affiliate link.
If you do on average 6 minutes per comment that means that if you dedicate 2 hours, you will be leaving about 20 comments per day and if you do this every day you will start getting a huge amount of clicks every day and for sure you will make some sales.
Question and Answers
Do this method works?
Yes, it works, I still use it to make sales and drive traffic to my blogs and I know a lot of big name marketers like Neil Patel you used this method and reported massive results.
How much money I can make from this method?
There is no guarantee how much money you can make, but in my case, I make a sale between 140 and 300 visitors to my affiliate link, sometimes I make more, it depends on many factors.
If you could post 20 comments per day in a month you will have 600 comments, and if each comment gives you 1 visitor per day this is 600 visitors per day and if you make 2 sales per day, you will be making at least $40 per day, assuming you picked a product with an average sale of $20+
Is this long term?
No, this is not a long term stratergy, but you can use this method to make at least $100 per day but it is very difficult to scale up, you will need to start building your list and probably creating an authority blog yourself.
Final word
This is how you can promote Clickbank products without a website or blog, there are many methods you can use, I will keep posting them here.
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