Starting your affiliate marketing with Clickbank

One of the first things you will want to get involved with is affiliate marketing. Although you need to drive traffic to your website, blog, or “mini-site”, getting set up with a Clickbank account is very important. You see, Clickbank is a huge marketplace of e-products. Someday in the future you may actually make one of those e-products and place it on Clickbank for other affiliates to sell. For now, you are going to want to take products and sell them to others, and you will make a hefty commission, usually at or over 50%, for each sale.

If you go to Clickbank.com you will find it remarkably easy to establish an account. The most difficult part will be choosing a name that may not already be taken. Keep in mind that later on you may use that name when you sell a product, so don’t make it too funky. Something marketing related like my products would be good. I believe it is limited to 10 characters.

Now head on over to the Clickbank “marketplace” and you will see that it is divided into various “niches”, or areas of interest. You will be able to create what is called a “hoplink” for each one of those products, that would lead to paying YOU the commission if you were to sell that product. Clickbank recently introduced a way to “cloak” your hoplink so that people will not be able to easily figure out the product name, and place their own affiliate id into this url instead of yours.

There are a huge number of ways to decide on which products to sell, but it depends of course on what you plan to focus on with the subscribers that you will eventually be getting and repeatedly “making suggestions” (selling) to. One thing to look for in product is a high “gravity” meaning that a lot of other affiliates are promoting the product, not just the product owner.

As with most of these newsletters, I’m pointing you in the right direction, but it is up to you to find out as much as you can through the Clickbank marketplace itself and through forums. In my next report, I’ll be talking about forums and how you can use them.