Making Money with Clickbank and Domain Names

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Do you use Clickbank to make money with your domains?

I have used Clickbank for close to 10 years now, with varying success.  I just read the Get Rich Click book by Marc Ostrofsky and it's made me have another hard look at the Clickbank program after using it sparingly in recent years.

Clickbank is an all-digital marketplace of mostly information products that you can sell as an affiliate.  There are 23 categories of information products, so chances are there is a product that would suit most any topic your domain name might have (e.g.: Gardening, Making Money, Dog Training, Recipes, Health, Building Apps, Gambling guides, etc).  When I started on  Clickbank years ago, it was pretty much all english products.  Now, they have products in other languages and more ad tools you can use to make it easy to sell Clickbank products with a domain name, webpage, or on your website.  My last Clickbank sale was a french How to Lose Weight guide.

To sell on Clickbank, you just need to sign up and create a username.  This username will be in your hoplink, which is basically just an affiliate link to a specific product.  You can search the Clickbank Marketplace section by topic or keyword, and when you find a digital product to sell you click on Promote, and it creates your hoplink once you enter your Clickbank username.

Here is an example of a hoplink for a product on how to sell domain names:
http://eb33233dh9w80pmiz6yp25002w.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=DOMAINS

Note you can also add a tracking word on your link.  I used 'DOMAINS', but if you are putting a product on different pages, you can use a different word to track where your sales are coming from.

When you visit the link above, it takes you to a page with this link:
http://www.openforsale.com/?hop=hugegrowth

My Clickbank ID is hugegrowth.  When people click to buy, you should see your ID at the bottom of the payment page.  Then you'll know the sale is being tracked to you.

Most Clickbank products can earn you a commission of $10 to $25 per sale, but it can also be lower or higher.  When you search for products, you'll see what the commission is and other indicators like how well the product has been selling on Clickbank (it's gravity).

Another great feature of Clickbank that's been added in recent years is the ability to create your own ad boxes of varying sizes.  If you go into "My Account", you can choose the "HopAd Builder".  You can create a text box based on keywords, text color, link color, link hover color, background color and border color.  You can also choose the font size.  Once you build your ad and get the code, Clickbank will serve up related products to the box.  This is a good set it and forget it tool to build an ad.

Click here to see some sample Clickbank text box ads.

So, if you want to use Clickbank there are many ways to do it.  You can put a product link on your website (usually adding a short description of the product helps).  You can forward a domain directly to a Clickbank link, if the domain gets traffic and the product really suits the domain name.  You can build ad boxes of various sizes and colors and have product links automatically served up to your webpage.  Again, the key is to promote products that relate to what your traffic is looking for.

For payments, you can set your threshold as low as $10 to trigger a payment.  Clickbank pays by cheque in the mail.  This is a good feature compared to some affiliate programs I've seen where you need $100 or $200 to trigger a payment.

Clickbank has a good reporting system, you can log in and see when you've made a sale, what product it was, what your balance is, and when a payment has triggered.

A few caveats of Clickbank:

If you promote a single product, check your link once in a while to see that the webpage is still up for the product.  I've had some products either close down their site or even change the payment system so that it doesn't go through Clickbank anymore.  If you stick to popular products this shouldn't happen.  It is not a frequent thing, but something to look out for.

If you have no activity on your account for a few months, and you haven't met your minimum balance to trigger a payment, Clickbank will deduct a dollar or two from your account every two weeks as a maintenance fee.  This isn't great, but with a low payment threshold if you are selling products often enough this shouldn't happen.

I haven't seen a hits log in Clickbank.  It would help to be able to see what products you are getting traffic to and what sites it is coming from.  The reporting at Clickbank focuses on sales data and not traffic data.  As an affiliate, I like to know what kind of traffic I'm sending.

In conclusion, I'd recommend anyone to try marketing Clickbank products.  There is a product to suit almost any niche, the commissions are good overall, it's easy to set up, there are both english and other language products, and Clickbank handles all the delivery and checkout.  All you need to do is pick the right products to promote and let Clickbank mail you a cheque!

If you have any comments on using Clickbank, or any Clickbank tips, please post them below.

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