Required
__ Your digital product, in a format that is accessible by people using different operating systems and software. For example, not everyone has Microsoft Word on their computer.
__ Your own domain name. ClickBank does not allow you to use subdomains on another site, such as http://yourproduct.blogspot.com.
__ A Pitch Page and Thank You Page for your product. For more information on requirements for these pages, see Get Started as a Vendor. If you don’t know much about web design and want a quick and easy way to get your Pitch Page and Thank You Page built and hosted, check out a product called PitchMagic, which is sold by a ClickBank vendor. The software uses drag-and-drop functionality that follows many of the “best practices” of successful Pitch Pages but doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML.
__ Website hosting for your Pitch Page and Thank You Page. ClickBank does not provide hosting for these pages, and you cannot use free hosting services that merely assign you a subdomain.
__ Customer support. You must be able to provide timely customer support when needed, such as offering support to customers on using your product, or responding to return requests.
Source: ClickBank
Attract More Affiliates
No matter what your product or niche is, the easiest way to generate huge sales of your product is to attract a lot of affiliates to promote it. While some established ClickBank vendors have no problem finding affiliates to promote their next big product, if you’re just starting out it can be hard to know how to let affiliates know about your product and convince them to promote it. This guide will offer some ideas to make this discovery process easier and faster.
Have a Great Marketplace Listing
The first place to start is with your Marketplace listing, which is the initial place that most affiliates will see and learn about your product. Since the Marketplace is heavily used by affiliates, it’s very important that your product description and information provide them with the information they need to decide whether to promote your product.
The important question that affiliates want to know about your product is, “What’s in it for me?” Before knowing anything else about your product, they want to know why they should choose to promote yours over the thousands of other products available in the Marketplace.
The product description is your chance to highlight how your product benefits affiliates. Be honest and set realistic expectations for the affiliate. If they choose to promote your product based on claims about how well it converts or how much support you provide for affiliates, they’ll quickly stop promoting your product if they feel your claims aren’t justified. Some of the benefits that affiliates know to look for and value:
- Good conversion rate (ratio of visitors to a site who end up buying)
- High average $ earned/sale
- Vendors who provide an affiliates page with useful information for affiliates promoting the product (see below for more details)
- If a product offers recurring commissions, as in the case of subscription or membership products
- Low refund rate
- Any unique or interesting details about your product that make it unique
- If the product is in a “hot” niche
Mentioning any of the above benefits that apply to your product can be a great way to communicate to affiliates that your product is worth promoting.
Have a Great Affiliates Page
As mentioned above, one of the best ways to attract affiliates is to make their job easier for them by providing a page on your website with extensive information and tools for them that make promoting your product easier. These include things like:
- Attractive banner ads, buttons, graphics, etc, that they can paste directly into their site with their HopLink to your product. It’s a good idea to provide a wide variety of graphics in different sizes, formats, etc
- Suggested keywords that relate to your product, which they can either bid on in paid advertising, or try to rank in search engines to drive free traffic to your website
- An FAQ about your product that they can use to write articles about your product or provide information to potential customers
- General tips about how to promote your product, such as “inside information” about your niche that an outsider wouldn’t know, suggestions for how to convince visitors to click their HopLink, etc
- Examples of articles or topics that would be of interest to your potential customers, which they can use for articles or advertising
- Testimonials you’ve received about your product
- A step-by-step description of how to become an affiliate, for people who aren’t already familiar with ClickBank but would like to promote your product to others
- Any additional pre-sales material they can use on their site, such as a video about your product that can use their HopLink to send the visitor to your Pitch Page after the video
When providing any kind of affiliate materials that require working with HTML or other code, it’s a good idea to provide the exact code for affiliates to copy and paste into their website, since many people aren’t very comfortable working directly with code.
The more help you can offer your affiliates, the more they’ll be willing to promote your product, which is a win-win. Since producing these materials often only takes time or the relatively small cost of hiring a graphic designer to make buttons and graphics for you, creating a truly useful and attractive page for affiliates is an excellent investment in your product that can easily pay for itself.
As a side note, a long-time ClickBank vendor and affiliate wrote a post on our blog about Pitch Page mistakes that ClickBank vendors make that often drive away potential affiliates. It’s worth reading when designing your Pitch Page and Affiliates pages. You can read it here.
Important: We strongly recommend that as part of your affiliates page, you include things like an Earnings Disclaimer (which states that any estimates of how much affiliates can make by promoting your product is just that- an estimate and not a guarantee) and an Anti-Spam Policy, stating that you will not tolerate affiliates who promote your product through illegal or unethical techniques, and warning them that ClickBank may terminate their affiliate account, and that they will not be allowed to promote your product if they do so. These types of disclaimers set important expectations for your affiliates, so they know what behaviors are acceptable before they start promoting your product.
Recruit Your Own Affiliates
Rather than waiting for affiliates to stumble across your product, why not actively recruit affiliates to promote it? Many of the top ClickBank vendors do this, and the time and effort you put into it can generate big returns. There are many different ways you can go about this, but some popular practices are:
- Recruit on forums: There are quite a few forums dedicated to affiliate marketing. Although you should always check a forum’s policies before posting about your product and trying to recruit affiliates, many forums allow this and it is a common practice. However, you should be aware that many vendors promote their products to affiliates via this method, so to really stand out and capture affiliates’ attention, you should try to find ways to differentiate your product from others and answer “What’s in it for me?” as well as offering great tools and support to affiliates.
- Social media: Rather than just waiting for affiliates to find you, one great way to attract them is to get your name and product out there via social media marketing. If you can build a presence for yourself on popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, and others, this can be a good way to recruit affiliates. If you become a trusted expert in your field, such as fitness or Internet marketing, potential affiliates will learn about you from other people they connect with on the social networks, and will be interested in promoting what you have to sell. In addition, it can be a great way to communicate with existing affiliates and let them know about new products you have coming out, or changes to your existing product, like if you raise your commission rate or are offering special bonuses to affiliates. Participating in social media can be useful in other ways too, since it lets you keep an eye on what types of products and offers affiliates are interested in, as well as trends or concerns in your area of expertise.
- Join My Affiliate Program link: With ClickBank’s Join My Affiliate Program (JMAP) link, you can also recruit affiliates directly. Just keep in mind that affiliates are required to establish a ClickBank account so that we can track their sales, send them checks and provide them with the information needed to refer potential customers to your products. In order to enroll your new recruits, all you need to do is add the JMAP link to your affiliates page, if you have one. Here’s what happens when you submit a potential affiliate via the JMAP link:
- We ask them for their ClickBank nickname. If they have no nickname, we ask them to sign up with a ClickBank account, which is FREE for affiliates
- We show them how to make a HopLink to promote your products
- We close our JMAP window so they end up back at your site
Your JMAP links must be targeted to a new window, and should be in the following format:
< a href = ”http://VENDOR.jmap.clickbank.net” target=jmap>CLICK HERE < / a >
Here’s how to make it work…
Replace VENDOR with your vendor nickname.
Replace CLICK HERE with any promotional text or image you prefer.
Leave target=jmap alone. This is what makes the link open in a new window.
Expert advice: Long-time ClickBank superaffiliate Chris McNeeney wrote a guest post on our blog about proactively contacting affiliates to promote your product. Be sure to check it out, as he gives some extremely useful advice!
Create a HopAd for Your Product
One way to get more affiliates to promote your product is to get your product out there via ClickBank’s HopAd Builder. It’s an ad platform that allows ClickBank affiliates to host text ads on their website that relate to the topic of their site. It’s completely free for vendors to use, and can potentially gain massive exposure for your product, without any extra effort on your part! All you have to do is create a simple customer-facing ad for your product, and the HopAd Builder does the rest. For more information on how to create an ad, see Creating Vendor HopAds.
Place an Ad in the Marketplace
One of the most effective ways to immediately get your product in front of affiliates is to place an advertisement in ClickBank’s Marketplace. As you know, the ClickBank Marketplace consists of several category and subcategory pages that help affiliates find the kinds of products they’d like to promote. Each page has eight ad spaces that can be used by vendors to highlight the benefits of promoting their products. Unlike Marketplace listings, ads are seen by all affiliates that look for products on any particular category or subcategory page. Marketplace advertising can do a lot for both new and experienced vendors. In fact, many of our top vendors have been advertising on multiple pages within the Marketplace for several years.
If you’re interested in advertising with ClickBank, visit the Marketplace, browse through our various categories and subcategories, and choose one or more pages where your ad would best fit. Once you know where you would like to place an ad, click here to be added to our waiting list. If a spot is available in your selected category/subcategory, you will be contacted promptly.
Source: ClickBank
