Hi,

Brett from Niche Laboratory here. In this post I'll go through some of the various ways I've made money from ClickBank.

I joined ClickBank in 2009 and now almost 10 years later I'm still getting regular payouts.

I like ClickBank because:

1. They pay you by wire transfer so it's a good way to make money online without a PayPal account.
2. You can make money by being a vendor, an affiliate, or both.
3. There's a good range of products on there to promote.
4. The sales pages are really easy for buyers to use.

So let's review some of my ClickBank case studies...

Selling Products on ClickBank

My first case study is on selling a product on ClickBank.

Back in 2009, I came up with an idea for an eBook. So I wrote the book and put it up for sale on ClickBank.

This was pretty easy to do. Once the eBook made it into the MarketPlace then I started to naturally pick up some affiliates. In fact I still have a few of the same affiliates all those years later.

I sold a few copies of my eBook but it wasn't a huge success. I was kind of uneasy at having a product in this particular niche, so I didn't really do much with it. Eventually when my domain was up for renewal I let it expire. It was a potentially good niche on paper. However I found people didn't really go buying crazy in this niche. I decided to focus on other niches in which I was having a lot more success.

I am thinking that I should make another product to put up for sale on ClickBank. It really was quite a good way of making money without even having a good website of my own.

Selling Other Peoples' Products by Affiliate Marketing - Case Study #1

I've had a few successes selling other peoples' products on ClickBank.

Most of the time I've been promoting eBooks. However, in thise case study I'll demonstrate that there's much more to ClickBank than eBooks.

Back in 2010 I trawled the ClickBank MarketPlace in search of interesting products that weren't in super saturated niches. At the time just about everybody was promoting the forex and get your ex back eBooks.

I wanted something different.

I ended up finding some software for making cardboard cutouts of celebrities. Wow. What an interesting niche!

So I promoted this software by just finding some keywords people might be searching for. Here's one of the pages I created.

This niche is a lot bigger than you might think. It's got 22,000 searches a month on Google for "cardboard cutout". As you can imagine, this niche is full of long tail keywords such as "cardboard cutout of jesus". There's endless easy to rank for long tail keywords like this. Just think of all the celebrites people want standees of, and new celebs shoot to fame every single month!

I ended up selling quite a few copies of the software. Then the sales stopped. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was part of the general collapse in popularity of Windows PC software.

Anyway, the ClickBank product is still there but it's not listed in the MarketPlace. From that I assume it's not sold any copies in the last 30 days. Which is not really the type of product you want to be promoting.

Selling Other Peoples' Products by Affiliate Marketing - Case Study #2

I've sold a few copies of other peoples' eBooks over the years. Dating guides do OK and it's nice to have a bit of income in the dating niche that's not just related to selling dating site memberships.

Also it's nice to offer my own website visitors a wider range of products.

If you're interested in this niche then apparently women tend to be more willing to buy dating guides. I find this a little surprising given they're generally going to find it easier to find a partner compared to a man. But maybe women are more suspectible to the slick marketing these eBooks and courses come with these days?

Are eBooks still popular? I guess they're not quite as popular as they once were. More material is freely available online these days. Still, there is always the need for information, especially in highly specialised niches.

Incidentally, I've noticed a couple of popular eBooks I used to promote have disappeared from the ClickBank MarketPlace. So there's still very much of a demand for these types of products. Products which YOU could be writing and selling.

Selling Other Peoples' Products by Affiliate Marketing - Case Study #3

So this leads me onto ClickBank case study 3.

This is quite an easy one. Niche Laboratory is a keyword tool so on the Niche Laboratory website you might have seen adverts for two other keyword tools: Keyword Researcher Pro and LongTail Pro. Both of these are in the ClickBank MarketPlace.

I make the occasional sale of both. LongTail Pro converts slightly better and it has a monthly recurring membership option. If you're one of their affiliates then you too will make monthly recurring affiliate income provided the user you referred continues their membership of LongTail Pro.

This demonstrates that selling the recurring membership products that you can see in the ClickBank can be fairly lucrative.

The downside is that in this particular marketplace there are two problems:

1. There are a lot of keyword tools available these days so the market is pretty saturated.
2. Less people seem to be blogging to make money online. I guess this due to a better economy in the USA making more people look for real life jobs than try to make money from blogging. Also it's got a lot harder to start a successful micro niche website compared to the golden years of 2008 - 2012.
3. Niche Laboratory just doesn't have enough traffic to be able to get Pat from Smart Passive Income/Spencer from Niche Pursuits type income.

Case Studies Summary

So what did I learn from all this?

If you're interested in making money online then there's definitely a need for more products to be created then sold on ClickBank. Once your product is on there then affiliates will help you market your product for you.

Niche selection is really key - you need to create a product in a niche you're tremendously knowledgeable about.

If you're wanting to market other peoples' ClickBank products as an affiliate then here are my tips:

1. Ideally you should already have a website in a particular niche. If you don't have a website, then trawl the MarketPlace in search of niche products that won't be too competitive to get traffic for. My top tip is if you know a language other than English then look for the many non-English products on there to promote. Again, it took some finding to come up with the cardboard cutout software but it turned out to be a great thing to promote.
2. Always choose products that have a Gravity of greater than zero. You can see the product Gravity ratings in the MarketPlace.
3. Don't worry about a low gravity. Some niches are smaller than others and will have a lot less sales. Keyword research software is quite specialised and will never have as much gravity as the broad interest dating guides for example.
4. Check that the vendor only allows sales from ClickBank. Otherwise you could send traffic and they could process payments using a different payment processor, robbing you of any commission.
5. Test, test, test. Put offers on your site. If they don't convert, swap them out for other offers.
6. If you see a product that's OK but not spectacular, then why not make a better version?

So that was a look at some case studies from making money through ClickBank. If you have any questions about ClickBank marketing then post your queries below.