6 months ago I stumbled upon the affiliate program provider called Clickbank after buying a great book/video about fixing a broken Xbox 360 (Red Ring of Death Repair Guide).

The vendor of this guide used Clickbank as the selling medium and although I didn’t realise it at the time I found the product via a website owner that had written a product review stating how the product had helped him fix his sons Xbox 360, since I used his affiliate link, he made 75% of the sale price!

As I’ve always wanted to write a book and sell it online, but had no idea how to sell a book/ebook online I did some research about Clickbank for future reference (just in case I ever get of my butt and wrote something :) ).

I found Clickbank is a relatively easy way for vendors to publish and promote a digital product (ebooks, software etc…) and potential have thousands of Clickbank affiliates (like the Xbox 360 review person) promote it for you at no direct cost to you. The cost comes from the sale price, vendors share anywhere up to 75% of the sale price with the Clickbank affiliates who sent traffic to their products website!

After more research I realised I could make money online using Clickbank without having to create my own product, I could promote other Clickbank products and potentially earn more** than if I made my own online book!!

**Clickbank products that offer 75% commission are for very obvious reasons the most popular products to promote by Clickbank affiliates, so if a vendor wants to sell a lot they tend to offer 75% commission. So the affiliate makes more than the vendor.

Signed up for a Clickbank Affiliate Account

So I signed up for a Clickbank Affiliate Account and since I’d used the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death Repair Guide and thought it was value for money I started promoting this product via a product review and basic SEO (search engine optimization) methods.

Had no sales for the first couple of weeks, but after Google, Yahoo and MSN had indexed and ranked the page reasonably well I finally started to make sales.

Sales from organic search engine traffic is reasonably stable and on average I make two sales every 3 days, that works out around $4,000 a year if this is maintained for a year (so far consistent sales for around 3 months, which is great for one page!)

I’ve since added 10 more Clickbank product reviews mostly on a site called Squidoo, after more research on promoting Clickbank affiliate products I learnt Squidoo can be used to promote Clickbank products easier than on my own website!

I learnt how to do this effectively from another ebook called The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo which I’ve been promoting for just over 3 months and is on average making 3 sales every two days, that works out to over $13,000 a year and that’s from one Squidoo web page which is free!

Review Clickbank Affiliate Products

Basically I’m buying Clickbank products that could be useful to me (there’s plenty of them) and using/reviewing them. The money it costs to pay for the product is recuperated from affiliate sales quickly IF the product is worthy of a positive review (don’t review any old crap, you’ll loose credibility).

Taking into account all 11 Clickbank products I’ve tried to promote (4 did terrible BTW, one of the products was a SCAM: a Forex product), based on the last 14 days, I’m going to make around $24,000 a year from Clickbank from only organic search engine traffic which is awesome!!

Commission Blueprint Course Review/Recommendation

As you can imagine this has peaked my interest big time into Clickbank, so I’ve been looking for more ways to make money from Clickbank. From a Internet marketing forum I read about a course called Commission Blueprint which is reported to teach it’s students how to make over $100,000 a MONTH from Clickbank affiliate sales!

After a lot more research and finding many top Internet marketers recommending this course I paid the fee and signed up.

I’m two weeks into the course and it’s a great course, (learnt a lot of new stuff) though not sure I’d call it a beginners course. The course teaches you how to find great Clickbank products and how to use PPC (Pay Per Click) sites like AdWords and Overture to buy reasonable cost traffic that converts well.

I’ve spent the last week testing the concept and after an initial disaster first try (lost $60 after choosing a bad product, so wasn’t that bad :) ) I’ve consistently made over 40% profit on the money I’ve spent on AdWords including the lost $60 (only tried with AdWords so far). To date I’ve almost spent $1,500 on AdWords and made back just over $2,200.

I’ve never used AdWords before, so there’s been a steep learning curve.

According to the course I should be able to scale this up, this was the testing phase so far putting back in the money I made (so I didn’t start with a $1,000 budget to test a concept!).

I doubt I’ll get to $100K a month, $10K a month would be cool though and with further testing you can apparently bring your AdWords costs down (using techniques in the course, not tried this bit yet) without decreasing sales: net effect should be when I’m proficient at the methods taught I’ll make more profit as a percentage of money spent (potentially higher than 50%).

Anyway, it’s still early days with the course, but so far I’d recommend trying out Commission Blueprint if like me you want to take your Clickbank affiliate revenue to a new level.

I’ll add a update in a few weeks with how things are going.

Good luck fellow Clickbank affiliates.

T.J