Make Money with Clickbank

Clickbank is a website that allows you to market other people's products and make a commission off of every sale you make. It's a great way to start out when you're trying to make money online.

The commissions are usually in the range of 50% or so. The reasons the commissions at Clickbank are so high is because the products that are offered for sale are digital ones, such as software and ebooks...and they require little to no overhead to produce.

Example: You are interested gardening. You might even already have a gardening blog. You can go over to Clickbank, find some gardening ebooks to promote and then promote them through your blog or though articles that you write.

Read on for the step by step method.

The first thing you need to do to get started is to head on over to Clickbank.com and click on the link that says sign up. You will need to enter in some information and before you know it you will get a confirmation email welcoming you to Clickbank.

You will get your own Clickbank ID that will be in each and every one of the links that you use to promote the products.

Once you get everything set up with Clickbank, you will want to log in and then click on the link to the marketplace. Here you can search for products that are on topics you may be interested in.

Since we've already mentioned gardening, let's use that as an example.

I have gone over to the marketplace and entered gardening into the search tool. You don't have to worry about changing any of the other search criteria right now.

Once you hit "go" a list will pop up of gardening related ebooks that you can market. The most popular products will be listed at the top of the list.

"Joyful Tomato" comes up number one on the list. You can look at the description and notice that it says $sale/$12.63...this means that for every Joyful Tomato ebook you sell, you will earn $12.63 in commission. That's not bad!

Also, you can click on the link that says "view pitch page" if you want to see where your customers will be led to after they click on your affiliate link. If the sales page looks good and you know that you can promote an ebook on growing tomatoes, you can then go ahead and click on "create hoplink".

Once you do this, you can enter in your clickbank ID and then a tracking code.

When I first started using Clickbank, I didn't take advantage of the tracking code option and boy, I wish I had! For instance, if you are planning on marketing this link on a Squidoo lens about tomatoes, you can enter in squidootomato as the tracking ID.

This way, when you log in to Clickbank to look at your sales stats, you can see exactly which of your hoplinks are producing the most sales...the more you get into marketing online, the more valuable this information becomes.

Once your hoplink is created, be sure to copy and paste it into your notepad so that you will have it for future reference.

Now that you have chosen a product to promote, you have to figure out how exactly you are going to get that link out there. There are several free methods that you can use to promote Clickbank products.

1. Create a squidoo lens that gives information about your topic. If you want to sell the Joyful Tomato ebook, you might want to create a Squidoo lens about the different kinds of tomatoes and which ones are the easiest to grow. You need to make sure that your lens content is all original - not copied from somewhere else! In your lens, you will include the ebook hoplink, along with a statement like, "Click here for the best tomato growing guide I have found".

2. Write articles to promote your product. There are several places you can write articles and include you affiliate link. Bukisa is a site where you can post your articles and even get paid whenever you get a certain amount of traffic! You might also consider posting your articles on Helium.com or eHow. All of these sites allow affiliate links. Writing an article isn't rocket science, so don't spend all day on one article. Remember, the more article you write, the more people will see your affiliate link and have a chance to buy your product.

3. Start a blog. You can start a free blog about tomatoes at Blogger.com and make posts about gardening that include you affiliate link. It's easy to do and it's fun!

Now that you have all your ducks in a row, how do you get people to read what you have written? With the unlimited number of websites on the internet, yours may be getting lost in the shuffle.

The main way that people get to information that they are looking for online is to search for it using a search engine like Google. They might enter in "how to grow huge tomatoes" and then notice that over ONE MILLION pages pop up.

Generally people don't look past the first page of results given in Google (do you?) before they click on a page they want to see. So the goal would be to get your site/article/lens on the fist page for a certain search term.

First you need to figure out what words people might use to search for your page. Let's say it's "how to grow huge tomatoes"...you will need to make sure that you use those EXACT words a couple of times on your page.

Next, you will need some other sites to link to your pages. This is what makes some pages more popular than others in Google...those links coming in to your pages are called backlinks and you will need at least a few to get your information onto page one of Google.

It's actually pretty easy to get backlinks if you know what to do. All you have to do is go to Ezinearticles.com and sign up for an account. Write a short article about your topic and then in the resource box at the bottom, include some information about your site and the site address. DO NOT link directly to the affiliate offer (your hoplink)..only link to your lens, articles, or blogs.

This helps you in two ways. You will get a backlink for your site AND people who read your article will have a chance to click on that link! The more articles you write, the closer to the top of Google rankings you will get.

There are tons of other ways to get backlinks, but this is the easiest one.

Making your first clickbank sale is a thing of beauty and can certainly inspire you to get your butt into gear and work a little harder to make sale number two! Once you make a couple of sales, you may be wondering...Hey! Where's my money?!

Clickbank has a policy that they call CDR - Customer Distribution Requirement. This means that you have to have at least 5 sales from five different credit cards and sales from both credit cards and paypal.

CRAP! That means that when I first started making money on Clickbank, I had over $100.00 in my account and couldn't get my hands on it until I met the CDR.

Fortunately, I found an easy way to make it happen. I read a free report about this problem and had my first payout within a couple of days. Click here to get the totally free report on how to get around the CDR issue and get your first Clickbank paycheck fast! It's my gift to you!