Clickbank is probably the place most affiliates start.

You join once and can then promote any of the thousands of different programs they offer and treat yourself to a healthy slice of the profit every time you make a sale.

A typical commission at Clickbank is at least 50% of the retail price and can often go as high as 75%, which means you get at least as much as the person who produced the product in return for introducing a sale.

Clickbank only pays for sales. You don’t get anything for introducing leads.

Things to check before promoting a Clickbank product

Always check the “pitch” page. You’re looking to see whether or not the sales page looks reasonable. You won’t know how well it converts to sales until you send some traffic to it, but it should look “OK”. Make sure it doesn’t have ways that your commission could leak away – you’re checking here for things like Google Adsense on the page as well as whether they only take Clickbank for payments.

If they display Google Adsense, don’t despair. Instead of promoting the product, use the techniques discussed in Adwords 180 to display highly targeted adverts on their site.

Some people are put off if the main page has an email opt-in box on it. Personally, I don’t mind as it means that the site is likely to be sending out follow-up emails to promote their product. Your Clickbank cookie will still be there unless another affiliate sends the same visitor to the site, so you’ll still get your commission until the Clickbank cookie expires 60 days after you first send your visitor to the site. Chances are that if they haven’t bought the product in 60 days they never will. So don’t panic!

The Clickbank Marketplace is where you find products to promote. The search is fairly basic but workable. You get a bunch of figures below each product like these:

$/sale: $21.24 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $21.24 | %/sale: 50.0% | %refd: 67.0% | grav: 0.38

The first figure ($/sale) tells you the likely payout you’ll get from the sale. This is after Clickbank’s commission and also takes into account refunds and special offer prices. So it almost certainly won’t exactly equate to the percentage shown. However, it’s a good guide.

Future $ applies if the product offers a recurring commission on sales, for example if they also sell a monthly membership.

%/sale shows the percentage of the sale price you’ll get. So long as this is reasonable, go with it. Sometimes a product will offer a lower percentage because they have more support costs or they know they convert visitors well. Other times a site will offer the maximum of 75% to bring in affiliates but may not convert as well. The only way to find out is to test. Sorry.

%refd  is the amount of sales that are “referred” or not sold by the product owner themselves. The higher this is, the better as it means the product owner isn’t competing against their affiliates.

Finally there’s “grav”. This is Clickbank’s figure that takes into account how many affiliates are promoting a product and a few other things. Personally, I ignore it but other people use this figure to judge how many other affiliates they are competing against.

The important thing is not to get too hung up on all this. Dip your toe in the water and see how you get on promoting Clickbank products.