There’s many Clickbank alternatives and although Clickbank seems to be the “go-to” resource for newbie affiliates, there’s others too! Clickbank tends to be the first stop shop for new affiliates for a few of reasons:
- Digital products can pay out more than physical ones – typically 40% commissions on sales.
- Clickbank is easy to use and free
- Beginners can start selling without much administration
- There’s lots of products on there.
Plus, Clickbank has been around for a while and was founded in 1998 in a garage in San Diego California. Hence there’s plenty of people who promote it to newbie affiliates. But this doesn’t mean it’s the best platform to use for beginners. Many new affiliates get it wrong, as I did. They don’t know how to promote the products and create a sustainable business from it.
However great a product might be, an affiliate’s success comes down to their ability to promote it, not just the product. Plus, as you’ll see in this article, there’s better products which will pay you more over the longer term.
Clickbank Alternatives
There’s also the price point of many Clickbank products which is around $100. A $100 product can leave you little choice in the way of promoting it. When I started promoting Clickbank products back in the early 2000’s, I used a free strategy I share in my article Clickbank Trick.
But free strategies take time and are not guaranteed to work either. So you can spend a lot of time struggling trying to sell Clickbank products, without getting anywhere. This was basically my experience when I first started learning affiliate marketing. I did make sales, but after a lot of struggle and failure.
Later on I learned about recurring commission affiliate programs. Clickbank does have some products which pay recurring commissions too – you can find them using cbengine.com (see below).
Clickbank Alternatives – Best Products To Promote
Some of the best products to promote are those which offer huge value to their customers. Unfortunately many Clickbank products don’t do this! Products which offer a lifetime value to customers are good because if you refer the customer, you can earn commissions for a lifetime. Software and training products needed for online business owners are some of the best to promote. They offer huge value and businesses can’t run without them:
- Aweber – autoresponders are used by online business owners to run email marketing campaigns and connect with potential customers and buying customers
- Semrush – Business tools and data collection for online businesses and affiliate marketers
- Hostgator (hosting provider) – You can’t run a website without your own hosting. Most business owners have websites or intend to get one.
- Online business training courses – gives people the skills, tools, software and support to build their own online businesses.
Clickbank Alternatives – Start With You
When I first started using Clickbank, I started with the product first. I built many websites around keyword targeted domain names based on the product. It’s a strategy which can still work. See Clickbank Trick for more on this strategy.
But there’s a problem with this strategy and it’s longevity. Building content is now necessary in order to get any traction from a niche website. Unless you’re prepared to build out your site, it’s going to get overtaken by other people who are willing to go the extra mile. So your site can fall off the search results quite quickly.
The other problem is that it’s much harder to create content around a topic you know nothing about or don’t even have an interest in. It’s also hard to stick to a path you’re not suited to.
Starting with “you” means finding out what makes you tick and build your affiliate business around that. Most people start with the money and work backwards. Instead, it can work better to start with your interests and your “ikigai” and work forwards.
Ikigai means “reason for being” and is a Japanese term. If you can identify your ikigai you’ll have a much greater chance of success with your affiliate marketing business.
High Ticket Products
Clickbank doesn’t have any high ticket products you can sell as an affiliate. I came across high ticket items much later in my affiliate career, after a huge number of failures! With high ticket products your scope for marketing on the internet open up much wider. With low value products like you’d find on Clickbank you only have $40 to play with in your marketing budget on a $100 product. With products which pay out $1000 commissions, there’s much more scope for practicing and experimenting with paid marketing.
If you’re trying to sell a $100 product to earn a $40 commission, it means you’ll need to spend less than $40 before selling a product to make a small profit. Larger value items make this a much more viable alternative. And since paid marketing is the fastest and most scalable solution to earning affiliate commissions online, it’s definitely the way to go.
High payout affiliate programs offer high ticket and subscription products, together with a number of other advantages over Clickbank products:
- A range of up-sells – “Up-sells” are products you can earn from when your referrals purchase another product from a range.
- A built in sales team – Most affiliate products don’t have a team of people closing sales on your behalf
- Multi-tier commissions – earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.
Access a range of products to promote through this training platform.
Affiliate Practices
Clickbank does tend to attract beginners when it comes to affiliate marketing. And it’s a good place to start because you can easily access the platform, you don’t have to purchase the products yourself and there’s good commissions to be made!
But there’s a couple of problems this “ease” can lead to. One is that you can promote products you don’t have to buy yourself. So you could recommend a product you haven’t even purchased! There’s an obvious ethics flaw here for affiliate marketing. You can see my affiliates get such a bad rap if they are promoting a product they know nothing about!
The easily accessible platform is good in one way but bad in another. Many affiliate programs are a little more careful as to who they allow to promote their products. There’s a good reason for this too. Some affiliate vendors only want affiliates who will maintain their standards and properly represent their company and brand. Bad affiliate practices can get companies in trouble with legal aspects of their business.
As a newbie affiliate I just wanted the money and this led me to try almost anything I could think of to make the sale. But this has a bad knock-on effect for the end user, the product owner and of course your reputation as an affiliate. Ultimately it leads to trouble for the affiliate too. Google doesn’t like spammy content and desperate affiliates will more likely create it and fall into the trap of going for fast strategies over good ones.
Focusing On Training
This is why getting the proper training, education and understanding from the get-go, is pretty important for affiliates starting out. All of your actions are determined by your knowledge. If that knowledge is flawed, you’ll take the wrong action steps and create a lot of problems for yourself. Of all the Clickbank alternatives I’ve tried over the years, this is my top recommendation.
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