How Does Clickbank Work?
Before we start if you haven’t read my first post What Is Affiliate Marketing please do so now as I will assume you will know the basics of affiliate marketing.
Clickbank is a marketplace for digital products. A digital product can be almost anything that isn’t a physical item. The most common product types on Clickbank are ebooks (electronic book) mostly in the PDF format. They can also take the form of website subscriptions etc, but these are less common.
Anyone can become a publisher on Clickbank as long as their product is approved, so some products are better than others. Take a quick look through the Clickbank Marketplace to get an idea how things are set out. If you click on “View Pitch Page” that will take you to the products web page. It’s a good idea to take a look at a products page before you start promoting it to check that it’s a decent looking page.
You will also see a link called “create hoplink”. If you click this it will bring up a window with two text boxes, Clickbank Nickname and Tracking ID (optional). Forget the tracking id for the time being. When you sign up to Clickbank you will have to select a unique username (nickname), when you enter it here it will create a link for you. If somone clicks your hoplink and buys the product you get a comission. By clicking this link Clickbank puts a Cookie on the user’s computer. This tracks your referral for 90 days, so if they buy within that 90 days you get your comission. One thing to note is that if that user visits another person hoplink your cookie will get overwritten, meaning that the last person to have their hoplink clicked will get the comission.
By now if you haven’t got a Clickbank account do so now here. So just to summarize, to get your comission you need to create a hoplink for a product and refer people to that product through your hoplink. If they buy within 90 days you get your comission.
