If you have ever heard about affiliate marketing or looked into different ways of making money online, you have likely heard of Clickbank.
Clickbank was one of the earliest players in the world of selling digital products online – it was founded way back in 1998 and continues to be one of the largest and most popular online platforms for selling digital products.
If you still don’t know what Clickbank is, it’s an affiliate marketplace where you can find ebooks, digital courses, and other digital products to promote.
Products aren’t actually sold on the Clickbank marketplace itself – vendors will have their own websites with their own domain names.
However, Clickbank has its own payment processing system. When you use Clickbank as a vendor, you will be able to get more sales by having affiliates promote your product for a commission.
You can choose the commission percentage per sale (10 percent, 50 percent, or whatever you choose), but you won’t have to do much more besides that.
Clickbank will take care of giving the affiliates a special link with which to promote your product and will take care of paying them as well.
Of course, you can help your affiliates out by giving them promotional tools they can use, such as banner ads.
Clickbank, essentially, brings together vendors and affiliates so that they both benefit.
Related: Commission Hero Review – How I Made $2300 in Profits With Clickbank & Facebook?
Although Clickbank was founded in 1998, they did not create Clickbank University until 2013.
What Is Clickbank University?
Despite its name, Clickbank University is not an accredited, real “university.” Don’t think that you will get some sort of degree in online marketing by signing up for it.
Instead, it is an online training course that teaches you how to make money on Clickbank in different ways. You won’t get any degree, but the skills you will learn can help you make money selling digital products or promoting them as an affiliate.
Who Is Clickbank University For?
Clickbank University is not for you if you are looking for a digital marketing degree that you can use to get a position in a marketing firm.
However, if you are looking for a way to earn money online by setting up YOUR OWN online business, CB University can help you learn valuable skills.
CB University is also not for you if you already have a lot of experience making money online.
Of course, you can certainly learn new tactics and strategies that can help you in your online business, but as a whole, the Clickbank University courses are designed to take newbies from not knowing anything about how to make money online to being able to earn a full-time or part-time income – including passive income – through selling or promoting digital products.
CB University is not perfect, but if you are looking for a beginner-level course to get started with affiliate marketing or selling digital products, it is a good choice.
How Much Does Clickbank University Cost?
Clickbank University costs $47/month, but you don’t have to stay on as a paying member once you finish the training.
There are also a few additional upsells, which we will go through in the following section.
What’s Included In Clickbank University?
Let’s go through the training and products available in Clickbank University. There are two main training modules – one for affiliates and one for vendors.
Vendor Training
When many people look for ways to make money online, they often start off with affiliate marketing, as it requires fewer upfront costs and less effort.
However, if you prefer to make money by selling your own products instead of promoting other people’s products, this training module will teach you how.
The benefit of selling your own product is that you get 100 percent of the sales, instead of a commission percentage.
Even if you promote products with a high commission of 50 percent, it can sometimes be hard to get a good ROI if you are relying on paid advertising; getting 100 percent of the sales makes being profitable easier for you.
The vendor training will focus on creating a product and selling it with Clickbank. You will be shown every step of the way.
For example, Clickbank University will have training on how to find a good, profitable niche. If you sell a product that is not in demand, it will be hard to make money.
They will help you come up with ideas for your product.
Then, they will teach you how to create your product. You may want to structure your product as a video course or as an ebook; perhaps you want to earn recurring income by creating a membership site.
They will also teach you how to maximize your ROI by including upsells. Upselling is important – often, your profit will come only from your upsells while your initial sales will only earn back your advertising costs.
Every successful business either has upsells or cross-sells. Fast food chains upsell by charging you a premium for including a soda with your burger; Amazon cross-sells by showing you products that are often bought together.
Once you have created your product, you will learn how to market it. Creating a convincing sales page is crucial to getting sales.
The entire course lasts 12 weeks. The interesting part is that upcoming content is locked and only becomes available as you progress through the course; this means that it actually does take 12 weeks to finish the course and you cannot just go through the entire training in a few days.
While this may be frustrating, the point of it is so that you don’t rush things. Patience, perseverance, and commitment are important when starting a business – you have to realize that you won’t see results overnight.
CB University is trying to cultivate that mindset to ensure you don’t rush things or give up too quickly.
At least, that’s what they say. More likely, they are doing this to get more money out of you.
Clickbank University costs $47/month, and if you were allowed to go through the entire 12-week training course in one month, you would pay only $47 as opposed to $141.
Affiliate Training
The second training module focuses on making money as an affiliate. Although you will earn less per sale than if you were selling your own product, affiliate marketing has its own benefits.
For example, with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to invest any money upfront into creating your product. Creating a product can cost money if you want to hire freelancers, designers, coders, website builders, and other experts.
Of course, you can do all the work yourself – but that will require a lot of expertise, experience, and time. It can take weeks or months to write an ebook or create a software or membership site.
In addition, if you are not a good writer, don’t know how to build a good website, are not sure how to write a successful sales page, etc, it won’t work either.
With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to do any of the work involved in creating a successful product yourself. You can actually “piggyback” off the work of someone else – you can promote products that already have a high-converting sales copy and get lots of sales.
In the Clickbank marketplace, you will be able to see how popular each product is, the conversion rates it is getting, and so on. You can sort products by various metrics in order to find the products that are likely to bring you the most sales and commissions.
Some metrics you might want to look at in the Clickbank marketplace are average commissions per sale, average commissions per initial sale, and average commissions over time.
If the average commission per sale is only $5 for a non-recurring product, it might not be worth it to promote the product. If the average initial sale is $3 but over time it’s $175, that means that the product likely has upsells or a recurring membership fee.
On the other hand, if you know that the product has a recurring membership fee but the average commission over time only amounts to $10, then not a lot of people are staying for more than a month or two.
These are all things you have to look at when trying to decide whether a product is profitable or not.
Many times, you won’t even have to create advertising materials yourself. Many products will come with pre-written email swipes, pre-designed banner ads, and other promotional materials you can use to market the product.
The affiliate marketing training module is eight weeks long. Of course, since it is Clickbank University, the training will focus on how to promote products that you can find in the Clickbank marketplace.
You will learn what affiliate marketing is and how it works. You will also get training on how to find the best affiliate marketing products to promote and how to search the Clickbank marketplace using real data and metrics to find high-converting products.
They will teach you about email marketing, which can bring you a much higher success rate. You will learn how to draw subscribers in with a funnel and a free giveaway and then use your list to promote products.
Email marketing is important – sure, you can just send people to a promotional link on your website, but most people won’t buy through your affiliate link the first time. When you give them something for free first, they are more likely to trust you – you can build a relationship with them.
With an email list, you can keep promoting various products that you trust. You can turn a potential single purchase into multiple purchases over time.
You will learn how to write emails effectively to promote other people’s products.
The affiliate marketing training module is four weeks shorter than the vendor training module. However, it is still a complete course that will help you get started with affiliate marketing even if you have no prior experience.
Remember that with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to do many of the things that a vendor has to do in terms of product creation – you can skip all of that and just focus on the selling and marketing part.
The only bad part about studying affiliate marketing with Clickbank University is that since it is produced by Clickbank, they only focus on using Clickbank’s own marketplace. Now, it is true that you can get by with using only Clickbank products.
However, there are tons of other affiliate marketplaces which give you access to a much wider selection of products to promote. For digital products, there is JVZoo and the Warrior Forum; there are many sites for physical products such as Commission Junction, Amazon Affiliates, and Share A Sale, as well as private affiliate programs run by private companies.
There’s no reason to limit yourself to Clickbank. In addition, although Clickbank used to be popular, it has gotten a bad reputation over the years, due to the many scams sold on their marketplace, especially in the “make money online” niche, as well as in Forex, dating, and other niches.
As such, many affiliates shy away from selling products that have clear affiliations with Clickbank on their website, and many good products have cut ties with Clickbank and moved on to marketplaces such as JVZoo. A large portion of the products sold on Clickbank have bad graphic designs as well.
As such, Clickbank now has a much smaller selection of high-quality products that you feel confident are worth their price.
Traffic Generation Training
Whether you decide to sell your own product as a vendor or promote other people’s products as an affiliate, you will need to be able to generate traffic to the sales pages you are promoting. Without traffic, you won’t get any sales.
There is an entire training module in Clickbank University that teaches you how to send traffic online.
Unfortunately, the training part is a little lacking. It only focuses on two methods of generating traffic, and both of them are paid methods.
There isn’t much training on how to get free traffic. Knowing how to get free traffic is important if you don’t have a large start-up budget to spend on paid advertising.
This is especially true if the reason you are choosing to start with affiliate marketing in the first place is that you don’t have the resources and budget to create your own product. In that case, you may also want to know how to drive free traffic through social media, blogging, SEO, and other methods.
However, the training that CB University does have goes in-depth into how to generate traffic using these two methods: Facebook advertising and Instagram influencer marketing.
Facebook advertising is great because it allows you to be very specific with who you are targeting. You can narrow down your target audience based on demographics, income brackets, location, interests, age, gender, marital status, and much more.
You can even target people who have already visited your website or are already on your email list. This is known as retargeting and allows you to get even higher conversion rates.
The second kind of traffic generation technique is influencer marketing on Instagram. Influencer marketing on Instagram allows you to tap into the power of popular accounts in your niche who have thousands of followers.
For a small fee, you can get a shout out that will bring you quality traffic. And since these people are fans of the accounts that promote you, you will have built-in trust and social proof.
Unfortunately, the training does not go into other forms of paid traffic generation, such as banner advertising, search engine PPC advertising on Google and Bing, and solo ads on email marketing lists.
The Clickbank University Website Builder
After purchasing Clickbank University, you will be presented with an upsell offer. You will have a chance to buy the Clickbank University website builder, which will allow you to build your very own website on Clickbank without having to go to a separate hosting platform.
This website builder costs two payments of $297 each. If you decline the offer, you will be offered another payment plan – seven payments of $97 each, which can be paid over a longer period of time but comes out more expensive in the end.
The website builder includes a drag-and-drop website editor that allows you to easily create landing pages and blogs from scratch.
However, I must say that this certainly is not worth the money. It comes out to around $600 (and if you make seven payments, around $680).
This is a lot of money for a website builder. There are dozens of hosting platforms that will let you host a site for just a few dollars a month, including Bluehost and Siteground.
In addition, WordPress is free and includes its own drag-and-drop editor for building blogs and landing pages. If you want a more advanced landing page builder with additional technical capabilities, there are dozens more in the $30-100 price range.
All in all, there are many reasons you should avoid getting this upgrade. First of all, there is no reason you should be paying that much money for a website when you can get it for a fraction of the price elsewhere.
In addition, you don’t want to chain yourself to the Clickbank website builder platform. It is better to get a WordPress website on a third-party hosting platform; if you do that, you can always switch later to another hosting platform and will have a lot more control over your website.
Advanced Training
Besides the website builder, there is another upsell where you are offered advanced training for a one-time fee of $97. If you decline this offer, you will be offered to get it for two payments of $49 each.
The advanced training has some useful information, and it also goes into many areas that were not covered in the main training. For example, it shows you how to use banner ads, which is something that we mentioned was missing from the main training.
In addition, it goes into advanced tactics such as product launching and using webinars as part of your funnel. These are all things that can drastically increase your earnings and sales.
Clickbank University Affiliate Program
Clickbank University 2.0 also has an affiliate program. You will get a 50 percent commission on all upsells.
For the main membership, you will get a 75 percent commission for the first sale and a 25 percent commission for every recurring, monthly sale.
You will be supplied with marketing materials such as email swipes.
Clickbank University Pros & Cons
Let’s go through some pros and cons of Clickbank University.
Pros
- It’s great for newbies – if you are new to affiliate marketing or selling digital products, it will explain everything to you from the beginning
- $47/month is pretty affordable for most people, and you can cancel after you finish the training
- Has comprehensive affiliate marketing and vendor training that will give you all the information you need
- They have a forum where you can get help from other members, as well as regular, live webinars
Cons
- The website builder is massively overpriced
- They lock the content to force you to pay for at least an additional month or two
- Their affiliate training focuses entirely on Clickbank and doesn’t mention any competitors or other affiliate marketplaces
- They charge you a whopping $97 for the advanced training, which is also a bit overpriced
- The traffic generation training doesn’t even address free traffic
- Even when it comes to paid traffic, it only focuses on two methods, so it can be considered incomplete training in that regard
How Does Clickbank University Measure Up?
Let’s see how Clickbank University measures up as a whole.
Ease Of Use – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Clickbank University is incredibly easy to use and navigate. All the training is clearly laid out and easy to follow.
Features – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
While the vendor training and affiliate training are almost complete and take you from newbie to advanced, the traffic training is somewhat lacking, and the affiliate training only covers Clickbank. In addition, the website builder is not the best.
Customer Service – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
It’s easy to get help in the forums and Facebook group, and CBU also promises a refund if you are not satisfied.
Value For Money – ⭐⭐⭐
This is a tough one. Overall, the basic training has decent value for money IF you are a total newbie.
However, the website builder gets one star in terms of value for money.
Wrapping It Up – Is Clickbank University Worth the Price?
If you are totally new to affiliate marketing or selling digital products, then yes – $47/month for two to three months is a good price for being shown step by step how to create your online business.
However, make sure not to buy the website builder upgrade, as it is just not worth it.
