Clickbank is essentially what is referred to as an Affiliate Service Provider.
Clickbank is a marketplace of digital products like software and ebooks. All of
these digital products are owned by various merchants who sign up to Clickbank
as a vendor. In turn Clickbank displays all these merchant products in their
marketplace as well as handle all the payment processing.
This is pretty much how the sales are handled :-
Buyer -----> pays Clickbank (online via credit card or paypal) -----> Clickbank
pays you (every 2 weeks via cheque)
You can either sign up as Clickbank as an affiliate or a merchant. If you've got
your own product then you would sign up as a merchant, post your product on the
Clickbank marketplace and sell it on your own or simply rely on affiliates to
sell it for you.
If you don't have your own product then you'd sign up as an affiliate (like me)
and sell other merchant's product. For now I will talk about selling other
people's products as an affiliate as its the best place to start. As an
affiliate for every sale you make Clickbank will pay you a certain percentage of
the sale. This percentage is decided by the merchant and if you access the
Clickbank marketplace you'll be able to view the percentage paid out to
affiliates.
Although there are a lot of other Affiliate Service Providers other than
Clickbank, if you're just starting out with affiliate marketing then I would
suggest starting with Clickbank. They've got the biggest collection of digital
products in various categories ranging from Fun & Entertainment to Money &
Employment. What I like about digital products is the high commission percentage
paid out to affiliates ranging from 50-75%. Amazon, for example pay you a
measely 10-15% as most of their products are physical products that carry
production costs.
To start promoting Clickbank products you need to sign up with Clickbank (its
free!).
A little about Adwords then....
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about Adwords but just a short
introduction to what its all about. Adwords is basically a pay per click
advertising program. Once you sign up (Google charges you a $5 activition fee)
you specify the amount you're willing to pay for that specific keyword and write
your ads. Everytime that keyword is searched for on Google, your ad will be
displayed and everytime someone clicks on it Google will charge you. That's
pretty much it!
