Affiliate marketing is one of the very good business models to start making money online. The business model has eliminated the need to invest and develop your own product while learning the skill to build an online business. To link your audience with the affiliate link, you can use a landing page to bridge them. One of the most famous affiliate marketplaces, Clickbank affiliate marketing is one of the best networks to start.
There are products from different niches and price points for you to start with. Not only that, there are a lot of digital products on its marketplace, providing a higher commission rate.
What is ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model that involves three parties. Product owners, affiliate marketers and customers. An affiliate marketer will sign up for the affiliate product. Then, you will get a unique affiliate link where you will get people to click on the link to visit the product page. And If they make a purchase, you will be credited for the sales and get paid commissions.
This Is done via a cookie. In the link, there is a tracking algorithm embedded where usually after someone clicks on the link and visits the website, a cookie will be stored in their browser. There will be an expiring time for the cookie. For some products, it might be 24 hours and some might be valid for months.
For example, if you are promoting the Amazon Affiliate program, after someone clicked on your affiliate link, the cookie will be valid for the next 24 hours. And anything they purchase from Amazon within that 24 hours, you will get paid commissions. Not limited to the product in the link only.
One of the very famous affiliate networks to start is ClickBank Affiliate Marketing. There are a lot of high-commission products in ClickBank Affiliate Marketing to promote. Due to the nature of the digital product, you will be getting a high commission rate. Typically, it will be 50-75% and some even 90% for the initial offer.
Why use Sales Funnel for ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
There are many new affiliate marketers that throw their links around and hope to get clicks. This may work back 10 years ago, but not now. People are more reluctant to click on links they don’t know and are more cautious when buying things online.
Not only that, when you are direct linking your visitors to the affiliate link, they are just passthrough traffic for you. It’s transparent to you. In most cases, you don’t even know who clicked the link, visit the page or make the purchase or not.
There is also not possible to follow up with people who might be interested.
This is why you will need a sales funnel for this.
A sales funnel works as a bridge between your visitors with the affiliate product. In this stage, you offer them something irresistible to capture their contact details. Your goal here Is not to make money but just merely to capture their contacts. You will make money when they join your email list and eventually make a purchase later.
Not only that, If you are directing the traffic to the affiliate link directly, you are building the business of the product owner but not yours.
When you build your own list with a sales funnel, this is where you can continue to follow up, build relationships and nurture them to go from a lead to a paying customer and finally to a recurring customer.
Which Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel Works the Best for ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
For the affiliate marketing sales funnel, there are three key elements or steps involved.
- Lead generation squeeze page – In this step, you will be offering a digital freebie or a free+shipping offer that is so good they cannot say no. In return, you ask them to leave their contact details to claim the free offer.
- A bridge page or thank you page – After they claim the offer, they will be directed to this bridge page where you thank them for claiming the free offer. And explain to them what to expect on the next page. This usually is a short video or a short sales page to explain what you are doing. This is a way of giving a brief introduction of what is the affiliate product and also some hidden benefits that are not available on the affiliate page. You can also offer your exclusive bonuses that they will get if they buy from your affiliate link.
- The actual sales page in your affiliate link – this is where they will make the purchase decision. There is nothing much you can do at this stage as you don’t control this page. However, you can always follow up with those potential leads through emails.
And today, we will be focusing on step 1, how to create a high-converting lead generation sales squeeze page.
1. Create Your High-Value Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details. A lead magnet can be a report, an ebook, a cheat sheet, a video course, a webinar, a trial subscription, an email newsletter or free consultation.
Different markets and niches will have different types of lead magnets and one of the keys to good lead magnets includes
- Something that is easy and free to reproduce, so you won’t have additional production and shipping costs to deliver it.
- You need to identify what’s the biggest problem your target customers are facing and wanted to solve. Then, your lead magnet should offer a solution to that.
- The problem that you are trying to solve must be related to the ClickBank affiliate product that you are promoting. In the end, you don’t only want to “sell” your free lead magnet. But you want them to buy the ClickBank affiliate product.
To create the lead magnet, you need to first research your target customers and create a lead magnet that they really need. Not only that, the lead magnet shall be something that they can implement instantly and get results.
This is why, a 2 pages step-by-step guide or cheat sheet most of the time, works better than a 500 pages ebook. This is because most people don’t read long ebooks. And it takes time for them to read, without knowing whether is it good.
A cheat sheet, in contrast, promises that if they follow the steps, they will get certain instant results.
Read more about lead magnet type and creation
2. Use the Right Landing Page Format – ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
There are different types of landing pages to be used in different scenarios.
A short-form landing page or a squeeze page is used for lead generation. On this page, normally there are only a headline, sub-headline, contact form and a CTA.
A medium-length landing page is used as a lead generation landing page and a sales page. On this page, apart from the elements in the short-form landing page, there are also other elements like testimonials, some explanations of the benefits of the products, and sometimes a video sales letter.
And finally, the long-form landing pages, are similar to the medium-length landing page, but with more information, longer sales copy and more images about the offer.
And for lead generation, we will be using the squeeze page, to squeeze all the information that we need out from them.
3. Start with a Template
When there is a sample template to start from, why start from scratch?
It is always easier to start from a proven template rather than trying to find out yourself.
If you are using a top landing page or sales funnel builder tool like ClickFunnels, the templates provided in their library are those tried and tested and proven to work.
So, why not leverage it and customize it to the feel you want rather than starting from scratch?
4. Write an Eye-catching Headline to Sell Your Free Offer
At this point, you might be wondering, why you need to sell a free offer. Why don’t people just come and grab it?
This is what happens on the internet, many people are offering different kinds of offers some valuable and some just rubbish. And most people are sick with this. This is why, you need to be different from the rest, show your best offer and why they should buy from you.
Your headline is the first thing your visitors see when they visit your landing page. It will be the determining factor on whether they continue to read or not. And if you understand the user behaviour, they might have multiple tabs running, on a video call and have their YouTube playing all at the same time.
And chances are they saw your ads, click on them and reach your page. There are only less than 5s for them to decide on whether to continue reading or leave. This is why you need to make sure you hook the attention of your landing page visitors to get them to stay on your page.
You may read the Copywriting Secrets free book to learn about the secret formula of compelling headlines.
5. Explain the Benefit of Your Free Offer
The reason someone buys something is not because of the specification. You don’t buy a car because it has a 4.0l engine and can go 0-100km/h in X.XX seconds. Your buying impulse starts with the benefit that the car will bring to you.
You need the car to look good and it can bring you to the place you want to go. Your friend will see how your car looks and have a different impression of you.
This is the benefit of the car to you that makes you want to buy it. And after you make the decision, you will look at the brochure for the specification that it offers. As long as it’s not too bad, it doesn’t matter much. But there is one more thing that you can share with your potential customers to help them to make the buying decision faster.
The hidden benefit of it. Back to the car example, a hidden benefit will be the new car will come with a warranty, which means less maintenance cost for the first few years. Another thing would be to give an impression of successful entrepreneurs to your clients so that they can trust you more and give you the business.
6. Clear Call To Action for Your Landing Page
A clear call to action button is the most important element on the landing page. People need to be guided to take action. And this is exactly what a Call to Action or CTA button does.
In general, a good Call to action button needs to be attractive and eye-catching. You can use a bright and contrasting colour so that people can notice the CTA button. Also, the wordings shall be descriptive and specific like “Claim Your Free Cheat Sheet” or “Get Instant Access to the Training”. This will work extremely well compared to something like “click here” or “learn more”.
In some cases, people will add arrows around the CTA button to make it more obvious for people to click on it.
For a short-form landing page, you will only need one CTA button. And if you are using a medium or long-form landing page, you will need to have more CTA buttons. Ideally, one CTA per screen to constantly remind them to take action.
7. Testimonials – ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
You don’t need a testimonial section on a short-form landing page. But testimonials are very useful in a medium or long-form landing page.
People don’t believe in you if it’s the first time they heard about you. There is no trust or relationship yet between you and them. And no matter how good is your sales copy, they will think that you are promoting your offer. You will definitely say that it’s good.
This is why a testimonial is important. Testimonials or feedback are collected from your past customers. They claimed your offer before and use it before giving the testimonial. This makes it a more trustable source to get feedback on your lead magnet offer.
8. Visual Design for your Landing Page
Although you are offering a digital product as your lead magnet, you should create a mockup design for the lead magnet. This is so that the lead magnet can be seen as an actual product. If you are offering a cheat sheet or a report, you can have the mockup design for the cover. And if you are offering a video training course, you can have the mockup for it as well.
Apart from that, you can have relevant images for your niche, an explanatory video on the lead magnet offer or interviews with reputable people in your niche to give their opinion on the lead magnet.
9. Test it out
When you are running an online campaign, you need to know which part of your campaign is working well and what’s not.
When we investigate a failed campaign, it’s either the traffic problem, landing page problem or the lead magnet problem that causes the low conversion rate.
One of the fastest ways to get some data and investigate is to run paid ads to bring traffic to your landing page. Paid traffic is measurable, predictable and scalable. Once you start paying, you will get traffic directed to your landing page.
The goal here is,
First, to get people to click on your ads
Then, get people to click on your CTA and claim the lead magnet offer
Next, get to the bridge page and click on the CTA to reach the affiliate product page.
In each step, you want to keep testing and optimising it to make sure your campaign works.
10. Run Split Test and Optimize Your Landing Page
Now that you already know that your lead magnet offer works, let’s take it to another level. That’s what we call split test or A/B testing.
A split test is done by creating 2 variants of your landing page. Now, send 50% of traffic to Variant A and another 50% to variant B. Then see which one converts better. In each test, you only change one parameter and see which variant wins. Then, continue testing until you got the best-optimised landing page.
One mistake that marketers did was to test more than one parameter at once. This is wrong as you can’t identify which changes that cause the improvement.
Final Thought – Create A Killer Landing Page For ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
A landing page is crucial for building a sustainable affiliate marketing business. By having the landing page in front before sending the potential buyer to the Clickbank affiliate product page, you can now able to track and follow up with the potential leads.
Creating a squeeze page funnel for affiliate marketing can be simple with the sales funnel builder tool – ClickFunnels. We have a full guide on how to create high converting landing page from scratch for ClickBank Affiliate Marketing.