As you’ve heard me complain from time to time, there are only 24 hours in a day. That’s fine if your hourly rate is tens of thousands of dollars an hour but for most freelancers it isn’t. So to make more money, you need to augment the time you spend writing by selling something that doesn’t take you time to do after someone has bought it. Creating and selling digital products through Clickbank is one way to augment your income.

Understanding Clickbank

Basically, here’s how to sell a product using Clickbank:

• First, you need to sign up with Clickbank and pay their sign-up fee (which is about $50, give or take a smidgeon).
• Then, when you have a digital product you want to sell, you create a sales page and a thank you page. Your sales page might be one of those really, really long sales pages with flashing arrows and “but wait, there’s more!!!!!!” text. Or, it might just be the products page on your website. The thank you page is where you make your digital product available. (For example, you add a link to the PDF version of your ebook or a link to a zip file containing the mp3s of your videos).
• So far so good. Now here’s where Clickbank comes in: The “buy now” button you embed on your sale page is connected to Clickbank so when someone clicks “buy now”, a window opens and prompts the buyer to pay for your product. Clickbank accepts the payment and sends the buyer on to the thank you page where they can download your digital product. Clickbank takes a small cut of the price and you get most of it.
• Clickbank plays more than a transactional role in the process. They also have a marketplace where your product can be listed, exposing it to a larger audience than those who visit your sales page. Additionally, Clickbank also gives you the ability to create an affiliate program so that affiliates can offer your product for sale and earn a percentage of every sale. With the right product and the right payout percentage, you can get an army of affiliates offering your product for you so you don’t have to do much advertising and you can still end up with revenue.

A review of the site

I like the idea of Clickbank a lot. They help entrepreneurs who want to sell products but don’t have the time, money, or technical savvy to invest in a program like 1ShoppingCart (which is very good but might be price-prohibitive to some). You can get up and running fairly quickly with Clickbank and the cost is minimal. That makes it perfect for freelancers, coaches, entrepreneurs, and small business owners.

I’ll admit that not everything is perfect: When I first started with Clickbank a few years ago, I found their website to be really unwieldy, but I think that has gotten considerably better over the years. Sometimes it can still be tricky to find information but once you become familiar with the site and their lingo, you can find what you’re looking for. Another complaint with Clickbank is with their marketplace, which tends to get a little “schticky” where get-rich-quick programs abound. So I don’t really participate intentionally in the marketplace, preferring to sell my products through my own effort.

In spite of these two relatively minor issues, I’m quite happy with Clickbank to sell digital products. There are a few good options out there, so freelancers should shop around first, but Clickbank is a good, solid option and a trusted name in the field. And they offer you a way to make more money without raising your rates.