Hey there everyone, in this post, I’ll be going over how to make money on Instagram with Clickbank, so that you can start monetizing your Instagram accounts.
We’ve got a few things to cover, so let’s get straight into it.
Earning money online is something that has become more and more popular, for a variety of reasons. I’m sure that you’re aware.
Some people are looking for a full-time career whilst others are simply looking for the opportunity to make a little extra cash on the side of their regular day job (i wouldn’t recommend quitting your job until you’ve got a little extra cash around, mmkay?).
Whatever your reasons, one of the most popular and easy ways to do this, is by monetizing an Instagram account that you already own, or an account that you can build from scratch (you don’t need to grow it to a huge following either).
Instagram is one of the most successful and beloved social media sites in the world, at this moment in time, so it is little wonder that a huge amount of people are taking advantage of their huge following and using this to make money.
But Where Do You Begin?
The truth is, there is more than one way to start making money from your Instagram account.
Yeah, news flash…I know. 😅
Whether this is through the selling of products or services, affiliate marketing or by posting sponsored content, flipping accounts, account farming, selling likes and so on…
Now, even though these are all valid ways to make money with Instagram, we’ll be focusing on how to make money on Instagram with Clickbank and affiliate marketing, specifically.
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for almost 2 years now as of the writing of this post, and so I can give a little more insight on the strategy, so if you are interested in going down the affiliate marketing route, you will be pleased to know that some good results, can be easily achieved with this strategy.
This may all sound a little alien to you right now, but keep reading to find out all the information you will need to get started on monetizing your Instagram through affiliate marketing. Do remember however, that you need to actually put these teachings into action, otherwise you’ll definitely not get results.
Affiliate Marketing, What’s That?
Affiliate marketing may sound like an extremely complicated business strategy, but it really couldn’t be more simple, so don’t worry about it.
In essence, it is the process through which you direct potential customers to a product or service using a link that is unique to you. Whenever someone makes a purchase (or an action) using your individual link, you’ll take a cut of the sale, a piece of the pie. So to speak…
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing, I’ve written about it elsewhere in my blog, it’s just a few minutes read, and it’ll be sure to set things, a bit more straight.
It is a commission-based income model and so the more you can encourage your followers to click on the links and make a purchase, the more money you stand to make. It’s also performance-based, which means you won’t get “paid” for your time, but for how much you’re able to produce.
But is it really that simple?
In short, yes it is, but that doesn’t mean to say that it comes without any work from you. You need to be willing to put in a little time and effort, and just like everything else, it has its upsides and downsides.
Why Would A Company Use Affiliate Marketing?
For big businesses, sharing their profit with an affiliate marketer is certainly a much more cost-effective strategy over hiring a full time, salaried salesperson.
Like I said…it’s performance based. The company only pays you…if you successfully create value, and not necessarily for your time.
They gain advantage off of the “free advertising” that you’re sending them, and they don’t have to pay you, if you don’t deliver results. Sounds like a good plan to me…
But this doesn’t mean that affiliate marketing won’t be of huge benefit to you. Not at all! 😀
Many companies who have affiliate programs offer a lucrative reward with the average rate of commission at between two and seven percent on physicals, and more on digitals (which is where we’re going to be focusing our efforts).
Another great thing for affiliate marketers like you and me, is that we don’t have to create anything. We don’t have to create any products, which takes a lot of time, money, testing, a support team, staff, inventory…all of those things.
All we have to do, is recommend something that we like, or use (best case scenario, that we both like AND use).
“But, if it’s so easy and anybody can do it” you might be asking yourself, “Won’t it become saturated?
No.
Companies are always looking for more sales and more people who can sell their products or services. So that is…kind of what you’ll become, a salesperson (although if you do things correctly, there is no selling involved at all). Affiliate marketing will work, as long as people are willing to buy things.
Why Use Instagram For Affiliate Marketing?
Of course, there are a huge number of social media sites and platforms out there and they all have their own pros and cons when it comes to any sort of money-making strategies at all, that is a given.
However, there are some reasons why Instagram makes such a good platform for those looking to take on affiliate marketing from a beginners standpoint (personally, I’ve made a lot of money on Facebook, and prefer it over Instagram, but still).
Let’s take a look at some of those reasons…
- Instagram has a LOT of monthly users. Up there with the top dogs. A huge potential market.
- It’s somewhat easy to build a niche following on Instagram and so marketing your product to a target audience is much more simple.
- Most people have and use Instagram on a daily basis, so some of the knowhow, is already there, which is a plus.
- The traffic is not the best, but you can piggyback off of other influencers and micro-influencers, to send a surge of traffic, unlike what you can do in most other platforms (we’ll be mentioning this later).
As you can see Instagram, has some things going for it. It’s definitely not the best, but it’s also not the worst. With that said, let’s continue down the line. 😃
What Is Clickbank?
Up until now, we understand that we’ll be using Instagram as a hub from where we’ll be sending potential customers, over to our product. The next bit…is the actual product. Where are we going to find our products from?
We’ll be getting our products, from a site called ClickBank.
Simply put, Clickbank is an online retailer that sells a huge variety of products, both physical and digital from a multitude of different niches. It is one of the most trustworthy and most well known and respected online marketplaces in the world.
Why should you use ClickBank and not some other marketplace?
There is a couple of reasons:
✅ You don’t need to request approval to promote anything on Clickbank. If you’re a new affiliate, some of the affiliate marketplaces will ask you some questions, just to know if you have experience, a website, etc etc. ClickBank, generally allows anyone to promote anything (unless you’re from Pakistan or Nigeria).
✅ You get up to 75% commissions on your sales, sometimes throughout the entire funnel. This is a lot more than other marketplaces out there, and it’s a huge difference to make a sale and make $1.5, and say $30-$40.
✅ It’s fast. You sign up, pick a product to promote, grab your link, and you’re ready to go.
✅ They actually pay affiliates (every single week). A lot of affiliate marketplaces out there, might not pay out their affiliates after they have made a sale (it hasn’t happened to me, but hey). Clickbank pays out their affiliates on time, every week.
How To Make Money On Instagram With Clickbank
Now let’s get down to the real important stuff, how to make money on Instagram with Clickbank!
So the idea here is:
1) Choose A Niche That You’re Interested In.
Are you interested in spirituality? Get into that. You interested in making money online? Get into that instead. Just pick 1 niche that you like.
You can choose from within Clickbank, and there is a LOT of them to choose from.
Make sure to choose wisely however, because the niche is something that you’ll want to have your entire account revolve around, since you’ll probably be posting images that are related to, what the people who are interested in that niche are interested in.
I recommend going for something in the health, wealth or relationships niche.
This is also an excellent way to become more trustworthy in your field. If people see that you are dedicated to your niche and not simply posting different stuff, they will be more likely to interact with you, which is a plus.
2) Choose A Product That You Think Is Good.
For this part (and to keep things simple) we’ll want to choose a product that has, as an initial sale (the amount of money you’ll make) something close to the $30-$50 mark.
Don’t waste too much time going over the products. You can filter through both “popularity” and “gravity”, inside of Clickbank for your specific niche, to find out which products are doing the best, always keeping in mind that you want to have that 30-50 dollar mark.
It’s a lot easier to get to $100 per day, if you’re selling two $50 items, than if you’re selling a bunch of $5-$10 items.
Personally, I’m VERY picky when it comes to products that I sell, and would dive deep into each product (or at least know something about it) before I recommend it.
But if you’re just starting out…you’ll want to pick whatever is that is currently working. If it’s selling, it’s probably good enough.
Next, you’ll want to get your affiliate link from within the dashboard (this is assuming you created yourself an account in Clickbank). To do this, click on the “promote button”.
Now that you have your affiliate link. You’ll want to add it to the bio of your Instagram account.
BUT BEFORE…
We’ll have to “mask” the affiliate link.
Masking is a very simple process in which you simply shorten the link, into something that looks a bit more…nice.
For this, I would recommend linktree.
Instagram, usually only allows for 1 single link, to be posted anywhere on the entire platform, and that is the bio link (which is where we’ll adding out affiliate links). With linktree however, we can “branch out” that link, and add multiple links inside.
This, not only makes your links look a lot cleaner, but also allows you to send people to multiple different offers and multiple different platforms, like your Youtube, Facebook group, or whatever platform you like.
You create a linktree account (which is free…it’s crazy) you set up your links, and you copy the original link, and add it to your Instagram account. I would recommend you adding just 1 link, since more options could be confusing.
3) Posting On Your Account (And More).
The last part of the whole process, is posting on your accounts.
This is the most complicated part, because you’ll need to be constantly adding new posts, with new hashtags, and interacting with people, to drive them over to your affiliate links in the bio.
This is the part where you’ll actually have to DO something. And you’ll have to do…quite a lot of it.
Here are a few tips for driving traffic from your Instagram account.
✅ Have and attractive looking profile
In order to gain more attention, your profile needs to stand out from the crowd.
You should try to make it attractive and also well organized. Make sure to have one “main theme” when it comes to pictures.
So if you have a travel Instagram, post mainly photos about travel, if you have a business account, post business-related images.
But the more “on theme” all of the pictures are, the better engagement you’ll get, and the more people will start following you and liking and checking out your other pictures, since they’re “similar” to the rest.
✅ Post Regularly.
This part is up for debate.
Yes, Instagram loves you posting regularly and multiple times per day. How many? It really depends. I would personally post at least once per day.
Some people die for the “6 times per day” schedule, but I think that that’s a bit too much.
Basically, you’ll want to post as often as possible, without skipping a day. You can also post at different times in the day, to see when it is you’re getting most of your engagement. This will give you an idea, later on, on the best times to post, for maximum reach, traffic and sales.
✅ Find Good Hashtags.
A nice addition, is to add hashtags to your posts. You don’t NEED to do this, but it’s an option you’re given by the platform, so why not?
For this, I would definitely choose hashtags that are NOT very competitive. Each hashtag has an “explore page”, which compiles the 9 best posts for that hashtag. If you hit the explore page, you can get a lot of traffic over to your account (or at least it used to be that way).
The hashtag “dogs”, for example. get’s a bajillion post per second being uploaded (or something crazy like that). Your chance of hitting the explore page for that hashtag, is harder than with the hashtag “dogs_are_the_best”.
On top of this using relevant hashtags shows your stuff to different pools of followers, which draws in different types of people to your posts.
✅ Add A Call To Action (On Most Posts)
Finally, you’ll want to add in the captions, a call to action (CTA). This is basically a phrase that tells your followers or viewers, what they should do (follow you or click in the link in the bio).
Here’s an example of what I do:
Personally, since this particular account is “business-related” I don’t mind adding the “check out the bio link”, in every single post. If you’re running a personal brand account, I can see that it might be a bit “pushy” to always be sending people to the link, but it’s up to you to decide.
Try to have the CTA blend into the caption as lightly as possible and make it curiosity-based.
If you’re saying “click the link in the bio to check out the new muscle-izer5000” in every post…people are going to know what it is, and they might Google it, instead of clicking through. So make sure it spikes curiosity.
Secret Tips…
Additionally, you can use follow-unfollow software like Jarvee which will allow you to automatically have traffic come back to your page, follow you and click on the bio link. This is a great way to scale, because you can have multiple accounts running at the same time.
It takes a lot more setting up to do (I’ve done this, and it’s a pain) with multiple profiles, phone verifications, proxies and whatnot…so I won’t get too into it, but it’s definitely something that you can do.
Another really cool thing that you can do, is pay influencers for shoutouts.
Instead of posting all the time (which requires a bunch of content and a bunch of time) or following and unfollowing or commenting and liking and such, you can head over to sites like this one here and order a shoutout.
This way, you “rent out” someone else’s account, by creating a post that can either send people to your account (where you’ll want to have content already, otherwise it’ll make no sense) so that they can follow and click on your link, or you can ask the owner to add your link to their bio, so that when he or she posts his or her followers will see your link and hopefully buy the product.
Consider A Landing Page
If you send your clicks directly through to Clickbank, from your account it is likely that you will lose that person forever if they decide not to buy.
This is a HUGE mistake that a lot of influencers are doing. They’re relying on their Instagram accounts, to “always be around” and as their main source of traffic.
You don’t want to do that…
In fact, the Instagram algorithm lately has been limiting its reach, and people who were getting tons of likes, are slowly getting less and less each time they post.
It’ll be a lot harder to sustain their lifestyles (in the case of the “big Instagram influencers”) if you’re losing reach.
Plus, when people click on a link, it’s usually out of interest, and very few people buy on first exposure. It’s something like 1 in 100, for targeted traffic, although it also depends on the offer.
However, if you create a landing page with a funnel builder, you are able to capture their email addresses, so as to contact them in the future.
Not only that, but it’ll allow you to send people, on demand, to OTHER pages and sites. You don’t really own your Instagram accounts, since Instagram can shut it down at any time and can change the algorithm. You do however, own an email contact list.
Make sure to include email marketing as part of the strategy, if you decide to go all in.
Conclusion
There you have it peeps. That’s how to make money on Instagram with Clickbank. I hope that you enjoyed and you got some golden nuggets out of it. 😀
There is definitely a lot more strategies and techniques that you can use with Instagram that I haven’t covered, and with both digital and physical online buying happening every moment, it’s up for grabs.
Yes it takes time, and yes it’s not easy, but if Instagram is your thing…I’d try this method out for sure (you’ll want to automate, later on too).
Just find a product, get the link, post, interact, repeat and change your links every now and again so that you’ll be offering fresh stuff to your crowd.
Worst comes to worst, you’ll have grown your account a lot, you’ll have learned something and you might even be able to sell shoutouts yourself (or the entire account).
Making money online with Instagram, as of right now, can be done as a side gig or as a full-time thing, if you are willing to put in the work.