Learn how to make money on Instagram with Clickbank without a website and you can unlock passive income for years to come.
Sounds too easy?
Actually, building a following and growing an income from it is hard. But the hardest part is growing that following.
Once you’ve done that – or taken a shortcut by paying for ads – finding products to promote to a relevant audience on Instagram and making passive income is not that difficult.
In fact, some ClickBank affiliate products even offer recurring commissions – meaning you could continue being paid far into the future for a single referral.
Making money on Instagram is living the dream and becoming an effective ClickBank affiliate is one of the easiest ways to do it.
The process is quite simple. Don’t hesitate and get started today. We’ve provided you with some free and paid landing page builders and email marketing tools to make your Instagram followers into repeat buyers.
Pick a Niche
Develop your Instagram brand within a niche. Choosing your niche is a big timesaver and boost to future profits here.
The biggest and most profitable niches generally revolve around three areas:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships.
These three work very well on Instagram and are also the focus on many products on Clickbank. And what’s more is these are the things that people are willing to spend the most on. So pick a niche wisely.
Choose Your ClickBank Product
This goes in hand with when you pick a niche. If you already have a following then your options are more limited, but you have a big head start just by having an audience in the first place.
If you’re starting from scratch then you can join choose your niche based on the products you want to sell.
ClickBank has a marketplace full of products you can promote as an affiliate as well as detailed insights into how popular and profitable those products are. But more on that later.
Build a Landing Page
Once you have your niche you need to set up a simple landing page to capture leads which you can link to in your Instagram bio.
Our favourite landing page builders are:
Set Up an Autoresponder
Then you need an email marketing platform to create an autoresponder series to form a relationship with your Instagram leads and sell them ClickBank products.
For that I would recommend Aweber as it is free up to 500 contacts and reasonably priced after that.
Plus the free plan includes features like automations which you don’t get in other platforms for free like ConvertKit.
Aweber even has a basic landing page builder included if you really want to stick to a budget.
Or you can level up a little and go for GetResponse which is a much more powerful online marketing platform. This has a great landing page builder as well as a funnel builder that lets you create a series of pages to drive leads towards buying.
You can even feature your ClickBank product on the thank you page after they sign up which is a powerful way to generate leads and make money in the short term before you even email them.
Importantly, whatever autoresponder you use make sure it allows affiliate marketing. When some affiliates abuse email marketing for spam, that affects the integrity of an email provider, reducing deliverability rates for other customers.
Email marketing platforms therefore need to ensure their users stay ethical and for that reason many popular services like Mailchimp do not allow affiliate marketing and can close your account for that reason.
We’ve written a whole article on the best autoresponders for affiliate marketing – but the short story is GetResponse, Sendlane and Aweber came top.
About ClickBank and Affiliate Marketing
Clickbank is a huge marketplace for digital products like ebooks, courses and software. But it is also a large affiliate network which means that anyone with an audience can sign up and promote products on the marketplace and receive a commission when they sell.
Affiliate programs work by giving affiliates – publishers and influencers with websites, social media pages and other ways of reaching people online – trackable links. These affiliate links allow publishers and merchants to see which link led to a sale and what commission is due to which affiliate.
Affiliate links work with cookies so that even if whoever clicked them on a publisher’s page is just browsing and leaves will still lead to a commission if they return days later.
This is very powerful and huge online businesses have been built on affiliate marketing from solopreneurs to huge corporations.
Almost certainly the biggest affiliate network in the world is Amazon’s Associates program. You know when you Google for a product review or “Best [product]” and get a website reviewing a list of Amazon products? Those sites are earning commissions from those links.
But don’t get excited about that. Amazon does not let affiliates promote products via email. And the commission is only about 3% on most items.
You could certanly promote some products on your landing page – but that’s not really what we’re talking about here with how to make money on Instagram with ClickBank.
ClickBank the aim is not to just make a few dollars selling one widget to one customer. With ClickBank a lot of products are part of sales funnels – meaning that one low-priced offer then leads to other big-ticket offers. And you get commission on every purchase your referall makes in that funnel.
In fact, some ClickBank products offer recurring commissions – meaning you get a commission on every subscription payment for the whole time that person remains a customer.
Finding Products To Promote
To make money on Instagram, you fundamentally need a good product.
The great thing about Clickbank is you get a lot of metrics into the performance of each product.
Some of the metrics you will see on ClickBank products are:
- Average $/conversion – how much affiliates made for each referred sale on average
- Initial$/conversion – how much the first offer in that funnel paid affiliates
- Recurring$/rebill – how much affiliates get paid a month for that offer
- Gravity – how many sales have been referred in the last 12 weeks.
To make money on Instagram with ClickBank, you want to find a ClickBank offer with a high gravity score, low initial cost and higher upsells or recurring commission. Plus make sure to look at the sales page to check it aligns with your Instagram brand.
Find Your Audience
The most important step in how to make money on Instagram with ClickBank is to focus on your relationship with your audience.
All good businesses focus on value – for themselves and their audience – and in your case the product you’re promoting.
With affiliate marketing it is very easy to go down an unethical route – promoting poor quality products for higher commissions and shoving them down your audience’s throats.
While that may yield results short-term, if you’re going to put in all this work you might as well build something for the long term.
The best way to build a successful affiliate business is to focus on trust. Those products on ClickBank could just target your audience themselves – but they probably wouldn’t sell.
However, if you build a reputation as a trusted authority on relevant products, your audience is likely to buy the product you recommend.
So how do you go about building that trust?
The first step is to reach people. The next is to get your Instagram followers into your email list so you can start a relationship with them.
How you choose to reach people is generally split between gaining followers organically, and using paid Instagram ads.
This is a typical case of time vs money. Building a following on Instagram takes a lot of time. But reaching people with ads can also get expensive.
The ideal situation is you already have a big following and already have a bit of a niche – like fashion, makeup or travel.
In that case all you have to do is start getting your Instagram followers ready to make a purchase.
If you don’t already have a large Instgram following then focus on creating lots of regular Instagram posts and stories with relevant hashtags based around your niche.
Most people use Instagram quite broadly to document their life – from cafes to woodland walks and dogs.
The key to making money with affiliate marketing is to pick your niche and stick to it. If it’s dog training then make sure everything you post on Instagram is about dogs and dog training.
Even big names like Tim Ferriss with huge audiences – who wrote the Four Hour Work Week and now hosts one of the world’s most popular podcasts – is very specific in his approach.
All his content is aimed principally at young entrepreneurs with a focus on productivity, fitness and finding inner peace. Therefore the products he promotes both in podcasts and emails match – investment apps, supplements and sleep aids – not dog training or online casinos.
Once your following starts growing, you can start using Instagram to lead people towards your lead magnet. Make sure to keep a good mix of normal posts amongst your more commercial money-making posts or people will stop following you on Instagram.
Give them what they want – your best content – to keep them engaged and to keep growing and just drop in promos ocasionally.
Making money on Instagram might make you feel like an “influencer”, but in reality you are building a brand. Make sure that your brand is clear and appealing.
Build a Landing Page With a Lead Magnet
You need a landing page to encourage anyone who visits your profile to give you their email address. The best way to do that is to offer some sort of incentive – your advice is a classic example.
Say you’re in the fitness niche – your landing page needs to offer something to encourage fitness fans to sign up to your email list so you can sell them fitness products from ClickBank.
What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
You could take a soft approach and offer a weekly newsletter of fitness tips. However, this isn’t very compelling.
You’d be better off with more of a product – your free course on how to get perfect abs in just six weeks. Something desirable. Something powerful. This is called a lead magnet.
Don’t be scared by the idea of offering a product like a course. It could just be long-form emails or embedded videos. GetResponse has lots of webinar features you could use.
The fact is, people don’t value what they get for free. Ever signed up for a free course and never even opened the email? So have lots of people.
The fact is, you need something to get that email address. And when you have it, advertise it all over your landing page.
How to Build a Great Landing Page
Many people who want to learn how to make money on ClickBank without a website fear the technical requirements of websites and landing pages.
However, with tools like Leadpages you can design beautiful pages instantly with a drag and drop editor. You just add your sign up form and connect it to your autoresponder – whether Aweber or GetResponse – with a click of a button.
In fact, the best landing page builders like Leadpages include lots of templates so you can choose an existing page that relates to your Instagram account niche and then just add your own copy.
In terms of structure, you want your promotion to be attractive and accessible. Simply address the need of your audience and provide a solution.
“Want to lose weight fast without exercize? Sign up to my FREE guide!”
“Want to save $500 a MONTH? Get my ultimate money hacks cheatsheet.”
You get the picture.
Don’t think yourself much of a copywriter? Then good news – there are low-cost software products like Automatic Script and Closers Copy designed for exactly these kinds of landing pages and emails.
Other elements to include in your drag and drop landing page is a photograph of yourself to build trust and authenticity, testimonials, even a video. These are called “squeeze pages” because you want to squeeze an email address out of your prospect.
While it can seem a little scammy, adding a countdown timer is proven to get more results through creating a sense of urgency in your prospect. Leadpages, Instapage and GetResponse all offer a countdown widget with “evergreen timer” functionality – meaning it resets for every visitor rather than counting down to a single universal time.
Optional: Set Up An Autowebinar
Another type of lead magnet which you can use instead of or in conjunction with a squeeze page is a webinar. Again a webinar is just a simple video course of about an hour or so where you talk about a solution to a prospect’s problem.
The great thing about that is making a personal connection with your Instagram audience. You are no longer just a stranger on social media. They see you and hear you as you subconciously become the answer to their problems.
The great thing about the categories of health, wealth and relationships is not only are they great ways to make money, but they also present lots of common problems for you to try and solve.
Webinars are traditionally live and require you to schedule appropriately. But that puts a constraint on your time, as well as making it difficult to reach prospects in different timezones.
Because of that more recently autowebinars have become very popular – which is simply a pre-recorded video that looks like a live webinar.
GetResponse has all you need to host a perfect webinar hands-free – including signup pages and waiting rooms as well as the hosted video itself.
Combine an autowebinar with a countdown timer that suggests the webinar just happens to start a few minutes from when your visitor arrived and you have a very powerful lead magnet.
Bridge Page – The First Sale Pitch
Once someone signs up to your list from Instagram you can create a thank you page. Not only is this a better experience for users that is available in all landing page builders, but its a great sales opportunity.
Make sure your user knows they are getting whatever incentive you offered and that they should have received it via email.
But then in a short paragraph or video you can do your first sales pitch for a Clickbank product to make money online as soon as they sign up.
It doesn’t matter too much whether they buy or not at that stage because you now have their email.
Nurturing Your Instagram Leads
Running your email list is just like running your Instagram account. You need to provide enough free value before making money with ClickBank so that people stick around and grow to trust you to the extent that they hang on your every word.
You can retarget their original offer a few times – write one email with a story about how it helped you. Then maybe follow up with a “last chance” offer a few days later.
Whatever you do, keep it real and don’t wade into spam territory.
The great thing about taking someone’s email before selling them an offer is you can then keep them and keep sending them other offers. Revisit Clickbank and find other products related to your Instagram account brand that you can try to sell them.
Of course, don’t forget when using Instagram with ClickBank that you need to keep up your inbound traffic at the top of the funnel – meaning you need to keep promoting yourself on Instagram to keep generating new signups to enter your funnel and make you money.
Remember that we’re working with powerful compounding forces here – a snowball effect. Your first sale is the hardest to make. But some Clickbank products have such good funnels they turn a very low initial sale into big upsells or recurring commissions.
Making money with Clickbank is not a get rich quick scheme – of course, it can be but you won’t build a long term brand from spamming people with male enhancement pills and you’ll miss out on that compounding effect.
Stay patient, keep growing slowly but surely as combining Instagram with Clickbank is one of the most powerful ways to make money online with your Instagram account.