Today, I wanted to take a Skillshare class on affiliate marketing. The first class that popped up was Clickbank Marketing Secrets. Clickbank is a huge e-commerce platform that offers a ton of digital products affiliates can promote. It’s been around since I started working online over 13 years ago.
There are some pretty decent products on Clickbank, and I do promote some of the products I’ve tried and liked, but I’ve never been someone to make thousands per week from Clickbank. In fact, I often make nothing per week because I just don’t promote many products from there. I know many people who do make a killing with Clickbank, though, so I wanted to see if this guy has some sort of secret that I just wasn’t attuned to.
Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Secrets By John Smith
The class took me back to when I started working online. Affiliate marketing sounded exciting to me. It was a way to share what I knew about various things as well as tell people about products or services that I resonated with in regards to those certain things. It sounded like a win-win, and I would stay up all night working on my websites because I was so passionate about the niches I was in and the potential I had to create a successful online business.
The teacher’s name is John Smith… that’s what he says. It sounds like a pretty good pseduo name. I’m not quite sure that’s who is behind the program.
It seems like the person got someone from Fiverr or something similar to do the speaking as the entire class is a visual presentation with an excellent speaking man.
That’s the only ‘I don’t know’ about the program. It makes you think someone copied someone else’s work and then just hired someone to talk out the points and put together a presentation for it.
But, regardless, the class by ‘John Smith’ is on point. I wish I would have found his class when I started as opposed to some of the courses and classes I took.
What The Class Covers
‘John Smith’ says that he’s going to teach you how to market Clickbank products the right way. He uses Clickbank as the source for products, but you can substitute any affiliate platform into this course.
That’s why, to me, the class title isn’t totally on point. While he talks about Clickbank as the main source of affiliate products, he doesn’t give secrets about Clickbank, per se. He more gives secrets of creating a successful affiliate marketing business, and he uses Clickbank as the source from where to get your products.
Here’s what covered in this Skillshare class.
Picking A Niche
This is something that I’ve talked about. It doesn’t really matter what niche you pick as long as you are interested in it and want to write about it a lot. There are products you can promote out there for almost any niche.
But, for bigger success in affiliate marketing, picking the right niche is important.
The thing I have never been good at is ‘playing the game’ of affiliate marketing. Basically, you find a niche in high demand and solve problems. I get the concept of it, but I can’t strategically put it into place. It’s easier said than done for me.
Once you pick the niche, ‘John Smith’ lays out a content plan that helps you go from informing people to selling to people.
Creating Content
He talks about a three-layered plan for producing content that sells. One of the things he says is that reviews shouldn’t be just reviews on one thing. You should do comparisons where you recommend a bunch of products to someone because people like to make decisions, and decisions are comparative by nature.
I get this, but I don’t do it. On this site, I recommend things product by product, such as this review talking about this Skillshare class. I recommend things as I take or use them. I realize that making comparative posts would probably do better for me, but this blog is about reviewing things I try, not marketing a bunch of things at once.
Marketing Your Content
Then ‘John Smith’ goes into talking about marketing your content, not through guest blogging, SEO, or buying links, but through more natural promotion using Quora, Facebook comments, Twitter, and forum marketing.
This part was pretty informative. Nothing too spammy about it, although you are going in with the intention on promoting your content, but that’s how any business works – you want to get your products out there in front of people’s eyes who want to check it out, so it’s really just a natural way of doing that.
He gives a process for each method of marketing. I like the way he encourages you to take your time before you promote yourself because you need to build trust. I know a lot of people don’t want to take this time, but then they end up getting labeled as spam, even if they have the best intentions, and it’s hard to come back from that.
In short, the class is good. It’s not ground-breaking stuff though. There are no secrets for Clickbank marketing. It’s just an outline on how to pick a niche, pick products, write content, and then market that content. It would be good for beginners and then they could explore what interests them even further.
Skillshare has lots of classes like this. Check it out here.
