Get started earning money on your digital product sales today!

Publishers just like you create the digital products sold on the ClickBank Marketplace in the same way that authors write books sold at retail book stores. The main difference is that we sell our publishers' products online using the ClickBank system. To see samples of digital products currently offered, visit the ClickBank Marketplace.

Here is the step-by-step process for getting setup as a ClickBank publisher:

Before getting started refer and agree to our Client Contract.

We've also compiled a list of our top beginner publisher questions.

1. Publisher Account Set Up

Please read the following before proceeding:

Product Requirements:

ClickBank only sells certain types of products. The basic criteria are as follows:

All products must be digitally delivered (via web pages, downloadable files, or email) within 24 hours of purchase. Immediate delivery preferred.
You may also offer shipped delivery of printed media (books, CD's, and DVD's) as a courtesy to qualified customers (e.g., US and Canada only), provided the shipped media is clearly complementary and not essential to the operation of the originally downloaded digital product. The complementary nature of the shipped media must be clearly explained to the customer. See Federal Trade Commission Policy, Advertising and Marketing on the Internet.
All products must be backed by a valid technical support email address, to which paying customers and ClickBank staff can send inquiries and receive a human (non-automated) reply by the end of the following business day.
All products must be backed by appropriate technical support pages, written in English, and hosted at your own web site.
All products and promotions must be fully compliant with state and federal law, including U.S. Federal Trade Commission regulations, policies and guidelines governing advertising, disclosure and consumer protection. You should review materials available at www.ftc.gov and familiarize yourself with applicable regulations.
All products and promotions must contain clear and conspicuous disclosures as necessary to prevent the promotional materials from being false or misleading. See Federal Trade Commission Guidance Document, Dot Com Disclosures.

Forbidden Activity:

If you use ClickBank in conjunction with any of the following activities, your products will be removed automatically and you will not receive a payment from ClickBank. Examples of prohibited activity include the following:

Keying in customer orders yourself. All customers must key in their own credit card or bank account information directly into ClickBank's web order form. We do not process orders by phone, fax, or email.
The sale of shipped products, except complementary media as explained in ClickBank's Client Contract above.
Unsolicited commercial messaging, spamming, or cross-posting.
Downloading of any software on a customer's computer unless a purchase is completed or permission from the customer is otherwise given.
Use of mousetraps, such as windows that respawn or otherwise resist being closed.
The sale of any kind of multilevel membership (including MLM, matrix, wheel, cylinder, downline, upline, chain, or pyramid), or any product that has no appreciable value to the customer other than the potential for resale.
The sale or promotion of franchises or franchise opportunities.
The sale of pornographic entertainment of any kind.
The sale of: unlicensed content, website templates, spyware, phone minutes, existing debts, digital cash, spending accounts, money transfer, gift certificates, coupons, rebates, vouchers, securities, stocks, bonds, deeds, sweepstakes, wagers, wagering pools, lottery tickets, pornography, warez, pirated software, pirating tools, hacking tools, http/tcp proxies, irc/ircd, bnc, eggdrop, socks4/5, remote bots, shell accounts, dial-ups, dial-ins, phone services, cell messaging, cell sms, spamming tools, fake ID tools, credit reports, credit repair, accounting services, legal services, medical services, pharmaceutical services, SSN searches, SSN lookups, SSN verifications, term papers, anonymous proxies, proxy lists, password lists, email address lists, postal address lists, hotel/travel reservations, seminar tickets, event reservations, or any materials endorsing or encouraging violence, hatred, revenge, racism, victimization, criminal activity, or any other category ClickBank decides to prohibit.
The sale of products about marketing through Craigslist or social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

Click HERE to sign up for a ClickBank account now.

BANNED PUBLISHERS

ClickBank reserves the right to ban certain persons and companies from becoming publishers. Reasons for such bans include, but are not limited to, prior misconduct and/or violations of ClickBank rules and policies.

2. Make a Pitch Page

A. Pitch Page Basics:

You need two web pages to make a sale through ClickBank: a Pitch Page and a Thank You Page. These pages must be published using your own registered domain name. ClickBank does not accept Pitch Pages or Thank You Pages hosted on free sites, and ClickBank does not provide hosting for these pages.

The Pitch Page is the web page where you describe the product to the customer, and convince them of the value of your product. On this page, you will need to direct the customer to a ClickBank payment link to buy the product.

In addition, your Pitch Page will need to include the following information:

Provide a detailed description of the product
Clearly state how much the product will cost. For recurring billing products, be sure to clearly state all the details of the rebill schedule. The rebill schedule for recurring billing products includes the duration, which is the number of times a customer is billed, and the frequency, which is the amount of time between each rebill.

For example:

"Your initial charge will be $19.95. You will then be charged $9.95 per month for 11 months after your initial charge has been made."
Explain how the product will be delivered (web page, email, etc)
Explain how long delivery will take (instant, 5 minutes, etc). For recurring billing products, be sure to explain how it will be delivered and how often it will be delivered. For example, if you are offering a newsletter, explain how the newsletter will be delivered (email, web page, etc.), and when it will be delivered (e.g. 1st of the month, 2nd Monday of every month, etc.).
Include the ClickBank payment link

B. Checking Compatibility:

If the product is a document for download, do not assume that customers can view any particular proprietary file formats. For example, not everyone has a copy of Microsoft Word on their machine. Also, WebTV users cannot open pdf, zip, or exe files. Tell customers what format the file requires before they make the purchase from ClickBank. Also, it is recommended that you disclose that delivery time will vary depending on the type and quality of computer equipment and internet connection.

If the product is an executable file, do not assume that customers are using the exact same operating system that you are. For example, not everyone uses Windows XP. Advise customers what operating system the file requires before they make the purchase from ClickBank.

If the product is only useful to people in a particular country or region, be sure to clearly say so. ClickBank customers may be from anywhere on the planet. As part of your Pitch Page, advise customers of any geographic limitations on products or services.

All statements made on the Pitch Page are subject to ClickBank's Client Contract and Product Requirements as well as all applicable federal and state laws, including, but not limited to, U.S. Federal Trade Commission regulations, policies and guidelines governing advertising, disclosure and consumer protection. Those rules can be found at www.FTC.gov

C. ClickBank Return and Cancellation Policy

ClickBank's current return policy is as follows: "ClickBank will, at its option, replace or repair any defective product within 60 days from the date of purchase. After 60 days all sales are final." ClickBank does reserve the right to alter or revise its return policy at any time.

You must take care to not use any promotional language that might conflict with our return policy. For example, phrases like "personal lifetime guarantee," "eight month unconditional money-back guarantee," or "lifetime memberships" are strictly prohibited. As a ClickBank publisher, the only guarantee you can make is that ClickBank will honor its return policy.

Customers can cancel their recurring billing product at any time during the rebill schedule. Upon receipt of an installment cancellation request, ClickBank will encourage the completion of installment terms, but installments may be canceled at any time. A cancellation means that no future installments are charged to the customer's account. Canceling a recurring billing product does not generate a refund.

D. Making the payment link:

The payment link is what customers will click on when they are ready to purchase your product from ClickBank. This link must be placed on your Pitch Page. When customers click on the payment link, they are taken to our product order form where they enter their payment information. After entering their information, they click a button which says, "Click Once to Pay Now". Assuming their payment is approved, our system takes customers to a page which confirms their order by providing them with a unique receipt number. We then direct customers to click a final link, "Click Here to Complete Your Order", which takes them from our order form to your Thank You Page, where you provide instructions on how they can obtain the purchased product.

Your payment link should be targeted to a new window, and should be in the following format:

http://ITEM.PUBLISHER.pay.clickbank.net

Here it is in html:

<a href="http://ITEM.PUBLISHER.pay.clickbank.net"
target=cb>CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE</a>

Here's how to make it work...

Replace ITEM with the item number of the link (product) for sale. As you set up products to sell in your ClickBank account, you will need to assign each of your links an item number: 1, 2, 3, etc. If you are setting up your first product, the item number is 1. The item number in the payment link must correspond to the item number for the Thank You Page in your account under "My Products".
Replace PUBLISHER with your ClickBank account nickname
Replace CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE with any promotional text or image you prefer.

See our Payment Link FAQ for more information on payment links.

3. Designate a "Hoplink Target URL"

One of the biggest benefits of using the ClickBank system is that you have access to our affiliate network. Affiliates advertise our publishers' products by enticing customers to click through their affiliate link and "hop" over to your website to make a purchase. This is why we call ClickBank affiliate links "hoplinks".

Affiliate hoplinks direct consumer traffic to the Hoplink Target URL listed in your account. There is only one Hoplink Target URL per account.

If you are only selling one product per account, your Hoplink Target URL will most likely be your Pitch Page URL. However, if you offer multiple products through the same ClickBank account, your Hoplink Target URL may be different from your Pitch Page URLs.

For instance, you could sell products from three different websites:

www.orange.com
www.blue.com
www.green.com

However, you would have to choose which one you want listed as the Hoplink Target URL in your account. If you choose www.orange.com as your Hoplink Target URL, a customer who clicks through an affiliate hoplink to your site will be automatically directed to www.orange.com.

If you want affiliate hoplinks to connect customers to all of your websites and you only want one ClickBank account, you should consider creating a new homepage that would serve as a gateway to your other websites. For example, you could create www.rainbow.com, which would contain links to www.orange.com, www.blue.com, and www.green.com. Affiliates will be tracked all the way through to the purchase.

To designate a Hoplink Target URL, follow the steps below:

Login to your ClickBank account.
Click the "Account Settings" tab.
Click on "My Site".
Click "Edit" to the right of the "Marketplace Information" section.
Enter the Hoplink Target URL in the correct field.
Enter a Marketplace Title (this title can be up to 70 characters long) and a Marketplace Description (this description can be up to 250 characters long) for your site. This is the information about your account that you would like to have listed in the ClickBank Marketplace. Note: If you are selling recurring billing products, you will also choose a Product Title and a Product Description for each product offered through your account. The Product Title and Product Description will appear on the ClickBank order form for each individual recurring billing subscription or installment, but ONLY the Marketplace Title and Marketplace Description will appear in the ClickBank Marketplace.
Click "Save Changes".

4. Make a Thank You Page

A. Thank You Page Basics:

As we mentioned in step 2, you need at least two web pages in order to make a ClickBank transaction work: A sales page, or "Pitch Page", to promote your product for purchase at ClickBank, and a "Thank You Page" to fulfill orders. Remember - these pages will be at your own website. ClickBank does not host web pages.

The Thank You Page is the page customers will see after they purchase a product. Customers will only reach this page if their purchase has been approved.

Your Thank You Page must contain the following information:

Thank the customer for making a purchase.
Display your email address so that you can provide technical support if the customer has questions about the product they purchased. ClickBank does not provide technical support for specific products. Do not simply make a clickable email image or button. You must actually display your email address visibly so that the customer can see it and have a record of the address.
Remind the customer that his or her credit card or bank statement will show a charge by ClickBank or CLKBANK*COM rather than a reference to your specific product. Your reminder should be prominent. Often customers request refunds because they forget that ClickBank is handling the purchase.
If the purchase was for a recurring billing product, be sure to restate the rebill schedule on your Thank You Page.
Collect additional information from the customer, if necessary.
Make an "exit link". Once the customer sees the Thank You Page, make sure they have at least one link to follow.

B. Where is the Thank You Page?

In order for us to send the customer to the product's Thank You Page, we need to know the following information per product type:

A. Standard Products:

The web address of the Thank You Page.
The item number of the product.
The suggested retail price of the product associated with the Thank You Page. Remember that your price is subject to ClickBank approval.

B. Recurring Billing Subscriptions:

The web address of the Thank You Page.
The item number of the product.
Product Title (this title can be up to 70 characters long, and will appear on the ClickBank order form, not in the ClickBank Marketplace).
Product Description (this description can be up to 250 characters long, and will appear on the ClickBank order form, not in the ClickBank Marketplace).
The suggested Initial Price and Rebill Price.
Note: Remember that your price is subject to ClickBank approval.
Frequency (initially ClickBank will only allow a frequency of monthly rebills).
Duration (for example, if you are offering an initial payment of $19.95 and 11 additional payments of $9.95, the duration is 12 since there will be 12 total transactions).

C. Recurring Billing Installments:

The web address of the Thank You Page.
The item number of the product.
Product Title (this title can be up to 70 characters long, and will appear on the ClickBank order form, not in the ClickBank Marketplace).
Product Description (this description can be up to 250 characters long, and will appear on the ClickBank order form, not in the ClickBank Marketplace).
The installment Price. The price a customer pays per installment for the purchase of the product. The minimum installment price is $7.95. Note: Remember that your price is subject to ClickBank approval.
Note: Remember that your price is subject to ClickBank approval.
Frequency (initially ClickBank will only allow a frequency of monthly).
Duration (initially ClickBank will only allow the product price to be split between 2 to 4 installment payments. For example, if you are offering a $100 product, with 4 installments of $25, the duration is 4 payments because there will be 4 total transactions).

All the necessary product information can be provided to ClickBank via your account, which can be accessed by:

Logging in to your ClickBank account
Click the "Account Settings" tab.
Click on "My Products"
Select the "Standard Products" tab or the "Recurring Billing Products" tab depending on which type of product you need to add to your account.
Click the "Add new product" button.
Type the full URL (including http://www...) of the Thank You Page in the "Thank You Page URL" field and enter the additional requested information in the "Adding Product" box that appears.
Ensure that the "Test Mode" box is checked, and then click "save changes".

See Step 5 below for more information on testing your links and Step 6 below for information on how to submit a product approval request.

C. Fulfilling the order:

When the customer sees your Thank You Page, keep in mind that they will have already purchased the product, and have been provided with a unique 8-digit receipt number. ClickBank receipt numbers are eight characters long and a combination of letters and numbers.

If you are selling a recurring billing product, the initial payment's receipt number will be in the same format as a standard product - a sequence of 8 letters and digits. The initial payment is considered the first rebill in the schedule. Each rebill that is associated with that initial payment will have the same 8 digit receipt number as the initial payment, however it will have a dash and an additional 4 characters at the end to show which rebill number it is in the series of rebills. For example, if an initial payment had P3RGBKGB as the receipt number, the first rebill would have P3RGBKGB-B002 as the receipt number, the next rebill would have P3RGBKGB-B003 as the receipt number, etc.

It is very important to give customers what they want as rapidly as possible. Do not present the customer with advertisements or links to things that they did not purchase. Senseless distractions will confuse and annoy customers, and will greatly increase your risk of losses due to refunds or disputed sales and increase customer complaints.

For recurring billing subscriptions, it is important that you deliver the products on time each month. Be sure to let the customers know when to expect the delivery each month, and be sure they are aware of how the product will be delivered.

Your best bet is to keep it simple, and deliver exactly what was promised. Here are some suggestions:

If the product is already in html format, put it on your Thank You Page.
If the product is a file for download (pdf, zip, doc, exe, etc), include a link to it on your Thank You Page. Also include explicit instructions for how to view or extract the file. For example, most people do not know what to do with a zip file.
Some products are personalized, or require registration to activate. Such products require direct feedback from the customer to complete delivery. The best way to do this is to collect the information with a web form on your Thank You Page. If you do not have advanced web design skills, an alternative is to simply ask the customer to send you an email with the information you require.

Bear in mind that ClickBank will promptly remove any product that creates unexpected customer service issues, regardless of the cause.

5. Testing Your Links

The best way to test a link is to see a purchase from the customer's point of view. To do this, you would go through the process of purchasing your own product. Please note that products that have not yet been approved are automatically placed in "Test Mode". This status cannot be removed until the product has been reviewed and activated by a member of our Product Approval Team.

To perform a test purchase, click through your payment link, which will take you to a test version of the ClickBank order form. Complete the information, and click to submit the order. This will lead you through the same process that the customers will go through when your product has been approved and it is out of test mode; however nothing will be charged to your card if you use a valid account number when in test mode.

If you are an existing publisher with an already activated product, and you wish to utilize the test mode feature, you can set your product to "Test Mode" by completing the following steps:

Log in to your ClickBank account.
Click the "Accounts Settings" tab.
Click on "My Products".
Select "edit" under the "Action" column for the product that you would like to test, which will open the "Edit Product" window.
Check the "Test Mode" box.
Click "Save Changes".
Click through your payment link, which will take you to a test version of the ClickBank order form. Complete the information, and click to submit the order. This will lead you through the same process that the customers will go through when your product has been approved and it is out of test mode; however, nothing will be charged to your card if you use a valid account number when in test mode.

IMPORTANT: Once your account has been activated, and your product has been approved, please check to make sure the "Test Mode" functionality for that product is turned off. If the "Test Mode" box for that product does not have an "x", then test mode is turned off, and your product is ready to be sold. If the "Test Mode" box for that product does have an "x", then test mode is turned on, and you will need to follow the instructions above to disable "Test Mode" (for step #5 above, you will uncheck the "Test Mode" box to disable).

Troubleshooting:

If you receive errors during the test purchase here are some things to review for remedy:

Is your payment link setup correctly?
Is your nickname spelled correctly?
Do you have the correct item number listed in the payment link?
Have you saved your Thank You Page URL in your account?
For additional information, please see our Payment Link FAQ

6. Requesting Product Approval

If the product you have added requires a product approval, the "Status" column on the "My Products" page will show "Pending Approval Request" for that product. You will need to submit a product approval request as follows:

Log in to your ClickBank account.
Click on the "Accounts Settings" tab.
Click on "My Products".
Click on the "Request Approval" button under the "Action" column for each product that you want to submit for approval.
Verify the information on the "Request Product Approval" form is correct, and answer the required questions on the form.
Click "Submit Product Approval Request", which will send your request to the ClickBank Product Approval Team for their review.

If you have submitted your request correctly, the "Status" column will change to "Approval Requested" for the product that is awaiting approval from the Product Approval Team. If a product has been approved, the "Status" column will show "Approved".

Every recurring billing product has to be approved by the Product Approval Team. To request a higher product price limit, go to the "My Site" page, click "Edit" to the right of the "Marketplace Information" section, and click the "Request max retail price change" button.

The typical retail cap for standard products is $50. In some circumstances, we can approve a retail cap as high as $200 for standard products, and even higher with a prior sales history with ClickBank with low refund and chargeback rates.

For recurring billing products, the typical retail cap for the initial payment is also $50. However, the standard retail cap for the rebill amounts is $30. In some circumstances, we can approve a retail cap as high as $100 for the initial payment, and as high as $50 for rebill amounts, and even higher with a prior sales history with ClickBank with low refund and chargeback rates.

You will receive the results of your request in three business days via email.

7. Pay Activation Charge

Once you receive the approval email for the first product that you submit for a product approval, you will need to pay your one-time $49.95 Activation Charge.

Instructions will be sent from the Product Approval Team on how to log in and pay the Activation Charge. You can pay by credit/debit card, PayPal, or money order.

Once your payment has gone through successfully, your site status on the "My Site" page is changed to "Activated", and you are set to begin selling any products that have been approved by the Product Approval Team. Please note that you cannot pay the Activation Charge until your first product has been approved and you have been notified by the Product Approval Team.

*** The Activation Charge only applies to publishers who list their products with ClickBank. There is no Activation Charge to be an affiliate or reseller.

8. Connect to the Affiliate Network

See Publisher Tool #4 for information on how to build your affiliate network.