I’m going to continue with where I left off in the last post. So, there I was, looking at a product this dude from the UK was trying to sell me via a very compelling video. It seemed that in order to make a couple of hundred quid a day I just needed to utilize ClickBank and blogging skills with HubPages.
Easier said than done, right? If you’re a complete newbie reading this, I know you’ll be feeling the same way I was!
I didn’t know what ClickBank was and I had never heard of HubPages. Blogging sounded familiar to me and I knew it had something to do with writing but I was a little muddy on all of that. So, I decided to do some research. The product the guy was offering was only £50 and it contained a series of step by step videos. I was very excited at the prospect of getting stuck in but needed to be sure I was able to do it.
My research showed that ClickBank was a digital marketplace, where somebody like me could choose a product in virtually any niche to promote as an affiliate and receive a commission for any sales I made. It sounded cool.
HubPages was a blogging platform, where budding writers shared their short stories and thoughts. Somebody like me could write up a ‘sales advertisement ‘ on whatever ClickBank product I choose to promote.
What ClickBank product did I promote?
Unfortunately, The Six Figure Mentors and Viewtrakr didn’t exist back then. Around that time I remember seeing constant ads pop up for a body builder called Anthony Ellis. He was a naturally skinny dude who had managed to pack on a lot of muscle in a short space of time, thanks to a special diet plan and work out regime. People seemed to be raving at the results and it was available to promote through ClickBank, so it looked like a sure thing. Although my amateurish, newbie ways didn’t see a red flag from the fact this would be hard to make money with due to the high level of competition, I carried on regardless.
I used the information from the product to create an account with ClickBank (very easy), learn how to become an affiliate for a product and generate my ‘hoplink’ (affiliate link) so sales can be tracked to me (a little tricky). I created my blog post in HubPages and stuck a couple of images in there for good measure. The step by step videos were pretty clear and concise, so I felt confident that I was onto a winner.
The only thing that strikes me now, 4 years later, is that I don’t remember any information on how to generate traffic (visitors) to my blog posts. I think at the time HubPages was so popular, the majority of the traffic came organically from search engines and fellow HubPages users. The videos did go into basics about the importance of keywords and SEO (search engine optimization), so that would’ve played a big part in the blog traffic.
My Very First Sale!
From my recollection, after creating 3 or 4 similarly styled blog posts all promoting Anthony Ellis’s muscle gain product, I started to see results. I logged in daily to HubPages and could see visitors (seemingly coming from nowhere) and clicks to the site. As the days passed I could see more and more visits and clicks but I was logging into ClickBank and saw zero sales.