A review of Clickbank 2.0
If you are familiar with affiliate marketing, then it’s likely that you’ve come across ClickBank, a popular and well-established platform on which affiliate marketers and vendors have been making money by trading digital products for several years.
In this review of ClickBank University 2.0, mentored by Adam Horwitz and Justin Atlan, we will find out if it is legit or scam.
This education program is designed for people to learn how to make money online, using ClickBank, either by promoting people’s products and services or creating and marketing their own.
What is ClickBank university 2.0?
The first version of ClickBank University was launched in 2013, and the upgrade, ClickBank University 2.0, was released three years later.
As expected, the newer version is a major improvement on the old, while maintaining all the favorable features that ClickBank University was known for.
The first version was solely focused on the creation and marketing of personal digital products, while this new version incorporates considerable training on a lot more; Majorly marketing the products of others (affiliate marketing).
ClickBank University 2.0 basically comprises two major programs – making money from marketing personal products (being a vendor), and making money by promoting the products of others (being an affiliate).
There is also a third section that deals with traffic generation, which is extremely helpful too.
The training program for vendors basically teaches you how to create your own digital or informative product and enlist it on the ClickBank marketplace.
The approach is unique, much different from the numerous make-money-online-type products available these days.
For affiliates, you are taught how to generate an online income by promoting the products of other vendors.
As these can both go hand-in-hand, it’s best to learn both. You can create your own products and then market both your products and those of other vendors.
Cost of ClickBank university 2.0
ClickBank University 2.0 is priced at $47 per month. While some consider this to be a bit on the expensive side, a lot of the users believe that the training is worth way more than this price, as you can make so much more if you put to practice what you learn.
ClickBank University 2.0 vendor program
The vendor program is broken into 12 thorough lesson weeks, teaching you how to successfully create and launch your own product on the ClickBank platform. Here’s a breakdown of each lessons week:
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Week 1 – How it Works:
Here, you are introduced to the general aim of the entire 12-week plan. -
Week 2 – Finding Your Perfect Product:
You’ll be taught to combine your passion and experience with the knowledge of what sells best on ClickBank, in order to help you decide what your digital product should be.
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Week 3 – Creating Your Avatar:
You learn to create an avatar that represents your average customer so that you can understand how your target customers think, and meet their needs most suitably. You take note of their demographics and what interests them. Most importantly, you get a better understanding of their problem and how best you can tailor your product to solve it.
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Week 4 – Creating Your Product:
You are taught to choose the most suitable format for your online products. For example, which will be more effective – videos or an e-book? You’ll learn the pattern that the most successful products on ClickBank follow. You’ll also be taught how to outsource the creation of your own product so that you don’t have to create the content yourself.
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Week 5 – Creating Your Perfect Upsell:
Here, you’ll learn to maximize the value that you can derive from each customer by upselling products that equally add more value to the customer by solving their problems even further.
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Week 6 – Sales Copy & Conversion Maximizing:
You grasp the secrets of successful sales copies from the expert copywriter of ClickBank itself, bearing in mind that even the best of products would never succeed without a great sales pitch.
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Week 7 – The Easy Video Sales Letter:
The secrets behind creating an effective video sales letter, just like the ones used by professionals will be revealed to you. Basically, you don’t have to spend thousands on producing a video.
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Week 8 – Finalizing Your Product:
You’ll be exposed to how to add fitting finishing touches to your product, correct all errors, as well as ensure that every element of the product is sound. -
Week 9 – Getting onto ClickBank:
You’ll find out, step-by-step, how to get your product on the ClickBank marketplace.
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Week 10 – Attracting & Managing JV Relationships:
One of the most effective ways to succeed on ClickBank is by attracting affiliate marketers. You’ll be learning how to determine what they want and get them to endorse your product.
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Week 11 – Split Testing:
You’ll discover how you can drastically boost your conversion rate by testing different languages, funnels and ads. -
Week 12 – Scaling Your Success:
You’ll be trained to build on initial sales and successes by creating even more traffic for greater success. -
Bonus – Selling High Ticket Products on Webinars
($1,000 and above per sale)
To be honest, this part of the training may prove a little overwhelming and is probably not for everybody, which is perfectly okay. It’s absolutely fine to stick with 100% affiliate marketing and perfect it.
And it’s equally wonderful if you can venture to build your own brand and create your own products. ClickBank University 2.0 teaches you how to do just that.
Once you get an email list of customers, you could even market relevant products from other vendors to them as an affiliate or for commissions.
ClickBank university 2.0 affiliate program
This 8-week affiliate marketing training is great whether you want to do pure affiliate marketing (only promoting other people’s products) or you plan to combine promoting both your products and other related ones. Here’s the breakdown:
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Week 1 – Affiliate Marking on Clickbank:
Here you’ll be taught how to profit from affiliate marketing, set goals and achieve them. -
Week 2 – Understanding Affiliate Marketing:
You’ll learn the basics of affiliate marketing, while navigating through the ClickBank marketplace and unraveling the secrets of the top products.
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Week 3 – Finding Your Passion:
You’ll discover how to research your niche and choose the perfect product. -
Week 4 – The Ultimate Affiliate Funnel:
You’ll learn about traffic and building squeeze pages.
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Week 5 – Free, Free, Free – Always Over-Deliver:
You’ll be trained to build relationships with your email list, deliver free content in different ways and outsource your content. -
Week 6 – Writing the Perfect Swipe:
The secrets to offering bonuses and making customers open your email messages and click.
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Week 7 – The Email Blueprint:
You’ll uncover how to use broadcasts and automate your emails. -
Week 8 – Scaling & Expanding:
You’ll learn how to open the floodgates. - Bonus – Running Affiliate Promotions
PROS
ClickBank University 2.0 comes with so many possibilities and advantages. It maintains all the great qualities of the initial version, while incorporating a number of improvements. Here is a look at some of the benefits that ClickBank University 2.0 has to offer.
Refreshing sales page
We are all familiar with how a lot of sales pages try to milk us of our every dime, and so it’s great to note that ClickBank’s sales page is pretty straightforward. It’s very clear about what your money will cover and what you stand to gain by becoming a member of ClickBank University 2.0
ClickBank University 2.0 was created by ClickBank for ClickBank.
ClickBank is a very reputable and reliable online marketing platform. Thousands of people make a full-time living from it. A good understanding of the platform is the best way to make the most of ClickBank.
There are so many people out there that claim to be pros at ClickBank, but who better to learn from than the makers of the platform themselves?
A lot of the people who claim to be experts at ClickBank have themselves gained their skills from ClickBank University 2.0, and so, it’s simply best to hear from the horse’s mouth.
ClickBank does also bring in mentors (Adam Horwitz and Justin Atlan) who have had huge successes (six- or seven-figure incomes) using the platform, to tutor their courses at ClickBank University 2.0.
There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Even though ClickBank no longer offers a free trial or $1 trial, they guarantee you your money back if within the first month of usage, you feel that ClickBank University 2.0 is not suitable for you.
This is a very assuring provision. It’s just like a 30-day free trial if you think about it, because your money will be refunded if, within 30 days, you don’t like your experience with ClickBank University 2.0. This eliminates the risk of disappointment.
The community is a lot more active.
There has been great improvement in the community and support system of ClickBank University. Fresh questions are posted almost every day, and there are quite a number of answers and responses for each thread, some of them very detailed.
It’s really quite impressive in comparison to some years ago. It’s great that the more experienced members help the newbies out. There is an active exchange of information with people improving each other’s skills, which is pretty awesome to see.
Members will also have access to the highly active and engaging, private ClickBank University Facebook support group, with Adam and Justin also present to help.
There are weekly webinars.
Every week, members now have access to weekly video webinars with Adam and Justin where they can get instant answers to their questions. The webinars are also recorded so that members of ClickBank University 2.0 can re-watch them subsequently. This is a great initiative for members to clear all issues with the experts.
The training is great for would-be vendors.
If you’re looking to create your own digital products (online courses, membership websites, e-books, programs and the like) and market them online, then ClickBank University 2.0 is a great way to start off. They offer one of the best training programs you’d come across in this regard.
CONS
As great as the ClickBank University 2.0 might be, and as many as its benefits are, there are quite a number of drawbacks you might want to consider.
Fear mongering
The obvious fear-mongering in the lengthy dialogue about how Google’s deep mind robots threaten to take our jobs and so we need to work from home to stay relevant is quite cheesy.
There’s no need for a valid training center like ClickBank University 2 to play such mind games.
A lot of the training modules are locked away.
One major issue with ClickBank University 2.0 is that all the training videos are not available to you immediately you join, although this has been improved upon a little bit.
You are only allowed to see a few of the modules, and then the rest of the videos unlock over time.
ClickBank claims that this is a measure, put in place to ensure that their trainees don’t skip any steps, but a lot of people find the fact that they can’t access it all even after paying for everything quite disappointing.
Well, it’s probably also ClickBank’s tactic to keep people for longer inside the community, past the one-month money-back duration.
If people had access to the information all at once, they could skim through it within 30 days, and then demand a refund. Think about it.
You only learn about paid traffic.
When it comes to online marketing, traffic is everything. Irrespective of what you’re selling or your mode of business, the amount of traffic you’re able to generate directly determines the number of sales you’ll be able to make online.
Another shortcoming of ClickBank University 2.0 is that the course content only covers paid traffic – in-depth training on Instagram shoutouts and Facebook ads, as well as a crash course on YouTube ads.
The training doesn’t cover free traffic at all, and so you don’t learn techniques such as content marketing, free social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Although one can argue that paid traffic is most effective for online marketing today, there is no doubt that free traffic can also be quite helpful.
ClickBank University 2.0 offers nothing on marketing on Facebook pages, paid ad spots, blogging, organic search traffic on search engines, other social media platforms, keywords or content creation.
Basically, aside the monthly membership cost of ClickBank, you’ll also need to invest extra money on paid traffic, ClickBank Builder as well as some other essential tools.
Summing it all up, you may find that you’re investing over $1,000 on ClickBank, without any guarantee that you’ll see any instant results.
Webinars have no specific theme.
It’s great that ClickBank has thought of providing a platform where members of ClickBank University 2.0 can get their questions answered, however, the fact that there are no focus topics for these webinars make it somewhat messy, with participants throwing their random questions and concerns at the experts in charge.
It would be great if each webinar had a theme so that it would be easier to search through the topics later to find areas of interest. It’s really quite difficult to take advantage of webinars that are just a random jumble of questions from all over the sphere of online marketing.
Some believe that it’s yet another strategy to keep members active and paying their monthly subscriptions. Otherwise, most members would just end their membership right after completing their courses. Right?
There appears to be a catch – upsells.
Once you subscribe to ClickBank University 2.0, their online website builder, ClickBank Builder 2.0 is available for purchase at $600.
Granted, this web builder might actually prove useful to newbies trying to sell their first digital product online. As ClickBank’s tested and trusted cookie cutter format, create landing pages that will be sure to have great conversion rates. And it also integrates seamlessly with the ClickBank platform.
However, you could learn to build simple sites using WordPress or Weebly with a good webhost such as BlueHost OR Wealthy Affiliate, for a fraction of that amount.
Also, if you do get the ClickBank Builder, know that you’ll have to keep up your ClickBank University 2.0 membership at $47 monthly as the builder builds the sites within ClickBank’s own webhosting account.
The courses are better suited for vendors than for affiliate marketers.
Although the pitch is that ClickBank University 2.0 offers training on how to build a successful online business either by creating and marketing your own digital products or by affiliate marketing, ClickBank provides a lot more information on creating and selling your own products than on promoting other people’s products.
In other words, the affiliate marketing part of the training isn’t nearly as rich as the part for vendors. Thus, those looking to make money from the online promotion of other people’s products may want to consider other training programs that can teach them more about affiliate marketing.
FINAL VERDICT
ClickBank University 2.0 presents a solid line of study with practical tools that can help anyone create, promote and/or market digital products on ClickBank and make money. There are real coaches with genuine training resources with which you can actually learn to make money from ClickBank.
Although some argue that the course is a bit limited for its price, there is no doubt that it has proven helpful to a lot of people desiring to create value online and thus proves that clickbank 2.0 is not a scam.
The truth is that there’s a cost associated with every business. Online businesses cost considerably less than brick-and-mortar businesses do. If you’re not willing to pay a moderate price to make it work, perhaps you’re simply not cut out for it.
