Written by Daniel Thrasher, Content Manager at ClickBank
There are two things that are certain in today’s online marketing world:
- Uncertainty.
- The popularity of cat videos.
Since point #2 is obviously self-explanatory, let’s focus on the idea of uncertainty.
The fact is, your online business success is dependent on many factors outside your control, such as:
- The latest algorithm update
- Which topics are trending
- Audience behaviors
- A healthy dose of luck
It’s like a permanent game of cat and mouse. And while Facebook has been a dominant ad platform and traffic source for several years, the social media giant has seen a huge decline after Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, which disrupted everything from audience selection to conversion tracking within Facebook advertising.
So, what now?
I’m here to talk about native ads and why they are the next big wave in affiliate marketing.
Introducing Native Ads
One of the best things about working at a massive affiliate marketplace like ClickBank is hearing the inside scoop.
Shortly after iOS 14 went into effect, I asked our team of account managers how some of our top affiliates were responding to the changes. Universally, the answer was, “They’re pivoting to native ads” or “They’re giving native ads a try.”
We have a full guide comparing native ads vs Facebook, if you’re interested in understanding some of the big differences between them. For now, let’s dig into what native ads are and how you can use them to make money online!
What Are Native Ads?
Okay, what are native ads?
Native ads are a form of advertisement appearing on a website and designed to blend in with the other content on the page. As “native” ads, they are placed like just another piece of content on a publisher’s site, which boosts clickthrough rate and reader trust.
While there are many different formats for native ads, the most common are display ads. You can technically find native ads on social or search platforms, but we’ve seen it be more effective to run native ads on the open web where you can maintain control over placement.
Why Native Ads?
Whether you’re coming from a Facebook Ads background or you’re totally new to media buying, it’s worth exploring why native ads might be worthwhile for your business.
Here are a few quick benefits:
- Tons of traffic. According to one prominent native ads platform, Taboola, they see more than 500 million daily active users.
- Less risk of account shutdowns and other headaches. Because native ads platforms are serving content across publisher sites, they aren’t as apt to randomly reject your ad or shut down your account.
- Perfect for building trust. The context of native ads is different than on social media or search platforms. Users tend to trust the websites they’re visiting, and that trust often extends to advertisers discovered on those sites.
- Great for broad niches found on ClickBank. Native ads appeal to a general audience in various niches, so ClickBank’s affiliate marketplace makes it easy to find relevant offers to promote via native ads.
Now that you’ve learned a bit more about what native ads are, it’s time to dig into how they work with ClickBank.
Which Affiliate Niches Do Well With Native?
If you’re new to the world of affiliate marketing or native ads, don’t worry – I’ll break it down for you here.
In essence, affiliate marketing is just promoting other people’s products for a profit. With ClickBank, you can easily browse our marketplace by category, find an offer that a certain segment of the population would want, and go promote it to them through native ads.
So, how do you decide which offer to choose? It starts with choosing the right niche. And as it turns out, that’s one of the most common questions we get: “What’s the best niche?”
While everyone is different, if you’re looking to go the paid ads route for your affiliate business, we find that these are the best affiliate marketing niches by far:
- Health and fitness
- Make money online (MMO) and e-business
- Online education
Other general interest topics can also do well: weight loss, self-help, spirituality/new age beliefs, trends like crypto, and widely popular hobbies.
If you think about it, you’re simply trying to strike a balance between supply and demand – you want to choose a niche that a LOT of people are interested in, but without so much “supply” (ie competition) that you can’t make your business profitable.
Topics, niches, and offers that appeal to almost everyone will ensure you have a broad audience to target, but you can be certain that you’ll face a lot of competition for those same eyeballs. Once you the niche with that sweet spot between supply and demand, you can build a thriving affiliate business!
But how do you get there? The best way to determine if your niche will be profitable is by scoping out the potential affiliate products you can promote.
Let’s give that a try using ClickBank’s marketplace!
Finding a ClickBank Offer
In order to start promoting a ClickBank offer, I recommend that you first go to ClickBank.com and sign up for a free account.
Inside your master account, create your account nickname and then head over to the affiliate marketplace. It looks like this.
From here, you can either pick a category and subcategory in the sidebar, or go up to the top of the page and search for a keyword that’s relevant to your niche or audience.
For example, if you wanted to promote a health supplement product, you could navigate to the sidebar under “Health and Fitness 🡪 Dietary Supplements” and pick from the list of offers that appear.
Evaluating a ClickBank Product Listing
Ready to pick a product you can promote with native ads?
Let’s continue on with the health and fitness niche example. That’s a pretty safe choice if you want something that’s in demand, because virtually everyone on the planet cares about their health – by comparison, not everyone is going to be interested in a niche hobby like bass fishing or learning a foreign language.
With that said, here are the primary product attributes to be thinking about as you look at a listing:
- Product niche/category. Find something that’s trending or where you have expertise to offer that others don’t.
- Gravity score. Each ClickBank product has a Gravity score that’s roughly based on the number of affiliates who have successfully made a commission from it in the past 12 weeks. A higher number means it’s converting well, but also means you’ve got competition.
- Avg $/conversion. Focus on finding a product that gives you a pretty decent commission for each sale you make, and you’ll be able to pay more for ads while still capturing a decent profit.
Once you’ve picked an offer that looks good, you can hit the big “Promote” button to generate a HopLink and start promoting your chosen offer with your traffic source of choice, including native ads!
Of course, if you’d rather skip over this research process and see some of the very best products to promote right away, feel free to check the best-selling ClickBank products of all time post or the monthly top ClickBank products post on ClickBank’s blog.
These are going to be the top-performing offers on ClickBank!
Creating a Native Ad for ClickBank Offers
Once you know which offer(s) you want to promote, the time has come to pick your native ad network.
There are many of them out there, but I would start out with a look at one of the following platforms:
- Outbrain
- Taboola
- Revcontent
I’ll let you decide which native ad network is right for you (or if you want to give multiple networks a try), but from here, it’s time to put together your first ad.
Here are two tidbits I’ll leave you with as you get ready to become a native ads affiliate master:
1) Know your audience. What will catch your audience’s attention? Is there a diagram, a statistic, an image, a fact, that would cause them to stop scrolling and give your ad a second glance? If you do your research and learn who you’re talking to, you can craft a winning combo of creative and copy to make them click.
2) It’s about curiosity. One of the most valuable tips I ever got was to “sell the click.” With native ads, you’re just trying to make a reader curious enough to click through. From there, you might encourage them to go through a quiz, read an article, sign up for an email list, or click over to a sales page – but getting them to click is the all-important first step!
Conclusion
Ultimately, native ads are a great way to expand your reach as an affiliate. Here at ClickBank, we see many of our top affiliates branching out into native ads, and that’s because they work!
If you’re ready to start promoting ClickBank products with native ads, please sign up for your free account here.
And don’t forget to check out Tom and David’s Native Ads Master Class course to learn a step-by-step process for dominating with native ads as an affiliate!
Daniel Thrasher has been a digital marketing and SEO expert for more than 10 years. As Content Manager at Clickbank, he writes about all things affiliate marketing, ecommerce, and business on the ClickBank blog. For more insights, head over to: https://clickbank.com/blog
