CB Engine is a tool that makes it easier to find which ClickBank products to sell. Yes, the CB stands for ClickBank! If you’ve never heard of ClickBank (CB) this article will explain what it is and how the CB Engine works.
Product: CB Engine
Overall Ranking: 50 out of 100 or 2.5/5 stars
Price: sale price $27 normal price $47
Owner: Matt Broich
Website: cbengine.com
What is ClickBank?
ClickBank is an affiliate marketing network, promoting digital products. These are products that can be download directly online after payment via credit card or PayPal. The type of products sold are ebooks, software, online courses or membership sites.
The platform helps the sellers or the product creators to sell their products by connecting them to affiliate marketers. This gives the sellers free publicity, in return, they pay commissions to their affiliates on each sale.
Finding Products In The Market Place
One of the problems with CB is finding good products to promote. While they do try to screen products to eliminate the scams they do have many low-quality products that make it through to their marketplace.
Finding decent products is time-consuming and you really do need to research any product you are thinking of promoting. This is especially true in the make money online niche.
As you can see, the first product listed in the E-business section is a well-known waste of money. This program promotes surveys as a good way of making money online and charges money for information you can find for free.
The Good and Bad About ClickBank Products
In general, you have to be very careful of what you promote from ClickBank. The worst thing about the platform is the quality of some of the programs and the time it will take to find a product that will be useful to your readers.
On the other hand, once you have found a good product the commissions are usually very generous. Often between 50% and 75%, according to CB Engine, the average commission is 57%!
The products are listed in categories which are further broken down into sub-categories, to enable you to find products relevant to your niche. In addition, CB provides a few stats to help you choose a product:
- Initial sale – the average amount affiliates earn for the sale of products
- Average rebill total – this shows the average amount affiliates are making on recurring sales
- Average $ per sale – this may be the same as the initial sale if there are no recurring charges or if there are rebills this includes the average rebill and the initial sale. This gives you an idea of how much you can from a customer.
- Average percentage per sale – the average commission for all sales of a vendor’s product. This includes the initial sale, rebills and any upsells
- Average percentage per rebills – only shown where there are recurring charges and show the average commission on rebills
- Grav or Gravity – a ClickBank calculation that gives you an idea of the hottest products at any moment. It takes into account the number of affiliates promoting a product and the number of sales. A high gravity may mean a product is selling well but also that there might be a lot of competition.
You can see what ClickBank proposes in the way of product details, let’s now look at what CB Engine offers.
What Is CB Engine?
This is a tool that researches and tracks products on ClickBank. The results they get enable affiliates to find the best products to promote. CB Engine provides more statistics and metrics than ClickBank.
Who Is It For?
This is for any affiliate marketer that promotes ClickBank products. The CB Engine will help you find the best selling products, the programs that offer recurring commissions or the newest products listed on CB. There are many different criteria you can use to find a product to promote.
However, once you find something that is selling well, for example, you will still have to check out the product to see if it will be useful to your readers.
CBEngine Tools
If you are interested in promoting CB products, the data returned by the CB Engine could be useful. Although I’m not a great fan of ClickBank in general because of the value of the digital products they promote, it is possible to find some programs that are good quality and useful to your readers.
As you can see from the image on the right there are different ways to search for products. Let’s take a look at these methods:
- New Products – a list of the latest products added to the marketplace
- Best Gains – this gives several different indicators, for example, the products that:
- offer the biggest payouts
- have the highest gravity (the ClickBank stat mentioned above)
- have the highest ranking in the marketplace
- are performing best at the moment
This can provide insights that could show if a product’s sales are increasing or decreasing. A product who’s sales are increasing could be a good choice to promote.
- Insider – recommendations to help you spot opportunities using predictive analysis (no guarantees that these will be successful)
- Product Reviews – much like the recommended products below, not real reviews, more like promotional info. Useless survey sites given positive reviews!
- Re-listed – products that have been re-listed in the marketplace
- Recurring – a list of all programs that offer recurring payments
- Removed – products removed from the marketplace. Could be useful if you are promoting something that is no longer on ClickBank. The vendor might still be selling the product, perhaps through a different affiliate marketplace, so you will have to change your affiliate link.
- Tags – a different way to list products
- Categories – all the categories and sub-categories of the marketplace listed with the number of products in each category and links to each category
- Vendors – an alphabetical list of vendors
- Statistics – a few stats on the marketplace with links to the new programs in each category
- Payouts – a chart that gives you all the different commission rates with a link to the products in each field
- RSS Feeds – to stay updated with the latest launch news and a script to add a ClickBank mall to your website
- Affiliate Tools – a few tools to calculate refund rate, the product sale price, the split in earnings between the vendor and the affiliate and a hoplink generator
Find Products Search Box
There is also another search box that allows you to combine many of the other metrics. Personally, I found it a little complicated and it’s a shame there aren’t any detailed instructions on how to use it. To profit from these results you will have to practice. You can find some videos on YouTube that might help.
Below is the sort of information you get. This was just searching, category and sub-category and then selecting one of the results.
The most important information that is not supplied by ClickBank is the refund rate. A product with a high refund rate is not something you want to promote. Also, the “referred” rate shows 99%, which means almost all sales are coming from affiliates. This means you might have quite a lot of competition from other affiliates.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Free trial
- Statistics not found in ClickBank
- Information might be helpful to find a profitable product
- Time saving
Cons
- You will still have to research and review any product you promote
- Supposed reviews only seem to be promotions
- Recommended products may convert well but many are a waste of money
Products Highly Recommended
This is part of the program I don’t like. Although the products recommended may convert well, are they useful products?
Will your visitors be pleased they have purchased the product or will they lose any confidence they might have had in you?
When you start a website or have a website that already attracts visitors building your reputation and keeping your existing visitors happy is very important. Promoting something that may be considered a scam is a bad idea and could undo all the hard work you have put into your business.
CB Engine had 10 programs they recommend promoting, 8 of which I know or have reviewed. I wouldn’t promote any of these 8 programs!
As with anything you promote, research or better still, try it yourself. Here these products are recommended because you can make money with them or the product owners pay to place the ads.
It’s a shame when programs like CB Engine are ready to recommend products that have no or very little value.
Should making money be your only concern? No, your primary responsibility should be to help and recommend useful products to your readers.
How Much Does It Cost?
CB Engine offers a free 7-day trial, with no credit card details required, which is very encouraging. There aren’t many programs that are willing to offer trials like this.
After the trial, you can purchase a lifetime membership for $27. Apparently, this is a sale price reduced from $47. At the same time, you are also offered the CB Press WordPress plugin for $30 extra. The price of the plugin is normally $77.
The CB Press plugin imports the whole ClickBank marketplace and allows you to select products to promote. The plugin was created by CB Engine.
As this is sold through ClickBank there is a 60-day guarantee.
My Final Opinion
I feel the CB Engine could speed up the process of finding a ClickBank product that converts well. But once found, you then have to try the product yourself, if you’re serious about your reputation.
There were a couple of things I didn’t like, the recommended products and the reviews. Both of which were really just promotions of a few selected products. I don’t know why these were selected or perhaps the vendors pay CB Engine for including them here. These products may sell and convert well, but should this be your first concern?
Maybe I am repeating myself, but only promote products that provide good value for your readers. Your bottom line or making a quick profit isn’t the most important criteria. Helping your readers and building trust is!
If you want to build a business that earns you a passive income over a few years, then only promote reputable programs. Promoting low-quality scammy products will harm your long term business.
Bearing this in mind, if you’re promoting or thinking of promoting ClickBank products, it could be worth trying CB Engine. You might save some time and have data not available from ClickBank.
How To Get Started
Choosing the products you wish to promote is only one part of the puzzle. Next, you need to learn how to get traffic and make sales!
Whatever products you are thinking of promoting ClickBank, Amazon or any others, you will need to know the basics of setting up an affiliate marketing business.
The first step I recommend is to join a training platform that teaches you all you need to know about creating your affiliate marketing website. One of the first things you learn is how to choose your niche. From there you can start looking for products to promote on ClickBank with the help of CB Engine or you can choose other platforms like Amazon.
You will also learn to create a website. No worries these days it’s very easy you don’t need any technical expertise at all.
My #1 recommended training platform is Wealthy Affiliate. You can join with a FREE 7-day trial and see what you think of the training, support, tools, and community. After that, you can choose to either stay as a free member or upgrade to a premium member.
If you have had any experience with CB Engine or selling ClickBank products I would love to hear how you got on. Or if you have any other questions or comments let me know below.
Truth be told, I have not ever found any products on Clickbank personally that were even worth promoting. They all felt scammy, or either as you stated, of low quality. With that being said, I see why you gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars. It just might not necessarily be worth it, or promoting Clickbank products at all.
Many people have this opinion about ClickBank, Christian. I feel CBEngine could be useful if you really want to promote products from this platform and it’s not expensive. However even after finding a product that should sell well you then have to check it out to see if it’s legitimate. So any time you may have saved will then be spent researching the product. Of course, you should research and preferably try any product you promote.
All the best,
Peter
I haven’t used ClickBank as an affiliate but have bought some digital products through them which turned out to be no good and I have ended up deleting them.
I would agree with you that if you were going to be an affiliate with them, then you would have to do your due diligence to sift through all their products to find out what is worth promoting.
ClickBank might make it easy to start with them, but you just got to be careful with what you promote to your customers as some of the product reviews you come across on ClickBank may not be genuine.
I do have a couple of ClickBank products I promote, but I have tried many as well Adrian. Most of them I had to use the money back guarantee because they were so bad. CBEngine may help an affiliate marketer find products that have the potential of making money but before promoting anything from ClickBank you have to check it out thoroughly.
All the best,
Peter
Hello Peter.I just finished reading your review of CBEngine. I have heard of Clickbank but I have never used it. I have not heard of CBEngine however, but your review was so thorough and well written that anyone reading it will quickly know what it is and how it works.
My only suggestion on such a complete review would be if you could provide the information that is missing on the last sentence in the section titled How Much Does It Cost.What is the 60 day period that you are referring to?
Hi Thomas,
ClickBank is a well-known affiliate network but unfortunately, they have many low-quality programs for affiliates to promote. So if you haven’t used ClickBank it’s not a major loss there are many other affiliate programs you can use. Thanks for pointing out I had forgotten to complete that sentence. ClickBank offers a 60-day guarantee which is normally always honored. This is one of the best things about this affiliate network.
I had hoped that CBEngine would only recommend useful programs, but unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. They recommend programs that could hurt your reputation, so as usual with ClickBank you will have to spend a lot of time researching for something genuine.
Thanks for your visit,
Peter
Hi Peter,
Very informative article you have here.
I have used CBEngine for a while. All I can say, you are definitely right about certain things.
First, their recommended products are mostly bad products. You might end up loosing your reputation if you recommend them to your prospects.
Another thing I’m asking myself is this: Is Clickbank worth it these days at all?
I see more and more low quality products there. There are much better platforms to promote.
But you have explained everything very well in your post.
Thanks again and all the best!
Hi Nenad,
I know what you mean about ClickBank products, at least in the make money online niche, it’s very hard to find something that is decent. It takes so long to sort the good from the bad it does make you wonder if you should bother with CB.
It’s quite depressing that companies like CBEngine are ready to recommend products that will provide little or no value to the buyers and may ruin the reputations of the affiliates who promote them. Still, this product might be useful depending on your niche and provided you check out each product you promote.
All the best,
Peter