Secret Affiliate Marketing Hacks

If you’re looking for secret affiliate marketing hacks, here’s a few of the ones I’ve discovered over the years. Affiliate marketing is a huge industry and there’s many ways to do it. So this is a compilation of some of the “secrets” I’ve discovered over several years as an affiliate marketer.

If I’d had this information earlier, it would have saved me a huge amount of wasted time. But, as an affiliate you learn from your mistakes. Plus there’s so much advice on the internet it’s difficult to know who to believe and who to trust. Everyone’s trying to sell you something – including me!

So here’s some of what I’ve learned which has worked for me. Everyone’s different though and will take a different path. As Bruce Lee said once: “take what’s useful, discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own”.

secret affiliate marketing hacks

Secret Affiliate Marketing Hacks – Traffic

Every affiliate marketer needs traffic. To get traffic takes effort or money or both. Decide on a strategy which suits you personally. If you’ve no time, use money. If you’ve no money, use time. When I started out with affiliate marketing I had time but no money. So I choose free strategies to get people to my affiliate products. I used YouTube and blogging but ultimately blogging became my default “habit”.

I kept at it and still keep at it now. It’s a slow, long route, but if you choose a topic you’re passionate about it’s still not like real work – or a “real” job. My blogging strategy is one many affiliates use:

Find long tail keywords which offer less competition than most.

Then, set about creating some awesome content which is useful to the person who’s reading it.

Secret Affiliate Marketing Hacks – Long Tail Keywords

Since starting out affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Penguin and Panda Google updates have seen many affiliates drop out. There’s huge competition for most topics now so you need to create content which is useful and offers value. Otherwise you won’t get a look in.

secret affiliate marketing hacks

The long tail keyword strategy does still work. Find the long tail keywords using Google’s keyword planner which suit your particular business. Then write a long, quality article covering as much as you can about the topic. If the top ranking article on Google is 2000 words long, write 3000 words. Use an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO works for me) and make sure all your lights are green!

Content is king. There’s many variables and thousands of ranking factors Google and other search engines use to rank you content (or not). But your content is the biggest factor. So write some quality content and put the work in.

Many of your blog posts won’t get a high ranking. But some will. If you keep at it long enough, you’ll see some traffic. Over time traffic turns into leads and then sales.

secret affiliate marketing hacks

Secret Affiliate Marketing Hacks – Paid Marketing

Of course paid marketing is far better than spending a lot of time creating content. But both have their downsides. Paid marketing is no good if you’re time rich but money poor. But if you’re time poor, paid is better. With paid marketing you’re risking your advertising budget. It takes time to figure it out too. So expect to spend money and lose at first. As you gain experience you’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t so you can streamline your marketing.

With paid marketing it can be very difficult to make a profit on low cost items. So ideally choose a high ticket affiliate program if you’re time poor. That way, you can more easily get the wheels turning and start generating sales. This brings the subject to kinds of affiliate products. With a paid marketing approach, you’ll need high value product in order to make your business profitable. With low cost products it’s hard and sometimes impossible to make a profit using paid marketing. So your business model will determine to some extent what marketing strategies you use.

the six figure funnel

Take a look at the above funnel. It’s a six figure business model. With high ticket digital products you can earn larger commissions than with low paying physical products like you’d find on Amazon, for example. Look at the rates Amazon pay their affiliates in the image below (from 0-11%).

don't use Amazon

With these kinds of commission it’s almost impossible to use paid marketing with your affiliate products. Plus you only sell one item at a time. With a product range, you can benefit from sales made later on to your referrals by a built in sales team. See SFM digital business system.

Recurring Commissions

Having a product which offers a recurring commission is a huge key to building a sustainable business online. Referring customers to one-off products isn’t as smart. You’ll need to keep selling in order to keep earning. But with subscription and membership products, you can earn from your previous sales. Each referral sale to a subscription products will give you an income, rather than just a commission.

Of course people drop off with subscriptions but, if you choose the right products, your customers can become lifetime members. With the right products a few sales can make you a lifetime income. Ideally use products which offer huge value. Products used for building online businesses are particularly good. This is because when a business owner needs a product, they’ll keep using it for life. See recurring income affiliate programs for some recommended products.

secret affiliate marketing hacks

Earn Commissions Online

One of the best ways to earn commissions online is through a business model called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, the “affiliate” promotes and sells a product available online. They don’t personally own the product, nor do they need to even speak with a customer. They simply recommend or refer a customer to the product.

When the product sells through an affiliate’s unique affiliate link, they earn a commission based on the sale. Some of the main benefits of being an affiliate marketer are:

  • There’s an unlimited earning potential
  • Affiliates can live and work from anywhere with a laptop and internet connection
  • The entry costs are low to become an affiliate marketer
  • You can sell products automatically using systems which automate sales over the internet
 affiliate marketing

Earn Commissions Online – Affiliate Marketing

But there’s downsides too of course. Affiliate marketing doesn’t just work overnight. It takes time to learn. There’s pitfalls and problems which new affiliates encounter, and many give up before they see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Here’s a few problems you can encounter as an affiliate:

  • Not being able to get people to your affiliate links
  • Struggling getting traffic to your content
  • Choosing the right products for long term success
  • Relying on the wrong strategies to sell
  • Focusing on long term activities which don’t work quickly
earn commissions online

To get the most out of becoming an affiliate to learn how to earn commissions online, it’s worth getting the right information upfront. I spent years struggling as an affiliate because I didn’t get the best help. So I jumped from one course to the next, always looking for the easy route! This is known as “shiny object syndrome”. You can also spend too much time on activities which don’t work: also known as being a “busy fool”.

Affiliates are basically self employed third party referrer who refer customers to products online. Do it well and you’ll be well compensated. Don’t do it well and you can get nothing. So you need to be good a focusing on the right actions and mastering your time management.

Earn Commissions Online – Strategies


There’s various strategies which affiliate marketers use to generate sales online. Here’s a few of the main ones:

  • Blogging – a cheap and slow process of building traffic (visitors) to a website in order to generate leads and sales
  • Paid marketing – a faster route whereby the affiliate creates a paid advert and hopes to get a profit from the commissions they earn from selling a product.
  • Email marketing – build a list of subscribers through either paid marketing or free strategies and promote products to your list
  • Social media – Social media marketers build an audience through offering value and/or building content to attract an audience
  • V’logging – like blogging, video blogging is done to attract organic traffic and build an audience. You can also use paid marketing with YouTube as well as building an organic channel which gets traffic for free.
earn commissions online

Types Of Affiliate Products

Most people have bought something from Amazon before and trust the site. Well, Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote products from the site through their own unique affiliate codes. Once a product is sold through your specific affiliate link, Amazon’s tracks the sale and you earn commissions online based on your sales.

But what most new affiliates don’t realise is that Amazon pays its affiliates some of the lowest levels of commission you can get! You’ll earn somewhere from 0-11% on your sales if you choose to use Amazon’s product line. Although there’s a lot to choose from, this doesn’t help you build a viable business very quickly. Have a look at Amazon’s rates in the image below:

earn commissions online

Earn Commissions Online – Digital Products

Physical products tend to pay less because there’s less markup on each item. The manufacturer needs to earn, Amazon needs to earn and the affiliate needs to earn; you also have postage costs to consider. So the bottom line for the affiliate is considerably less than with some other products.

With digital products you don’t need to physically post anything out. Once a digital product is created, there’s no manufacturing costs either. So the savings in manufacturing and postage can be passed on to the affiliate. Typically, digital products pay out from 40%-50% commissions, and sometimes even more.

So it’s worth promoting digital products over physical products because you’ll earn larger commissions for what is often the same amount of work. Some physical products though are good because they sell at a very high price and even with a low commission rate, you’ll still earn a good chunk for the sale. See highest paying affiliate programs list.

High Ticket Products

High commission affiliate programs offer much higher paying products which are also digital. With high priced digital products you get the best of both world’s: a high cost and a large commission.

Selling the high ticket products online also enables you to use the more expensive advertising platforms. Whereas with low value products you will struggle to make a profit while running paid marketing campaigns.

This often means you’re in with a long ride if you choose the lower cost physical products to promote as an affiliate. Because your product is low value you end up using free marketing strategies which are slow. Because they are slow, your earnings only come in dribs and drabs; perpetuating the problem.

earn commissions online

One way around this is to use recurring income products which offer ongoing value for customers. With a recurring commission product, such as a membership or software product, you continue to earn long after referring your customer; month after month.

The best way to benefit from affiliate marketing and earn commissions online is to use:

  • High ticket digital products – give you maximum commissions on high priced items
  • Recurring commissions – memberships and software products which business owners or online marketers need for their business.
  • Multi-tier – Multi-tier commissions are commissions based on sales made by your referrals
  • A range of products – most affiliate programs pay you only once for your sale. With a product range you can benefit from later sales made by an in-house sales team on a number of other products.

How Long Does It Take To Earn Commissions Online?

So how long does it take to earn commissions online through affiliate marketing? This is a difficult question to ask and is similar to asking when you’ll get six pack abs from going to a gym. Given the analogy it depends on how often you go to the gym, what you eat, where you’re starting from and a whole host of other variables.

With affiliate marketing, besides your own work ethic, time management and schedule, it depends on some major factors. These ones are pretty important:

  • The strategy you use to market your products (whether its a free strategy or a paid one) – a free strategy will typically take considerably longer
  • The products you use – low paying physical products will give you less traction than high paying recurring income products.
  • Your level of belief and determination to succeed – this often comes down to your “why” for starting an online business in the first place. Unless you’re driven internally in some way, it can be easy to give up before you attain the success you desire.
  • The support you get – Without support it can be difficult to know which steps to take and you’re more likely go wrong and veer off route. This leads to disappointment which can encourage you to quit.

Get Help And Get Started

Anyone can learn how to earn commissions online through using affiliate marketing. Much of the technical side of the business has been removed and there are programs and software available now to help even the biggest technophobes!

People of all ages too are starting online businesses, especially since the pandemic in 2020 has forced people to stay at home and look for new opportunities.

Access a webinar here and learn the strategies to turn your laptop into an income! Click on the image below to book your slot:

10 k online

Mastermind Affiliate Program

The Mastermind affiliate program is also known as Mastermind Experience. It is run through the SFM digital business program. It is the highest level product offered by the SFM; and gives you access to a high level commission of top valued digital products within a sales funnel. You also get access to a number of entrepreneurs who can help you personally with growing your online business through 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching.

mastermind affiliate program

You can attend small group masterminds too. Live events are organised globally by founders Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek. Jay and Stuart Founded a digital skills and mentoring platform in 2010 to help people become online entrepreneurs and create more freedom and financial certainty in their lives. Here’s a breakdown of what the Mastermind Affiliate program offers in terms of commissions:

mastermind experience

As a DEA (Digital Experts Academy) Partner, at Mastermind level, affiliates can earn up to 40% commissions on products valued at $20,000+. Selling the top level products means you can earn a commission of $8000 for a single sale. You also have a product range which includes multiple products, a sales team and recurring commission products. (More on this later).

Top Level Mentors – One To One Coaching

mastermind affiliate program

The mastermind affiliate program “Mastermind Experience” gives you access to top level mentors who can help you one on one. As someone who has struggled with affiliate marketing for a long time, I can testify to the importance of this in building a long term, sustainable business online. Often the problems associated with affiliate marketing are unseen. They can be technical issues but more commonly they are mindset issues.

A personal mentor or coach can help you overcome your mental blockages to online business and point you in the right direction. They can also hold you accountable and motivate you to keep going when you feel like quitting!

mastermind affiliate program

Mastermind Affiliate Program – Commissions

The mastermind affiliate program offers some of the best commissions available through selling digital products over the internet. With digital products, you can earn up to 40% commissions on the high valued products. As a DEA reseller, this means you can earn up to $8000 on a DEA Mastermind Experience Sale – the highest level product. Plus you can also earn from a number of other products within a range.

mastermind product range

Mastermind Affiliate Program – Multi Tier Sales

With the Mastermind Affiliate Program at Mastermind Experience level, you can also earn multi-tier commissions. This means that you can earn 10% of sales made by your referrals. Multi-tier sales give you another earning strategy in a powerful product range which offers:

  • A range of digital products you can sell globally for larger commissions
  • A number of up-sells – A variety of digital products within a range
  • A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
  • Recurring commissions from memberships and software products
  • High ticket products – Products valued at over $1000 you can sell for 40% commissions (According to your positioning within the product range)
multi tier commissions

Benefits Of Large Value Products

There’s some obvious benefits of large value products. For starters a high ticket product range means your average value per customer is much higher than with many affiliate programs. Most programs deliver an average value of $1 a month per lead. With a high value program like Mastermind Experience, this is more like $5 per lead.

the sic figure funnel

This has obvious advantages and not so obvious ones too. With a sales funnel like this you can much more easily access and capitalise on the paid marketing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. With lower value products these platforms can be out of reach and your marketing efforts have to focus on free and cheap strategies which can take much longer and be much more labour intensive.

The value of a paid marketing platform is also the ability to quickly scale up a business once you see a positive ROI – return on investment. With cheaper and free marketing strategies such as blogging and organic traffic generation, this is much more difficult to achieve.

Mastermind Experience Affiliates

One of the best benefits of the Mastermind Experience Membership, and other levels of SFM membership is access to groups where you can ask questions from six figure earners who have already achieved financial and geographical freedom through an online business. Going it alone online is tough at the best of times. Getting the help you need to build a profitable online business is worth its weight in gold!

You can access the Mastermind Experience through purchasing the Mentors All In package here and upgrade through the back office to access the Mastermind Affiliate program.

Alternatively sign up for a free video series on this website which will give you more information and answer some questions you might have.

mastermind affiliate program
Me with Jay Kubassek – Co-Founder of The SFM at an event in London

Biz Opp Affiliate Programs

Biz Opp affiliate programs, (or business opportunity programs) are some of the best kinds of programs you can promote as an affiliate. Biz Opp programs work well for a number of reasons:

  • They offer the most value for customers – particularly if they make money for them
  • Biz Opp programs have longevity – there will always be demand to earn money online
  • Business opportunities are “evergreen” – that is, they have year round sales and are not seasonal like in some niches.
biz opp affiliate programs

The best biz opp affiliate programs offer a number of products and software to help people build online businesses. The kinds of products can include:

  • Software products to help people build profitable online businesses from scratch (website building tools, sales funnels, graphics builders etc.)
  • Mentoring programs to help business owners overcome their mental and technical obstacles and issues
  • Online business coaches
  • Training and educational tools: courses and step by step tutorials to walk people through the process of building a profitable online business.

Biz Opp Affiliate Programs – Downsides

One of the major downsides to biz opp affiliate programs is the competition for organic traffic and paid traffic. It’s not easy to rank content around the major keywords for a business opportunity. “Make Money Online” for example is a hugely competitive keyword. Hence why this article is titles “biz opp affiliate programs”!

biz opp affiliate programs

Plus paid marketing is very expensive in this niche too. So to get a business profitable takes some work. Ideally a biz opp affiliate program should have a number of earning strategies which you can benefit from. This means you’ll have the ability to use paid marketing and don’t have to rely on free strategies as you would with a small value product.

Most affiliate programs only pay you once for the initial referral. After that they’ve earned a customer – potentially for life. You, as the affiliate have to keep finding new customers. It’s far better to use a business model which rewards you over and over again for your previous referrals.

Biz Opp Affiliate Programs

With a number of earning strategies it’s much more attainable to get your business in profit:

  • High ticket commissions – High ticket digital products allow you to earn up to 40%+ commissions on sales of $2000-$10,000 products. This goes a long way to offsetting your paid marketing spend to allow a profit. Without high value products, it’s much more difficult
  • Membership recurring commissions – With a membership product affiliates can earn recurring commissions month after month from each customer. This again allows you to slowly build up an income, rather than rely continuously on new sales only.
  • Multi-tier sales – With multi tier sales you can earn commissions based on the sales made by your referrals. This adds another earning layer to your business model which also encourages you to help those who have joined a business opportunity with you. This also means they are more likely to succeed with someone else helping them.
  • Up-sells – A good biz opp affiliate program will have a number of products within a range. Most affiliate programs don’t have this, so use one which does.
  • A built in sales team – Having a built in sales team closing sales on your behalf means you can concentrate only on the marketing (front end) of the business without worrying about “up-selling” to your members.

Online Scams!

There’s many online businesses online and a lot of people try and fail with them. Hence why there’s a mixture of good and bad reviews for online businesses which can affect your sales.

Most people will have a search on Google before diving in on a business opportunity and usually find a negative review which sours their opinion. Unfortunately this is something you have to deal with. For years the internet “biz opp” scene has been full of dubious “fly by night cowboys”. And this has sullied many people’s view of the industry.

However, more people now accept that online businesses are real and there’s a growing number of people who have already left their jobs and work full time online.

Access an all in one business system and online coaching community.

biz opp affiliate programs

Marketing Your Program

Marketing any affiliate program is a learned skill. Once you’ve mastered it once, you can earn from that program forever more by repeating the same process. With affiliate marketing the hard work is up-front.

Initially you’ll likely have some obstacles to overcome. Much of your marketing efforts might even fail. But, over time you’ll start to learn which strategies work and which don’t. You can of course shortcut this process by joining an online community and learning from others experience. But you’ll still have to learn by doing.

It’s often referred to as “failing forwards” and it means you have to fail in order to learn. Eventually, if you keep going and don’t quit, you’ll find something which works. Then, you can rinse and repeat. I’ve seen many people who have dropped out of affiliate marketing saying they’ve had “no results”.

But most affiliates who succeed also had this experience early on in their journeys. They just refused to quit and perhaps had a bigger reason to keep going. Pareto’s principle states that 80% of your outcomes come from 20% of the causes. This is worth keeping in mind with affiliate marketing. In order to make sales with your affiliate business you need to fail enough to find those 20% of actions which bring you the results you want. Then once you understand which actions bring about those results, do more of that!

Those who quit don’t get to this stage and blame affiliate marketing instead of taking full responsibility for their outcomes. See why affiliate marketing does not work.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

The most lucrative affiliate programs don’t just pay you once. They pay you again and again. Membership programs and software products are two of the best kinds of products to promote as an affiliate marketer. They give you the opportunity to make ongoing commissions from existing customers. With recurring income affiliate programs, you only need a few customers too, not hundreds, in order to make a sustainable business. But of course you can have hundreds or even thousands of customers too.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

A good business model has a number of ways to earn including:

  • A product range – not just a stand-alone product
  • High value, or “high ticket” products
  • Digital products – which pay larger commissions than physical products
  • Multi-tier products – get paid for sales made by your team of referrals
  • Recurring income products – memberships and software products

With a model like this, you simply refer a customer once and can benefit even years later should your customer purchase another item from a range of products.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – Programs To Avoid

The mistake many affiliates make, and the one I made, is to rush into affiliate marketing with desperation. If you rush in, you can end up spending a huge amount of time promoting the wrong kinds of products; those which only pay out tiny commissions and don’t offer ongoing recurring commissions.

With the most lucrative affiliate programs, you can also afford to use paid marketing in order to promote them. With low value products, like what you might find on Amazon for example, you’ll only earn 3-11% commissions on a sale. Take a look at Amazon’s commission rate for its affiliates. These figures recently took a massive dive too. And as Amazon gets more of a control over their customers it’s likely to continue to fall.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

With such low commission rates like these, affiliates are forced to use cheaper and cheaper marketing strategies. They create content which is then built around their products. When Amazon drops the commission rate, they have no choice but to keep promoting those products for lower commissions since they’ve spend such a long time investing in their low cost strategies.

Software Programs

Selling software products is a good strategy too. With software products you can earn ongoing commissions from each referral you make. Ideally choose products which offer lifetime value to customers. These are things such as products used for online businesses:

Tools and software like these offer ongoing lifetime value for their customers, who need these kinds of services to run an online business. Cheaper programs and one-off products should really be avoided for a couple of reasons.

  • You can’t recoup your marketing budget with them so you’ll need to focus on cheaper marketing strategies which are harder and take more time and effort
  • If a product doesn’t last, or is removed, you’ll have wasted that time building content around it.

So, ideally choose programs which have been around for a bit, offer huge value and are built to last.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – High Ticket Items

High ticket items are items which sell for a large cost. They also pay the affiliate large commissions too. A sale of a single high ticket item can be worth the same as selling hundreds or even thousands of low value items. With large value items, you don’t need to sell so many of them to make your business profitable.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

I made the mistake of thinking that since I couldn’t afford large value items, no-one else could either. However, people can afford to spend $20,000 on a product if it solves a particular problem for them. And if you can earn 40% of that product sale, it makes sense to promote it. See highest paying affiliate programs list.

Would you rather sell a single product at $20,000 to make $8000 (40%), or sell 1000 items at $20?

It may be more difficult to find the kind of customer to purchase such a product, but it surely isn’t 1000 times more difficult! High ticket items also allow you to use paid marketing which is much more scalable (and easier) than using other cheaper marketing methods. See also high ticket recurring commission affiliate.

Building Your Business Online

Of course even the most lucrative affiliate programs won’t make you any money if you can’t sell any products. This is a skill and it takes time to learn. Start here. Depending on your own personal circumstances, you can choose which direction to take your business. The fastest strategy is to place yourself at the very top of the business model and purchase as many of the high ticket products as you can afford.

If you do this, you can then earn the highest levels of commissions from those products. But if you can’t afford to purchase the highest valued products to put in your digital “store”, you should choose membership products and software products which pay you ongoing commissions from each sale.

Then, ideally use paid marketing to sell your products. The main problem with not having high ticket products in your sales funnel is that your return may be lower than your advertising spend. You can quickly lose money as an affiliate using paid marketing; especially if you don’t have any previous experience.

Cheaper Alternatives

Many affiliates use niche websites to generate traffic instead of using paid marketing. This is less costly but considerable more difficult than using paid marketing. One strategy I’ve used is to build niche websites and create content around my products. This takes time and is a lot of effort, but is a cheaper alternative if money is an issue.

Niche website owners create a blog around a topic they are familiar with and create content. This attracts would-be customers and you can use your blog to get them onto your email list. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic.

The best micro niche for blogging is one which you know something about. Ideally write about your passions and interests. This makes it much easier to sustain the necessary effort you’ll need to generate the required amount of traffic from it.

Best Residual Income Affiliate Programs

The best residual income affiliate programs offer a number of earning strategies. Single point-of-sale affiliate products only pay once. But some programs offer a range of products. This is far better for an affiliate. With a product range to promote, you can benefit from later sales which are made even years after you have referred a customer. Even better still, use a company which offers huge lifetime value and a built in sales team. (More on this later.)

Best Residual Income Affiliate Programs – Recurring Commissions

Recurring commission affiliate programs are a major key to getting the most out of your efforts, as an affiliate. With a recurring program, you get paid on an ongoing basis. Refer a customer once, and get paid over and over again. Products which fall into this category are things like software packages and membership programs.

Digital Products

It’s also worth choosing digital products if you want the best income from your affiliate business. With digital products, you stand to make considerably larger commissions than with their physical counterparts. Digital products tend to pay 40-50% commission on a sale. Physical products, on the other hand, only tend to pay 3-11% commission. Below you can see Amazon’s affiliate commissions on their products.

best residual income affiliate programs

Best Residual Income Affiliate Programs – Lifetime Value Products

What is a lifetime value product? The best products to choose to sell are those which people come to rely on, forever! These are products which can give them the most amount of value, over a lifetime. Products which help people and give them an income are therefore a good idea. Once someone starts using software which lets them build an income, then they will be a very satisfied customer.

Products like this include affiliate membership programs which offer training and software which offers affiliates the means to build their business. Typical examples are hosting providers and autoresponders (marketing software for email lists). See recurring commission affiliate programs for a list of products.

A Product Range

best residual income affiliate programs

A product range gives you more opportunities to earn from existing customers. With most affiliate products, you sell one at a time and make a single commission on each. With a product range, you sell an ‘entry level’ product which belongs to a range of higher value items. Then, a built in sales team, or automated sales system can make further sales on your behalf. Even if a later sale comes in years later, if you referred the customer for the initial sale, you earn the commission from that sale.

A product range is another great way to ensure your efforts as an affiliate are well rewarded. Since much of the work you do as an affiliate will be the same, it makes sense to choose the right program to attach yourself to. That way, your rewards are greater for the same amount of effort. It can take the same work to make a sale of a product worth $400 as it does for $4000. So given the same commission rate, it’s far better to promote the higher valued product.

High Valued Commissions

Yes high commission affiliate programs are another key to the best residual income programs. With a high value product range, you can make up to $8000 per sale! This can make a massive difference to your bottom line. With low value products you need to deal in bulk.

best residual income affiliate programs

This can be difficult for new affiliates when starting out because it can limit the ability to use paid marketing. With high valued items, you can use many more marketing strategies. An $8000 boost to your marketing budget can make a massive difference to your business!

You can choose the products to put in your digital “shop” according to the program you join. My recommended course is available through my free sign up video series. Sign up on the form on this site to get access.

Multi-Tier Sales – Best Residual Affiliate Programs

Yes multi-tier sales. A multi tier program gives you the ability to earn residual income from the sales made by your referrals. Using a program which offers both recurring commissions and multi-tier gives you the opportunity to massively increase your earning potential. Subscription sales made by your referrals give you recurring income. Subscription sales made by yourself give you an income. Large ticket sales made by yourself and referrals both give you commissions. So a multi-tier program gives you more opportunities to earn from using:

  • High ticket products
  • Subscription items
  • Up-sells – a range of products
  • A built in sales system/team selling your products on your behalf.

Sign up to the free video series on this site for more information. See also how to make residual income on the internet.

High Ticket Recurring Commission Affiliate

One of the best ways to start an affiliate business is to become a high ticket recurring commission affiliate. There’s a lot of common sense behind using both both high ticket affiliate products and recurring commission affiliate programs. Using both gives you the best of both worlds; you get large income “injections” from the large value sales, plus you get ongoing small “trickles” of income from your regular members and subscribers. Join a program which offers both by signing up to the free videos on this site.

High Ticket Recurring Commission Affiliate Marketing

Many affiliates start out by promoting low value products. Sometimes this is just because they took a course which suggested this. That’s how I started out. I promoted physical products from Amazon and then digital products from Clickbank. Much later, I learned the value of high ticket recurring commission affiliate products.

With physical products you only earn low commissions. Physical products have many more costs attached to them such as manufacturing and distribution. And although there are certain benefits to selling physical products, these costs mean you get a low rate of commission. Amazon, for example only pays affiliates between 3 and 10% commission.

high ticket recurring commission affiliate
Source: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/help/operating/schedule

High Ticket Products – Benefits

Selling high ticket digital products means you can earn up to 40% or even 50% in some cases of a products value. Why is this so much? Simply because with digital products, you the affiliate are doing all the advertising. There’s very few costs involved with manufacturing and distribution for digital products. They can be accessed online directly at no cost to the seller. Once created, they have no on-going manufacturing costs (in most cases).

High ticket products can pay out commissions of up to $8000 for a single sale. See highest paying affiliate programs list. This means that you can also use paid marketing strategies much more effectively than you would be able to for lower cost, lower commission products. Small valued items barely give you any breathing room to test and measure a paid-for marketing campaign. With an $8000 commission in your sales kit, you can afford to test a few adverts and fail many times before you make a sale.

Testing and measuring your marketing tactics is an important part of learning to become successful as an affiliate. If you’re only focused on free marketing strategies as an affiliate, you’ll have a lot of work to do and a long wait. (See how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing).

high ticket recurring commission affiliate

High Ticket Recurring Commission Affiliate – Subscriptions

Subscriptions and memberships are the best strategies to use for affiliates besides high ticket products. It took me a long time before I realised how powerful membership products really are for affiliates. I wasted a lot of time selling single products which only paid me once. Many affiliate programs only pay their affiliates once and then benefit from a potential lifetime of sales directly from each new customer who is referred. The affiliate then has to continually look for new customers and never really builds anything of their own.

With membership affiliate products (and subscription software products), affiliates can earn ongoing commissions for each and every customer they refer – potentially for a lifetime. Even a tiny recurring commission of $10 a month soon ads up with 100 customers. That’s $1000 a month recurring (passive). Of course there’s some attrition – customers dropping out. But if you choose products and customers wisely, you can create a hug ongoing income from referring customers to products which offer a lifetime value. (see recurring commission affiliate programs).

Typical examples of recurring commission products include membership sites (see free videos), software products such as hosting or autoresponders. These kinds of software are vital for online business owners, for example. So they make perfect sense for affiliates to promote because they can offer a lifetime value to the customer.

Other Income Sources From Affiliate Marketing

high ticket recurring commission affiliate

High ticket recurring commissions are two considerations for affiliates. But are there any other things to consider? Yes. A product range and the ability to earn multi-tier commissions are both other considerations if you’re already considering using high ticket recurring commissions. A product range gives you more products to offer existing customers. With many stand-alone affiliate products, you sell them once and only make a single commission. Ideally, you could have a number of products (or up-sells) within a range of products.

A built in sales team is another thing to consider too. With a ready made business model (like this one), you can offer up an existing sales funnel which has a number of up-sells, multi-tier sales, high ticket products and subscription products all built in.

Multi-Tier Sales?

What is a multi-tier sale? A multi tier sale refers to sales you make through your referrals. With a program which offers this, you can build a team and benefit from the sales they make. This incentivises you to help other people succeed in their own affiliate businesses; if you have referred them to a program.

A multi tier sales program which also uses subscription products can pay you for subscriptions sold by your team. This means you’ll not only earn from both high ticket sales and recurring commissions from your own sales, but also you’ll earn from those same kinds of sales made by your ‘downline’, or people whom you have referred to a program.

high ticket recurring commission affiliate

A Product Range

Selling a range of products gives you more products to offer existing customers. With a built in sales team, you only need to refer your customer to the entry level product. The sales team will “up-sell” customers other products within the range. Better products cost more money and so a product range might have incrementally more expensive products as you go up through the range.

Customers who buy an entry level product from you may go on to purchase a higher level product much later on. So you benefit from a customer for life, once you have referred them to a product range. Most affiliate programs don’t offer this. They only pay you once. When a customer returns, they benefit from the sale but you, as the original affiliate don’t.

Access a digital business system which offers:

  • subscription products
  • up-sells (a product range)
  • a built in sales team
  • multi-tier sales (at Mastermind level)

And all the software and training you need to build an online business from scratch. See the sign up form on this site to access free video series.

Affiliate Programs That Provide Websites

Affiliate programs that provide websites can save you heaps of time and effort. When I started out online, I learned a bunch of skills which you don’t really even need now! Take a look at the video below (click image) to see how quickly you can have your own ready made affiliate website up and running in minutes:

affiliate programs that provide websites
Inside The DBL (Digital Business Lounge) building your affiliate website

Instant Affiliate Website & Product Range

As you can see in the video, it’s very easy to use this software to build an affiliate website very quickly. What is even better is that this digital business system also provides training and education for building every aspect of your business online.

A range of digital products to place in your digital ‘store’ is also important. Most products you can choose from sites such as clickbank, allow you to earn a commission once from a sale. Better that this is to have a range of digital products which pay you again and again.

affiliate programs that provide websites

With recurring commission affiliate programs, you can earn ongoing income from previous sales. These are products such as memberships and software products which offer ongoing value to the customer. These are the best things to put in your digital “store” because you can earn more money from the same effort it would take to sell a lower value product which only pays you once.

Digital products are the best because they pay out 40-50% commissions. Compare this with physical products which pay 3-10% commissions on sales and you can see why digital is better.

Affiliate Programs That Provide Websites – The SFM

The Six Figure Mentors provide more than just website building software. They cover all aspects of online marketing, hold webinars and trainings throughout the world and offer a range of digital products you can promote and make money from. The SFM offer a digital success mentoring program for anyone serious about making an online business their full time living.

They offer websites and landing pages but also everything you could need as an online business owner:

affiliate programs that provide websites
Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek Founders of The SFM at a London training event.
  • Personal tuition and one to one mentoring (at the mentorship mastermind level)
  • Digital editing suites and landing page software
  • A range of digital products including high commission digital products, up-sells, and recurring commission products.
  • A network and community of online business owners you can connect with
  • A number of Facebook groups to join and interact with
  • Regular online training events where you can ask questions directly to mentors
  • Training end education tools, videos and seminars covering all aspects of online marketing.

Affiliate Programs That Provide Websites – What You Need To Do

An instant affiliate website and range of digital products is only half your business though. Without marketing, your business is dead in the water. It’s next to useless without a marketing engine driving quality targeted traffic towards it, into your ready made sales funnel.

Online marketing can involve a number of things from paid advertising to content creation. Depending on your interests, leanings and financial situation, you could choose one or another or both these strategies.

Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an online business. With a full range of high ticket affiliate products in your sales funnel, it’s much more doable too. You should choose your marketing methods accordingly depending on which products you are able to place in your digital shop.

With a full range of top tier products, you are better positioned to use paid advertising and recoup your costs and make a profit. With a smaller range of products, you will have to use free techniques or the cheaper marketing platforms.

Get Started!

To learn more and get started, opt in to the free workshop videos on this site. You’ll get a daily video explaining strategies you can use to build income streams from your laptop.

Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs

Some of the best products to promote as an affiliate are offered by recurring commission affiliate programs. With recurring commissions, you sell a product once, and potentially make a lifetime recurring commissions from the sale. Typically these kinds of products offer ongoing value to the customer in the form of membership to a program or a software product of some kind.

Recurring Affiliate Programs List

Here’s a recurring affiliate programs list:

  1. The Six Figure Mentors – Digital Online Business Mentorship Program.
  2. Aweber – For email marketing
  3. Leadpages- For custom landing pages
  4. Get Response – Email marketing
  5. Elegant Themes – WordPress website themes
  6. Social Pilot – Social Media Tool
  7. SEM Rush – SEO tool
  8. Snip.ly – Conversion/opt-in tool
  9. HostGator – Hosting provider
  10. Shopify – Online Store Builder
recurring commission affiliate programs
The SFM business commission structure

Why Choose Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs?

It’s obvious why many affiliates choose to sell these kinds of programs. A recurring commission on a digital software or membership product is far better than a one-off sale of some kind. It’s especially better than selling physical products too, which typically offer far less in terms of commission than digital products; which recurring commission programs usually are.

Take a look at the list above. All the products are digital products which are accessible online. None of them are physical products. Although physical products sell well online, they are not so good for affiliate marketers because they usually offer only 3-10% commissions. Digital products on the other hand offer much more, up to 40-50% in some cases.

Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs – A More Sustainable Business Model

recurring commission affiliate programs

Recurring commission affiliate programs offer affiliates the opportunity to build a much more sustainable business by promoting their products. With ordinary products (and even digital products), it’s much harder to build a sustainable income over the longer term. Getting traction with an online business is the key to longevity. Many affiliate marketers quit because they just don’t know this or they can’t get the traction in their business to make it sustainable.

“High Ticket” Affiliate Products

Another consideration for affiliates is the use of high ticket affiliate products. With high ticket products, you can earn much larger commissions from your members with larger value product sales. A high ticket product, for example, can sell for up to $20,000 with up to a 40% commission attached.

High value digital products include mentorship programs which offer more personal training and one-to-one training structures. This kind of product in your ‘digital store’ can mean that it’s easier to use paid marketing to build and scale your business. With lower value items in your digital store, you need to focus on free marketing strategies instead. This means it can take much longer to generate traction in your online business. See High Commission Affiliate Programs.

Up-Sells In Your Sales Funnel

Another consideration is to use up-sells. “Up-sells” are products you can offer existing customers. Many products, including recurring commission affiliate products, only have the one basic item for sale. With a product range, you can use the benefit of multiple “up-sells” to generate commissions from ongoing sales to your customer based which are closed by an in-house sales team. See Ready Made Sales Funnel more more on up-sells and digital product suite.

Multi-Tier Sales – Commissions From Your Referral’s Sales

The Six Figure Mentors offers multi-tier sales at their top tier partner level. This means that you can earn a percentage of the sale value when your referral’s start generating sales in their online business. This also gives you an incentive to help people directly as they become more proficient at building their online business.

Marketing A Recurring Commission Affiliate Program

recurring commission affiliate program

How does a recurring commission affiliate program affect your marketing strategy? Knowing a single sale can bring in a monthly income gives you far more leverage than if you’re selling physical products from Amazon. This can mean you are able to use paid marketing strategies. Knowing your yearly return on investment from, let’s say 100 sales, can give you the confidence to spend money on an advertising budget. If you’re selling books from Amazon, you would be wasting your money!

Multiple recurring monthly commissions can soon mount up. Compared to a stand alone product which pays only once, you can see that recurring commission affiliate programs can give you a lot more flexibility when it comes to marketing. You still need to make the sale of course, but there’s more scope for using the different marketing platforms when you can more easily recoup your advertising budget.

With a good product range and built in sales team, there’s more options again for using the more expensive (and better) marketing platforms.

Checkout my review of The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) who offer a training and education platform, an online community and a range of high ticket products which offer subscription commissions, up-sells, multi-tier sales and a built in sales team.

Highest Paid Affiliate Marketers

The highest paid affiliate marketers are by far those who create their own affiliate programs and use other affiliates to promote them. Even though they can often pay out 40%-50% commissions to their affiliates, this is well worth it for them because they aren’t spending money on advertising to make those particular sales.

However, creating your own affiliate program is no easy task. You’re far better off using an affiliate program which already sells and is working. To create high ticket products too isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have the expertise to do so. Ideally, choose high ticket digital products to sell; this gives you more chance of earning the higher salaries from affiliate marketing, if you do it right.

highest paid affiliate marketers

Highest Paid Affiliate Marketers – Sell More Products

Some of the highest paid affiliate marketers include also affiliate marketers who promote high commission affiliate programs such as The SFM. Anyone can do this by accessing a high ticket program and marketing products as an affiliate. Depending on how you position in the business system, will determine how much you can earn in commissions from some of the higher valued products.

For example, at the top level, The SFM’s DEA Partner program offers the ability to connect with six figure earners directly and get more personal tuition. You can also earn 40% commissions on products sales of $20,000 at this level. That’s $8000 for one single sale!

With a range of high ticket products within your virtual ‘store’, you can use online marketing strategies to drive traffic into a sales funnel and earn from a number of commissions structures including:

  • High ticket commission digital products – can be sold globally over the internet
  • Subscription affiliate products – membership products are the best things to use as an affiliate besides high ticket products. They give you ongoing commissions from previous sales.
  • Built in sales teamThe SFM has a built in sales structure which closes sales on behalf of their affiliates.
  • A range of up-sells – an “up-sell” is something you can promote to existing customers. When one of your previous referrals purchases another products from a range, you earn another commission – even if you didn’t personally close the sale.
  • Multi-tier sales – The SFM offers the ability (at partner level) to earn commissions from sales made by your referrals.

Highest Paid Affiliate Marketers – Help Other Affiliates

Some of the highest paid affiliate marketers within the SFM community (of which I’m a member), offer more help to their team. Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek have created a community of online entrepreneurs who are helping others to achieve success through promoting their SFM program. Top affiliates for the SFM have learned to help their members because that’s how they can help others succeed while also building a successful income for themselves.

This is especially true of a community such as the SFM because of the payment structure. Unless your team is doing well, and starts earning from The SFM, they will leave!

Best Paid Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Some of the highest paid affiliate marketers within The SFM community also use paid marketing to advertise. That’s not to say free strategies don’t work, they do. But it takes much longer to build an income from affiliate marketing through free content marketing strategies. Plus, it’s a less scalable marketing strategy too.

With paid advertising, you can learn which strategies work, and then keep them running. Content marketing takes much more time and effort, and much of the work you do, might not amount to much if it doesn’t get picked up by the search engines and/or shared frequently on social media.

highest paid affiliate marketers

Working Smart Vs. Working Hard

Some of the best paid affiliates find strategies which work, and keep doing them. But there’s a difference between working hard and working smart. As an affiliate marketer, you have to sell products. Affiliate marketing is performance based pay. This means you could work all day every day for months and still earn nothing.

So it pays to get the right training and education upfront if you’re serious about building a long-term and sustainable income from the internet. (Sign up on my website for the free videos).

Working smart is what top paying affiliates do. Whatever products you’re selling, unless you actually make sales, you’re wasting your time. Top paid affiliates know which products to sell, how to leverage their efforts and the best ways to use marketing to their advantage.

Physical Or Digital Products?

For example, physical products like you’d find on Amazon, for example, pay 3-10% commissions on a sale. Compare this with digital products which pay 40-50% commissions and you can see immediately where a smart affiliate might spend their time. Digital products can be downloaded from anywhere globally too, (like many physical products), but there’s fewer logistical problems associated with postage, manufacture and handlings costs. This makes digital products far better for affiliate marketers.

Subscription or ‘One-Off’ Sales?

highest paid affiliate marketers

As I’ve already mentioned, having subscription products in your sales funnel is a great way to work smart, rather than hard. ‘One-off’ sales don’t gain you a customer for life. With subscription products and a product range, you can make lifelong customers.

A physical store benefits from customer loyalty as a regular source of custom. Why should an online business be any different. With many affiliate products the affiliate sends a customer to a store, only for a single commission. The store gains the customer, potentially for life; whereas the affiliate don’t continue to benefit from having built that relationship. Choose subscription products!

Small Items Or Large Items?

There’s the train of thought which suggests that more people will be able to afford a cheaper item. Therefore, as an affiliate marketer you might decide to choose a (digital) product which sells for $100, for example. For each sale, you earn $40.

With a high ticket item, which sells for $1000, you might expect it to be harder to sell, especially to many people! However, this is a misconception. With affiliate marketing, you have to work the same amount whoever you sell to.

Granted, there may be less people able to afford a higher priced item. However, with a $1000 digital product you can earn $400 from the sale – ten times the amount earned from a $100 product. It doesn’t take ten times the effort to do this, especially if you target the right audience.

You still have to find customers as an affiliate marketer. If you work smart, you can find customers who value your products; and choose high ticket products for larger commissions. Higher commissions also help you to use paid marketing strategies, which are more scalable and faster than content marketing (free) strategies.