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 – 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 team – The 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.
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?
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.