lucrative affiliate programs Archives - High Commission 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.