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:
- Autoresponder Software
- Keyword research and SEO tools
- Online Business Building Tools And Training
- Website Hosting Software
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.
