So you think you’ve got what it takes to make it big as an affiliate?
How do you stop yourself from being among the majority of marketers that barely make a dime online?
When I first started blogging as a total newbie in the world of marketing, business and entrepreneurship, I spent months pouring my heart and soul into my content hoping things would take off.
But I failed. Miserably.
Why?
Because I was promoting products that I couldn’t relate to at all.
I’d judge a product solely on how much commission I would make per sale.
This made it extremely difficult to create compelling content — If I didn’t value the stuff I was writing about, how on earth would anyone else?!
People fail at affiliate marketing for many reasons — from entitlement issues and promoting terrible products to a lack of consistency and focus.
But one thing separates the super affiliates of this world from the rest.
No, they don’t have a magical secret formula for success! But what they do have is a proven affiliate marketing strategy that works.
That’s what you’ll learn in this blog post.
By studying the super successful affiliates of the world we can determine what works and reverse-engineer their strategies.
Here’s what else you’ll learn in this article:
Plenty of juicy material to plough through so let’s begin!
Why Super Affiliates are So Successful
Successful affiliate marketers don’t waste time constantly dabbling and dipping their toe’s into things. They maintain deep focus and remain consistent over a long period.
When it comes to marketing strategy for the best of the best, finding the right affiliate program that has an outstanding commission structure is the name of the game.
Elite level marketers don’t waste time promoting products that produce one-off $20 commissions.
Instead, they align themselves with high paying affiliate programs.
These affiliate marketing programs offer products/services that net huge commissions. And they’re the bread and butter for the super affiliates of today.
Of course, the affiliate programs alone don’t create wealth for these titans of affiliate marketing.
They create and share content that provides a ton of value, making a difference in people’s lives. They establish powerful brands that communicate their message to the world. And in most cases, they’re truly remarkable people!
People that succeed, fully understand the power of self-education, they’re always learning, growing and challenging themselves in some way.
Sucess with affiliate marketing is as much about your psychology as it is about marketing strategy and know-how.
Affiliate Commission Fundamentals
Let’s take a deep dive into the commission structures that make for the best affiliate programs. If you want to become a champion in the affiliate space and build a sustainable long-term business, you need to remember this one word…
Diversification.
And you’re in luck because affiliate marketing has plenty of opportunities to diversify your income.
There’s really only two types of commissions you should be aiming for as an affiliate, these are:
High-ticket product commissions
These products are typically sold on the back-end of a sales funnel (more on that in the next section) and cost upwards of $1000.
It doesn’t matter how good you are at marketing, if you’re spending your time promoting $20 products with no future upsells, you’ll struggle to build a profitable business.
For example:
Let’s say you’re going for a million dollars in a year.
To achieve this nice round number that contains many zeros, you’ll need to sell
50,000 copies of a product that costs $20.
Fifty thousand!
Good marketing can’t overcome bad maths.
On the flip side, if you’re promoting a product that costs $1000, you’ll only need to sell 1000 to make one million dollars.
If the product costs $4000 the number goes down to just 250.
Pretty powerful stuff right?!
Recurring commissions
These types of commissions are extremely powerful. Imagine referring someone once to a subscription service and getting paid healthy commissions every month for the lifetime of the customers’ subscription.
This is how you can build real wealth with affiliate marketing.
For example:
Every month I pay for an email marketing service called Convertkit . These guys are the bee’s knee’s when it comes to email marketing for bloggers.
My plan costs me $49 a month.
You can sign up as an affiliate to promote Convertkit to other bloggers and earn a healthy 30% lifetime commission.
This means if you referred just 100 people at $49 a month, you’d be earning $1500 a month.
While this isn’t a huge amount of money, it compounds over time.
You’ll keep earning that $1500 every month as long as your referrals stay signed up.
And check this out — if you referred just 20 people a month, within a year you could be looking at a passive income stream of $3600!
Totally passive. If you didn’t touch your PC for months, you’d STILL earn the same commissions.
That’s pretty incredible if you ask me!
Understanding the power of sales funnels
Understanding how sales funnels work can mean the difference between making $1000 or making $10,000 a month.
Seriously.
Most businesses have a sales funnel that they use to sell their products and services to consumers. These funnels usually offer a low-priced or free offering at the top and gradually introduce higher-priced, higher-value products to the leads that come through the funnel.
This back to basics diagram explains how sales funnels work…
Sales funnels work like magic because they help build relationships with customers and offer a taste of your products/services without large upfront investments.
Introducing your high-end products when your prospect barely knows you is like proposing to someone on your first date — it’s just weird!
The best affiliate programs provide lifetime customer commissions. So this means you’ll continue to earn commissions everytime your referral invests in a product from the business you referred them to.
This is how you earn the majority of high-ticket commissions in affiliate marketing.
Finding The Best Affiliate Products to Promote
How do you measure the value of an affiliate program?
Here’s some things to look out for before you start promoting:
How popular is the product?
You can’t judge the quality of a product solely based on the commissions you’ll receive.
You’ll find plenty of high paying affiliate programs out there with products that
aren’t great.
Research the quality of the product before you start thinking about promoting it. Check out the website. Read online reviews. Google search their brand name.
If no-one is buying the product in the first place, you’re wasting your time.
Commission structure
What’s the percentage of commissions they’re paying? Do they offer high-ticket products? What about recurring monthly payments?
Is it going to be financially viable for you to spend time promoting the product or is there something similar that pays higher commissions?
Cookie duration
The best cookies are the ones that last a lifetime. I’m being serious!
Noo, not the chunky chocolate chip cookies you’re craving — I’m talking about affiliate cookies!
Lifetime and “sticky” cookies mean you’ll be paid every time a customer you referred makes a purchase. In many cases, this still applies if someone cancels their membership and rejoins after a few months.
How cool is that?!
On the flip side, other cookies aren’t so tasty. Some only last for a few days and cover first purchases only.
Backend/upsell products
This is huge for anyone that wants to be a super affiliate.
Affiliate programs that have backend/upsell products (as mentioned in sales funnel section) can multiply your earnings many times over for doing the same amount of work.
The backend is where businesses make the most money. Let’s say you purchase an e-book on how to overcome anxiety.
After the purchase, the product owner builds a relationship with you through helpful emails that provide tonnes of value. After a week or so, he introduces you to his $2000 training program.
A percentage of people that bought the e-book will invest in the coaching program.
This is a very rough example but it demonstrates the sheer power of upsell products.
Second-tier commissions
These commissions are special.
They pay you a percentage of sales from other affiliates that you’ve referred to the business.
So not only can you make money by promoting products and services, you can also earn a percentage of profits other affiliates make through second-tier commissions!
What Are The Best Affiliate Programs?
Time to slice into the meat and potatoes of this blog post, the list of top affiliate programs! I’ve performed some detailed research and turned over a fair few rocks to bring you this tantalizing list!
I’ve broken things down into sections based on industry and created a handy contents guide (below) where you can jump through to your desired part of the article.
For the most part, you won’t find physical goods affiliate programs such as Amazon Associates in this article.
Why? Because commissions for these products are way too low.
I’ve also written a separate article on travel affiliate programs so you won’t find them on this list either.
Let’s get started!
Kicking things off with a bang — affiliate programs in the online business and entrepreneurship space!
Some of these programs provide an incredible education for anyone looking to get their start online through a unique “earn while you learn” opportunity.
Affiliate programs in this space pay extremely well. Why? Because many products are high-ticket AND information-based so businesses can afford to be very generous with their commissions.
Great news for affiliates!
Strictly speaking, this isn’t an affiliate program as such. I would describe it as more of a digital business system, and one that I openly promote myself because of the sheer life-changing value it provides.
It is a highly unique platform that has by far the highest paying commissions I have ever come across.
The Six Figure Mentors is a training and mentorship platform that prepares you for every aspect of online entrepreneurship, helping to empower you with the digital skill sets and leadership mindsets you need to succeed in the online arena.
They provide a step-by-step, modular training program taught by top business leaders to students from all over the world.
The courses they offer are designed for members to lay the proper foundations for their online business, essentially avoiding many of the obstacles and financial errors that people tend to make when starting out as an entrepreneur.
The SFM also houses a community of like-minded aspiring (and accomplished) entrepreneurs which is something that can be invaluable on your journey to success.
This is something perfect for the aspiring entrepreneur looking for their first online opportunity.
You’ll learn powerful business mindsets as well as marketing skills that will enable you to effectively sell products online.
You also have the ability to promote the system itself to business opportunity seekers and generate an income through their high paying affiliate program.
Points worth noting:
Cutting-edge marketing and business skill set training modules.
Lifetime customers. Recurring monthly as well as yearly affiliate commissions.
Up to $8000 commissions per sale! (Yes really)
Your own digital business coach to take you by the hand throughout your marketing education.
Access to a digital skills platform. Lead capture page creator. Web hosting. Blogging platforms
You can check it out for yourself here .
2. Shopify
At its peak on Black Friday this year, over $555,716 in transactions occurred in a
single minute through Shopify stores.
Shopify now powers over 500,000 business in 175 countries and generates over $23.7 million in monthly recurring revenue.
They’re the clear market leader in the drop shipping space.
You can promote the Shopify suite of tools to people looking to start their own online store. And earn a healthy income doing it too.
These guys provide everything you could possibly need to run a successful e-commerce business — from website builders to shopping carts, web hosting, analytics, store management, SEO and more.
The Shopify commission structure runs far and wide thanks to a variety of products you can promote. If you own a web design company or agency, development stores are an awesome way to build your recurring commissions.
You can set up stores for clients through Shopify and earn a 20% monthly revenue share on their subscription.
Through standard affiliate link promotion, you can earn 200% of the monthly subscription per referral.
One of their newest features is the free pos card reader that allows store owners to take physical payments from anywhere in the world.
Points worth noting:
Earn 200% of a customers monthly subscription through standard affiliate promotion (up to $2400 per sale).
Recurring commissions for development stores and Shopify Plus referrals.
We can also help you get your store up and running simply contact us.
3. PROOF
This is most definitely one affiliate program you haven’t come across!
PROOF is the brainchild of Dave Rogenmoser, someone I came to know of through a popular consulting training course.
It’s a subscription software that helps business owners increase their conversions and sales through the awesome power of social proof.
Since this product was launched, I’ve noticed it on dropshipping stores, price comparison websites and digital course sales pages.
PROOF is everywhere!
It uses a simple but powerful pop-up that lets people know who else has signed up/purchased a product recently. This simple concept has resulted in HUGE conversion increases for businesses!
If you run any type of business that involves generating leads/selling products,
PROOF could make a game-changing difference to your conversion rates.
Here’s is what it looks like in action…
Looks pretty sweet, right?!
Points worth noting:
A 14-day free trial period before anyone signs up or a paid account.
Basic marketing materials available to help promote software.
4. Qserver
This business falls under the web hosting umbrella and is one that I came across very recently.
Web hosting is a great way for bloggers to generate a healthy affiliate income. This particular example is one of many web hosting companies that pay handsomely for affiliate referrals.
Qserver offers powerful managed WordPress hosting for — you guessed it, WordPress websites!
I selected this business because they’re the first web hosting company I’ve ever seen that offers recurring affiliate commissions on top of the initial referral payments you receive.
Granted, the recurring commissions are only 10% but that’s 10% more than any other web hosting company offers right now.
The Old Ways Are DEAD:
Thebiabthe big one although similar to SFM you get high ticket for life not just that you also learn the act of utilizing every bit of your online presence to cut a cheque.
Are You Ready To Adapt And Thrive... Or Will You Stagnate And Struggle? It’s YOUR CALL! Deep down, there are only two driving forces behind every single decision we take when it omes to money:
Security and Freedom. Normally, people who value security tend to choose to work the same job for very long and they feel happy as long as they can provide a secure future for their families.
While people who value freedom more tend to do whatever it takes to own their time, choosing to start their own businesses, freelance or work from home.
You can check them out following here
Rounding things off
So there you have it! Enough information on affiliate marketing to make your head explode.
Don’t worry if you feel overwhelmed, you’ve just had tons of information thrown at you.
This isn’t something that’ll be built overnight.
If I had to give you one piece of advice, it would be to decide on what you want and stick to that one thing.
The dabbling nature people tend to have is
the single biggest reason for failure.
Affiliate marketing isn’t easy, and it won’t make you rich overnight. But if you align yourself with the right product, receive the right training and execute on what you’ve learnt, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.
The bottom line
Most successful businesses leverage the power of sales funnels to add value and generate huge profits. As an affiliate, you can leverage sales funnels that have already been setup by merchants to promote their products/services.
The bottom line
Understanding what makes a great affiliate program is the key to finding and promoting nothing but the best! High-ticket upsell products is where you can make the big-bucks.
FAQ - Should I be paying to join an affiliate program?
This is a common question that a lot of newbie’s have when first getting started online. The answer is, it depends. Most affiliate programs will be free to join but others have extensive training programs attached that will cost you money.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, it makes a world of difference if you have access to step-by-step training that puts you on the right track. The right training will save you months, if not years of banging your head against a brick wall.
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