In this post you’ll find the answers for the questions: what is a high paying affiliate program? and how is it different from other kinds of affiliate programs?
Affiliate marketing is the first entry point to many of those who plan to start their own businesses. The reason why this kind of business is the best for beginners to the business world, is that it often requires no money to make money. With a computer, good internet connection and a good copy, one can literally start making money from day one. Depending on the commission you make per sale, the time it takes from just starting on the business world to becoming a successful businessman/woman can be shorter than you think. Assuming you save what you make, you can eventually start a business of your own, and even have other people promoting your business for a commission. Regardless of whether you plan to stay an affiliate or build a product/service of your own, its important to choose the right affiliate programs for success.
What is a high paying affiliate program?
In business there is a variety of options for all kinds of pockets, skills, as well as levels of risk tolerance. Affiliate marketing being a variant of business of its own kind also comes in different flavors. They can be broken down into different sets, and among them are:
The payment structure
Just in the same way that not all businesses have the same goals, not all affiliate programs have the same compensation structure. The way an affiliate program rewards its affiliates varies from business to business, since in the end of the day, what affiliates are really doing is to promote a certain product/service for a business. So there are two major ways of compensation: pay per sale and pay per referral. If you’re already familiar with them you can skip straight to the size of the pay.
1. Pay per Sale
In a pay per sale scheme, the affiliate is rewarded for each successful sale is responsible for. Sometimes the affiliate has to build a landing page by himself, while other times the business already has its own landing page setup and its all a matter of attracting traffic to that page. This is usually the scheme most high paying affiliate programs choose to reward their affiliates.
2. Pay per referral
The pay per referral scheme on the other hand, is more about the number of people the affiliate is able to bring to the business. This could be through contact information such as emails addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes both. As counter intuitive as it might sound, sometimes a business has more to gain by getting the contact information of a costumer/prospect, than it has by getting a sale. The reason for this is that when you have the contact information of potential costumers you get to make not only make one sale, but many more over time. With each product the business brings to the market, they can make more sales simply by promoting their email lists; And as more and more people use the internet, emails tend to become one of the most valuable pieces of contact information for businesses. As online marketers often say “the money is on the list “.
The size of the pay
The size of the pay is another variant among affiliate programs. The idea of affiliate programs, specially if the reward mechanism is based on the number of sales the affiliate is able to make, is not that of an employer paying a salary to an employee, but that of business partner to business partner. The affiliate brings the costumer, and the business brings the product. The bulk of the job is on coming up with a product/service that people would be willing to pay for, so the affiliate gets a smaller part of the pie. The important thing here is not so much what part of the pie he gets, but the fact that he gets a part of it.
Today you can find all kinds of affiliate programs, from the ones that can pay as little as $5-$10, as well as programs that pay you on the thousands of dollars. What makes some pay more than others is mostly one thing: the price of the product. In essence, the more expensive the product, the higher the payment you get from the affiliate program and vice versa. High paying affiliate programs are usually affiliate programs in which the affiliate is promoting high ticket items and one of the most common examples is online courses.
The size of the pie
If you think of it in percentage terms it all makes sense. 2% of a product that sells for $100 is different from 2% of a product that sells for $1000.
With the high paying also comes greater difficulty in making sales. We can all agree that its way easier to sell a person to a $2 product than it is to sell the same person to a $100 or $500 product. The disadvantage of high paying affiliate programs could reside on the difficulty to make the sale, but the high point is that you only need a handful of sales any way. While its easier to sell cheap products, you also need to make lots of those sales to have any meaningful income.
In the end of the day, just like cars and insurance, what really matters is not so much the price, but your ability to sell. The better you become at selling a specific kind of product, the more money you’ll make regardless of the price. So, low ticket affiliate programs and high paying affiliate programs are like apples and oranges. They require different strategies and modes of thinking to be successful.
Summary
If yo’re planing to start affiliate marketing the best advice I can give you apart from choosing what kind of products you want to promote(high or low ticket), is to dedicate some time and money to invest in yourself. As the motivational speaker Jim Rohn teaches us in many of his tapes: you need to work harder in yourself than you do in your job if you are to be successful.
It is all about knowledge and experience 😉
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