Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly profitable niche, but it benefits highly when you have a large audience and a lot of volume. It’s a simple matter of numbers.
When you’re selling an offer that gets you $1 each time a user buys, you need to sell a lot of them in order to turn a profit. That makes sense. The fact that so many affiliate offers are for a dollar or less is a problem many new marketers face. It’s hard to find offers that get you more on a conversion, and when you find them, you also find a niche filled with other people trying to strike gold.
When you’re selling an offer that gets you $100 on a conversion, you don’t need nearly the same volume as you do with the cheaper offers. The thing is, you have to ask yourself why the price for a commission is so high. Sometimes it’s just because of the value of the product. If you’re selling a cruise rated at $1,000, getting $100 for it might not be out of the question. When you’re selling a program worth $125, a commission of $100 says to me “this is an incredibly hard product to sell.”
What, then, would you say about a product that you sell once for $15, and it gives you another $15 the next month, and another $15 the next, and the next, and so on for months or even years? Would you jump on the chance to sell that kind of product?
This is the recursive model, where one sale can lead to recurring commissions on a monthly basis.
The idea is simple; you sell something that works on a subscription model, like a course or a magazine. When the user pays their monthly fee, you get a cut of that fee. Every month the user keeps it going, you get more cash. This snowballs as more people subscribe; eventually, you might be making hundreds of dollars a month from users who haven’t visited or thought about your site in a year. It’s not your job to keep those users interested; that’s the job of the creator of that content. Your job is simply to make the sale.
The trick to a monthly recurring commission structure is that you can’t fake it. With basic CPC ads, AdWords and other such advertising, you can often buy tricky bot traffic and earn money by sending fake people through the links in question. With affiliate sales, you can’t do it. You only get paid when a legit financial transaction occurs, which fake users never do.
For example, let’s look at the first affiliate program on the list:
The affiliate program for Swissmade is a recurring model with plenty of support. The vendor has a product to sell, and they allow you to do the work to sell it for them. You build a site and refer users through your links to their site. They close the sale, and check out where the user came from. They find it was you, and they pay you for the referral. Then they monitor that user. If they keep up their subscription, you continue to get a referral payment for each month they keep it up. This can be pretty lucrative for offers that go on an annual sales basis, as well.
Swissmade offers you a bunch of tools and support, as well as high quality analytics and reporting. They also have a selection of great offers, so it’s not even that hard to promote good products.
Their requirements are strict, even tough they don’t have a lot listed. You need a Paypal account, which is par for the course. The other two lines, though, are a lot trickier. For one thing, you can’t earn a referral for a purchase you made yourself through your own link. If you’re tempted to use the affiliate program for a discount, don’t; it won’t work. Of course, Amazon has the same policy, so this is nothing new.
The other line is the hardest. “You are only allowed to use legal, ethical methods to promote their products.” No sending fake traffic, no spamming, no obfuscated links, no tiered redirects. It all has to be legitimate and high quality referral traffic. You’ll find this a lot, and it makes sense. If you’re not sending good traffic, you’re not closing sales, and so you can’t earn a commission.
Clickbank is one of the largest affiliate networks in the world, so it has a ton of offers available. A lot of them are product subscriptions or recurring courses, so they have that recurring fee that gives you plenty of cash over time. They also have a reputation for being one of the best affiliate networks around.
As an added bonus, Clickbank also offers a relatively high commission for many of their offers, up to 75% for some of the better products. Of course, these tend to have a lot of competition, but that’s to be expected. The brilliance of a recursion model is that you can succeed even with a packed niche, because you don’t need a ton of traffic and you don’t need to be dominant.
Another benefit to this network is the automatic upsell. A lot of their products have upsells built in. You refer a user for a product that earns you $15, but they decide to convert at a higher tier than the one you linked, you’ll get a higher payout corresponding to the higher tier. Not all of their offers have recursion or upsells, though, so keep an eye out when you’re promoting them.
Recursive models can be hard to find through a network. You might find that Clickbank has a lot of offers but very little in the way of recursive products at any given time. Therefore, why not provide an aggregator for recursion offers specifically?
A lot of the affiliate programs on this site aren’t part of greater networks. They’re often individual sites with their own single offers, which you can register for and sell at your own leisure. Think of it like the Amazon affiliates program, on a much smaller scale.
There are other aggregator sites, but this one has quite a few offers you can use to get started. Find a niche and explore offers, see what you can put together, and start building an audience. The referrals will start to roll in just as soon as you set them up.
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Alice Walsh
says:Thank you James! It’s a good article! I would add about Amazon Affiliate club. This community helped me greatly to start business with Amazon. I learned how to build and promote Amazon affiliate sites. So, you can try it as well, I think.