A sustainable affiliate program doesn’t just mean one which is eco friendly! While eco friendly affiliate programs lay claim to being environmentally friendly, a sustainable affiliate program should be financially sustainable. So what does this mean?

Aren’t all affiliate programs sustainable? Well, no they aren’t! Many well known affiliate programs offer little in the way of commission. Take Amazon for example, and eBay. Both programs offer from 1% to 10% commissions on products you refer and despite some benefits of cookies and bonuses, this is still really low.

You can get lucky if you refer someone to a product on Amazon if they fill their cart the same day and go on a spending spree. But mostly you’ll get small commissions for your efforts. This means you have to deal in bulk and unless you’re way ahead in your affiliate journey, and able to come up with free traffic, this is unsustainable for many affiliates. They simply can’t make a living with this model, let alone a scalable income.

Sustainable Affiliate Program – Recurring Commissions

Of course it all comes down to the affiliate’s marketing strategy too. Unless you can find a strategy which works, your business won’t be sustainable whatever you do. But that aside, there are some affiliate marketing business models which are far more sustainable than others. With an affiliate commission structure which offers recurring commissions, for example, you’re in a far better place than with single commissions of only 3%!

If your product only offers you 3% on every sale, and is priced at or below $100, that’s $3 or less you’ll make on a sale! Unless you’re making hundreds of these on a regular basis, you’ll struggle to make affiliate marketing pay. However, with a product which offers recurring commissions, on a membership or software product, your income will grow for each sale you make. So, even if you’re making a loss in the first instance, a recurring income will help you recover more quickly.

Recurring commission affiliate products are a major key to sustainability with an online business. With recurring commissions you efforts compound over time. With single point of sale products, you always need to keep selling to keep earning.

Sustainable Affiliate Program – High Ticket

With low value physical products you can expect smaller commissions. But with high value digital products, it’s far easier to build a sustainable income. Digital products on the whole give you far larger commissions than physical. With a digital product you’re looking at 40% commission typically compared to 1-10% with physical. That’s a huge disparity. Sell just 10 products at $1000 commission and you’ll make the same as selling 1000 products which pay you only $10 commission.

You might say that digital products are more difficult to sell than physical ones. And perhaps that’s true. Physical products are more tangible and require less convincing to sell. But if you compare the work you’ll need to do to make $10,000 with physical products compared to digital ones and the answer should be obvious. You’ll need to sell 100 times as many products with the physical product example above. It’s not going to be 100 times more difficult to sell a digital product.

With high ticket affiliate marketing you can earn upwards of $1000 per sale and even up to $8000 for a single sale!

What Makes An Affiliate Program Sustainable – Support

With affiliate marketing it’s very easy too to reach burn out point and give up. What can make a more sustainable affiliate program is one which offers help and support to its members. By joining a community as an affiliate, you can benefit from the experience of others who have already become full time entrepreneurs.

On your own, it’s difficult to sustain the necessary effort to make your business consistently profitable. But with help and support, it can be easier to overcome the barriers to success.

By following a step by step procedure and listening to other market leaders and coaches, your affiliate journey should be a smoother one.

Learn more about a training and mentorship program and how to access a high ticket affiliate product “suite” here.

A High Ticket Product Range

I mentioned high ticket products earlier, but it’s also worth looking at a high ticket product range if you want a sustainable affiliate program. With a product range, you can refer someone to a single product and benefit from a number of “up-sells”, closed automatically by a built in sales team. This means you don’t need to do the selling personally and helps massively with a digital business system.

Simply refer people to your entry level product through a sales funnel using email marketing. Most affiliate products don’t offer this. With most affiliate products, once you have referred a sale you lose your customer to the product owner. They get a customer, potentially for life, and you get a single commission! The more sustainable affiliate programs reward you for life, with recurring commission products and a product range from which you can continue earning. See lifetime commission affiliate programs.

With a high ticket program, higher value products offer more value to the customer. For each subsequent sale closed in-house (by a built in sales team), you earn commissions of up to 40% (depending on your commission structure).

Having a product range is another way to make your affiliate business more sustainable over the longer term. See SFM Digital Business System for one.

More Sustainability Through Muli-Tier Commissions

A multi tier affiliate program offers commissions based on sales made by your referrals. So as you grow the number of member sales through promoting recurring commission products, you can also benefit from their success through using a multi-tier program. The SFM Digital Business system offers a muti-tier commission structure to those at the top tier of the business system.

Selling the below products can earn you up to 40% commissions at the top tier. You can also benefit from 10% commissions based on the sales made by your members.

Summary – Sustainable Affiliate Business Model

Before finding this business model, I struggled for a long time with affiliate marketing. I sold products from Amazon and eBay by creating blogs and attempting to get traffic for free. But this business model has becoming less and less sustainable because the affiliate commissions are so low, and not everyone can have the top rankings for their content on Google.

There’s many other organic strategies you can implement with affiliate marketing, but free traffic is much more difficult to obtain and those low valued products don’t pay nearly enough to make it worth your while.

Paid marketing on the other hand is much more sustainable as a source of marketing (and it’s scalable). But you need a business model which can support it. With high ticket digital products, a product range, recurring commissions and a multi-tier affiliate program, you have a much more sustainable affiliate business than with the various other strategies you could employ.

Access a free video series to learn more about the SFM digital business system here. Or, get started and access Mentors All In here.