affiliate marketing earning potential Archives

The affiliate marketing earning potential is unlimited and some affiliates earn six figure salaries and above. But many affiliates will struggle when they start out and there’s a 95% drop out rate. The average salary of an affiliate marketer in 2023 according to Glassdoor is £38,040 (or $47,245.10).

It is the earning potential of affiliate marketing which appeals to many who get into the business. The entry level requirements to become an affiliate are incredibly low, especially compared to other traditional business models which would require equipment, business premises and staff. With affiliate marketing you only need a laptop and internet connection. Anyone can start from anywhere, providing they can join an affiliate program and get online.

This perhaps, in part, explains the huge drop out rate. But for those who stay there can be huge rewards.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – Large Value Products

Many new affiliate will join a program which they know of such as Amazon’s. Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs available. But Amazon’s commissions are tiny and you can earn as little as 1% on a sale.

So if you sold a $100 you would only earn $1 from the sale at this level. Digital products pay much more – around 30% – 40% and then there’s high ticket affiliate products. With a high ticket affiliate product you can earn as much as $500 and above from a sale. Take a look at this item:

The Golf Cart Hovercraft sells for $58,000 and pays 8% to affiliates who refer the sales. So you could earn $4,640 in commissions if you refer a sale as an affiliate.

With higher valued products and services, affiliates can earn substantially more per sale than with low value products. Some new affiliates don’t know about this and try selling lower valued products which can be much more difficult. To earn the same from lower priced items, you’ll need to sell thousands of them. Compare this to just one sale and you can see the difference in earning potential according to the products you choose to sell as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – List Building

Most top affiliates will have an email list in which they provide some kind of value in exchange for a subscribers email address. Top affiliates build email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. With such a list you can send out a single email and make tens of thousands of sales, or with a high ticket item, one or two sales would earn the equivalent income.

The bigger your list becomes, the greater the earning potential of your affiliate business. To build a list can be done through generating content on a blog, for example, or through using paid marketing.

Paid advertising is the fastest way to build a list and affiliates use advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube, among others.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – Subscription Products

Subscription products can vastly increase an affiliate’s earning potential. A subscription product might be a membership fee, or some kind of software product. Good subscription products offer a large value. An example is a business tool such as an email autoresponder. Autoresponders are used to build online (and offline) businesses by collecting email addresses and automating follow up messages.

Since this tool is vital for some businesses, customers of the product are likely to maintain their membership subscription for years if not decades. If you have referred the product, you can earn a recurring income from the sale. You can essentially earn a lifetime recurring commissions from these kinds of products with the right customers.

High Ticket & Subscription Products & Product “Suites”

A product “suite” is a product range and can be very lucrative for affiliate marketers. With a “one off” product you only earn a single commission per sale. This means you need to keep finding new customers in order to keep earning commissions. But with a product range, you can refer a customer once and benefit from later purchases they make from a product “suite”.

High ticket mastermind courses, training courses and mentoring programs are good examples of product ranges. These can be super profitable for affiliates because they can earn from multiple strategies including subscriptions, low ticket, mid ticket and high ticket items within a product range.

Combining this kind of business model with the use of email marketing can give you the largest affiliate marketing earning potential.

Get started here and learn how you can use this kind of online business model.

Summary

The affiliate marketing earning potential is unlimited since it’s a performance based business model and you can use automation to sell other people’s products online to a global audience.

The average salary of an affiliate marketer in 2023 according to Glassdoor is £38,040 or $47,245.10. Despite the huge potential of earnings in affiliate marketing many affiliate struggle to make their first sale and lose motivation. There’s a huge drop out rate of around 95%.

This is why it’s important to get the right knowledge and training if you intend to become an affiliate. Get started here and build your own affiliate business from scratch.

All affiliates start at zero when they begin, but ultimately the affiliate marketing income potential is huge. Top affiliates can earn millions from their affiliate businesses. The highest earners are those who create products themselves and have affiliates selling the products for them. But these entrepreneurs have often come from an affiliate background themselves and have become super affiliates; earning millions from selling other people’s products online; before going on to create their own products and courses.

Despite the affiliate marketing income potential that is possible, many affiliates struggle. The affiliate marketing failure rate is around 95% which means many who attempt it will simply drop out. But for the 5% who stick it out there are huge rewards, particularly if they promote the right program and are able to sell in bulk and scale up to a global audience.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential

But selling in high numbers is not the only key to affiliate success. Selling the right products and using the right business model and marketing strategies is also a major factor in someone’s success.

There’s many different affiliate marketing business models and if you get stuck with the wrong product or marketing strategy, it could mean your affiliate business goes nowhere. Amazon for example typically pays between 1% and 11% commissions on products within its affiliate program. Digital products pay much more – often 30%-50% commission on referred sales.

Smart affiliates know to use recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket products to give them the most profit for their efforts. But many new affiliates don’t know to do this, or can’t afford to invest in a high ticket program which gives them larger commissions. This means they’re stuck with low value items to sell and this limits the choice of marketing strategies that are open to them.

Even when they make a sale, if the commission level is as small as 1%, that’s only a tiny amount, even with an expensive item.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential – Starting Out

When an affiliate starts out they will be earning nothing. Everything they do will determine whether they make a sale online or not. The first few months and years of an affiliate business are the hardest. Nothing is guaranteed in affiliate marketing and for many, several months of hard work with little to show is too much to bare.

If you manage to get through this stage and make your first online sale, congratulations. This is a fantastic achievement and should be celebrated! Affiliates should always celebrate small wins because the small wins lead to bigger wins!

Income is generally sporadic even once you’ve broken through and had some successful sales. From one month to the next, you won’t have a guaranteed income. This is why many quit. But if you keep going and hold onto the day job while you build your affiliate business, income can overtake whatever you’re earning from trading your time for money in a job – even if you have a six figure salary.

Subscription Products

Going back to business models it’s important to use some subscription products in your affiliate business. With a low value product from Amazon which earns 3% commission, you’ll only earn $3 on a sale of a $100 product. That’s a tiny amount and you’ll need to sell a lot of them to make a good income.

With a subscription product, your earnings compound over time because each sale you make builds your monthly income. So selling a software product which pays a recurring commission can give you $20-$30 each and every month (providing your customer maintains their subscription).

10 sales gives you $300 a month, 100 sales gives you $3000 a month, and so on. With a global audience to sell to, there’s an unlimited earning potential. When you add high ticket products to your product range, your earning potential increases again. Providing you choose good products which give huge value, customers will maintain their memberships and subscriptions – often for a lifetime.

High Ticket Products

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? High ticket products are those products which carry a much higher price tag than most affiliate products. Most affiliates don’t realise that this is the key to large earnings with affiliate marketing, in addition to subscription products. With a high ticket product, an affiliate can earn commissions ranging from $500 to $5000 for an individual sale! What many think is that selling such a product will be much more difficult than selling a $100 product to earn $50.

But to earn $500 you would need to sell 10 of the lower valued ($100) product or 1 product at $1000 – (given a 50% commission for both). To earn $5000 with the lower valued product you would need to sell 100, or sell just 1 product valued at $10,000. Selling a higher priced product might be more difficult than selling the lower valued product, but it won’t be 100 times as difficult! So it makes sense to go for the higher priced items as an affiliate.

In addition to this, by choosing a sales funnel with a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf, you can avoid having to do much of the selling. With a good high ticket sales funnel you only need refer the initial sale. If your customer should purchase another product from the range, even years later, you still get credit for this sale. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential – Summary

The affiliate marketing income potential is unlimited but many affiliates don’t earn anything – especially when starting out. To earn money from affiliate marketing takes some time, patience and dedication. But once you start breaking through and making sales, you can focus on the things which have created those outcomes. In the first instance, you’ll spend a lot of time on unproductive actions which may not bring about sales. But if you stick with it long enough and keep learning, you should see some results.

Initial results aren’t consistent for most affiliate. They tend to be sporadic depending on your marketing methods. To help build a more consistent income from affiliate marketing it’s worth using subscription products which pay a recurring income month after month.

High ticket products too can help you generate more cash flow which should be reinvested back into your affiliate business to help it grow. Keep hold of the day job as long as possible because once you start relying on affiliate income you have less to invest back into growing your business.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.