They say there’s no shortcuts in business, but is there an affiliate shortcut you can use to make affiliate marketing easier? With affiliate marketing you don’t get paid unless you make a sale. So making the sales is clearly the path to success as an affiliate marketer.
But what if you could get paid over and over for each sale? Surely that would make the journey easier? Well you can! With subscription affiliate programs you can get paid recurring commissions for each sale you make.
Subscription products allow affiliates to build a monthly income which makes their business much more sustainable. As a beginner in affiliate marketing, income isn’t typically very stable. One month you might make a few sales, and the next you might make none! But with subscription products your income starts building and compounding as soon as you start generating sales.
This might be months into your affiliate journey, depending on the marketing strategy you decide on. If you’re blogging, for example, your journey will typically take longer than someone using paid marketing.
Affiliate Shortcut – More Traffic
Traffic is another big problem for affiliate marketers. When you start out, you have zero traffic. You can build traffic in a number of ways in order to generate affiliate sales:
- Paid marketing
- Organic marketing – through content generation
- SEO – search engine optimisation (typically accompanies content creation)
- Link building
- Social media marketing
If you’re starting out as a content generator, it can take months or even years to get enough traffic to make consistent sales. Even with paid marketing, sending traffic directly to offers can be tricky. Typically someone needs several points of contact with a product or affiliate before they make a buying decision. You could spend a heap in marketing before you make any sales at all, or create a tonne of content. But if you build an email list this can considerably shorten this timespan.
An email list allows an affiliate to better control their traffic. They can build a relationship with their subscribers over a much longer period of time than from a website or sales page. This means you can make more out of your content and/or paid marketing. On a website someone only gets a small window of opportunity to make a purchasing decision. But once on your email list, this time period is vastly extended. Some subscribers will even buy from you years after having signed up to your email list.
Affiliate Shortcut – Digital Vs. Physical
Physical products pay between 5% and 10% commissions typically. So promoting them means you’ll be earning a lot less than from a typical digital products which pays between 30%-40%!
There’s all kinds of digital products available online and although physical products do sell well, it can take some time to learn how to sell anything online. The time spent learning might be several weeks or months, but if you start out with higher valued products, those with larger commissions and those which pay recurring commissions your time will be better spent in the long run!
One sale of a digital product can be worth ten times than of a physical item. So for less work you can actually earn more with the right products. This is all the more apparent with high ticket affiliate products. High ticket products typically are valued at $500 or more. They will therefore come with a larger commission. It’s far easier to sell a single item which pays you a larger commission, than to sell hundreds of low cost items which amounts to the same earnings.
High ticket products can therefore save you a heap of time and energy as an affiliate marketer.
High Ticket Sales Funnel & Marketing
Some product ranges offer multiple products within a sales funnel. These are the best kinds of products to promote if you want to make your life a whole lot easier.
With a high ticket sales funnel, you promote a single “entry level” product. The system automatically up-sells higher level products on your behalf. A good funnel will have larger value products which are very useful and offer huge value. It will also use subscription products within the product range. This means as an affiliate you can earn from:
- High ticket sales
- Subscription products
- Digital products
In fact, the most efficient way to use affiliate marketing for the best result. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this. What’s more useful still about a business system like this is your ability to market it using paid marketing. Paid marketing platforms are expensive, so selling low value physical products using paid platforms can be very difficult. There’s less margin for profit. But with a high ticket digital sales funnel, you can benefit from paid marketing platforms more easily.
Paid Marketing – Affiliate Shortcut
Content marketing is a long term laborious strategy which most people don’t want to do. You can spend months or years creating content with no guarantee of results! But with paid marketing, you can run an advert and immediately see traffic coming to your website or landing page.
This is a huge shortcut for affiliates if they are willing to see it through. Although many advertising campaigns don’t work in the first instance, by testing and measuring your marketing, you can quickly find a profitable strategy using paid platforms such as Facebook, Adwords, YouTube etc.
Once you find a profitable campaign, paid marketing is super scalable. This means you can scale up to a global audience very quickly.
Paid marketing can get pricey of course, but with a high ticket sales funnel you stand to profit more easily than through using low value affiliate products. Once profitable, quickly scale up simply through increasing your marketing budget.
Access an all in one affiliate business system which offers these benefits and training here.
