Which product is best for affiliate marketing? There are so many products available to promote for affiliates that it can be confusing for new affiliates to know what to promote. Should you promote physical products or digital products? Should you choose subscription products or those which pay one off commissions? What about high ticket products?
There’s no perfect answer to this question, since everyone will have a different approach to the way they promote products. However, certain products are definitely more lucrative than others. So if the same amount of work is involved in product promotion, it makes sense to choose those which pay more!
This is certainly the case if you’re starting out from scratch and have no marketing experience yet. That way, your work will compound to bring about more income, more quickly, once your marketing starts kicking in. But what about if you have a website already which is generating traffic? Or an email list? If that’s the case, it makes sense to choose products which are aligned with your existing audience, since you can quickly take advantage of your existing online presence.
Your budget is another consideration too. With a small budget, you may not be able to purchase a high ticket sales funnel which offers the best affiliate commissions. Nor may you be able to afford paid marketing platforms which can easily burn through your budget while you’re learning.
Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? – Your Marketing Method
It can easily be said that subscription products are the “best” because they pay recurring commissions each and every month! High ticket affiliate products pay the largest commissions for a single sale, so they’re they “best”. However, some digital products which pay the most are also in the most competitive niches. This means if you’re going for a particular marketing strategy, particularly organic marketing methods like blogging or video blogging (v’logging), you’re going to be up against a lot more competition.
This means you’ll need to work a lot harder and for longer before you can break through and start making regular sales. In a less competitive niche, these kinds of marketing strategies can work more effectively, and more quickly. So for example if you’re trying to promote affiliate marketing programs, you should expect to find more competition within the organic marketing arenas. But for a topic less competitive, such as scrapbooking, you may have more success with organic traffic generation.
If, on the other hand you’re going to be using paid marketing, you’re far better off with choosing high value products. Paid marketing platforms are expensive and so to profit, you’ll need high value products. It’s much more difficult to promote low value affiliate products using paid strategies.
Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? – Physical Products Vs. Digital Products
Physical products tend to pay less than digital products in terms of commissions for affiliates. For example, Amazon pays affiliates from 1% to 20% on its product range. Mostly though this will range from 3-10% see affiliate commissions Amazon. Digital products tend to pay much more 30-40% on average.
Physical products can be easier to sell of course. The value of a physical product is fairly obvious whereas some digital products offer a more arbitrary benefit. Trust is another issue when selling products online too. Amazon is a well trusted site and many people are comfortable purchasing from the site. But be ware too that Amazon has and does change their affiliate terms to the detriment of the affiliate.
Why Digital Products Pay More?
Physical products have a whole heap of costs involved in their manufacturing process. They need building and posting. For everyone to get a “cut” of the profit and make it worthwhile, the advertisers fee will likely go down in the future too! Digital products pay more because they can.
The main cost of selling a product online is advertising, which is what the affiliate is getting paid for. With a digital product, there’s less involved cost-wise in manufacturing and distribution. Since delivery of a software or training product can be completely free online, this saving is passed on to the affiliate promoting it.
Once digital products are created, they require less input in the manufacturing process. While they may still be improved and developed, the “finished article” can be sold multiple times for free over the internet.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products pay far more than the average commission rate to affiliates. A typical high ticket product will pay $500 or more to an affiliate. Even standard digital products don’t offer this benefit. Many digital products sell for around $100 offering around $30-$40 in commission, depending on their commission structure. High ticket products have much larger price tags and so for what can be the same amount of work for an affiliate, you can make much more money!
Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product, the Helicycle!
At a cost of $395,000, an affiliate can earn an 8% commission with this product if they can refer a sale. That’s $31,600! So a single sale of such a product can obviously be worth many sales of a cheaper item. You would need to sell 790 of the standard digital product (priced at $100) given a 40% commission. in order to make the same as selling just one of these!
So selling high ticket products can be very lucrative. You might think that nobody will buy such an expensive item, but they do! It may be more difficult to sell such an item online. But it won’t be 790 times as difficult! To make the same money will require a lot more work selling the lower valued item.
Subscription Products
Subscription products are great for affiliate marketers because they pay ongoing commissions from each sale. An example of a subscription product is some form of software or a membership product. Products like these offer ongoing value for the customer.
Business tools in particular are good because businesses need the product in order to run their business!
An example might be an email autoresponder which is used by affiliates themselves. You may already have one? If not access a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
With subscription products affiliates can get the much needed traction in their business much more quickly because of ongoing commissions on their every sale! A “one-off” commission is short lived and even with a high ticket item, may not pay as much as subscription products will do over their lifetime! See also subscription affiliate programs for a list of products.
Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? What You Align With
Another consideration for affiliates when choosing products is of course their alignment with the product. As a new affiliate it can be tempting to promote any product you find online, whether you know the product or not – and even if you haven’t purchased it yourself! This can lead to problems because if you’re not aligned with the product yourself, it can be more difficult to promote it as an affiliate.
If you choose a product which you believe in, it’s much easier to get behind it in your advertising methods.
It can therefore be a good idea to promote products you have purchased yourself. At the very least this means your promotion of the product is a genuine recommendation, and not out of integrity with your own purchasing decisions. It will also mean you’re a more genuine affiliate and this comes across in your sales materials, advertising and copy.
If you go down the route of organic marketing – using strategies such as blogging and video blogging, this will help you stay the course because you’re promoting with integrity. It can also help you choose a topic or niche, if you’re particularly interested in something and choose the longer route of content creation and organic marketing.
Working on something you’re interested in and enthusiastic about can mean you stay the course much longer than if you choose something only for the commissions! This is what might be needed, depending on how you approach your affiliate business and the marketing strategies you choose to use. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
I hope this article has helped you better understand which product is best for affiliate marketing? There is of course a lot to consider. If you have anything to add that I may have missed please comment below.
