How To Earn Higher Affiliate Commissions

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A few months ago I explained why I prefer affiliate marketing to product creation, and nothing has shaken me from that decision, because it is a way to earn higher affiliate commissions AND free myself from the chore of product creation.

This video summarises the reasons:

YOU may have the skills and time to produce a high quality product – I congratulate you. Go market it 🙂
I have neither the time nor the skills.
And I certainly don't have the funds to “buy in” someone to produce a product of the quality I would be prepared to put my name to.

Putting A Price To Quality

Like most of my readers will have done, I purchased and evaluated many affiliate products over the years.

Some were so cheap and nasty I'd be ashamed to even give them away
Others have been such amazing value I know I couldn't produce something of the same quality
Why should my readers have to settle for something in-between, when I can instead recommend top quality?

I'm happy to produce a quick free ebook as a lead magnet, but I'd need to spend many, many hours creating a paid product I'd be proud to put my name to.

So having removed product creation from my “to-do” list, the next step was to find and test some top quality affiliate products.

Problems Of Affiliate Marketing

Finding high quality affiliate products wasn't difficult – another reason why I don't feel the urge to create my own. But there are a few pitfalls for the unwary:

If a prospect didn't buy on the first viewing, I proved (by careful testing) that a later sale would often go direct to the product creator
Often if one of my clients made a further “back-end” purchase, the sale didn't come to me, but to the product creator
Commissions on some purchases made by trusted contacts never even arrived with me. I just gave up arguing with the product creator in the end, it got too embarrassing
Most of the commissions were tiny – nowhere near enough to generate a decent monthly income for the average affiliate marketer without a huge list of contacts following him / her round
It's hard to compete with mega-marketers' bonuses when so many of your prospects are already on their lists

The simple maths are that to earn (say) $3,000 a month, your goal can be to earn 3 commissions of $1,000 each, OR 300 sales at $10 – OR even 30 x $100 commissions?

How close were you to making 30 sales last month? I was a long way short 🙁

I concluded that I needed to earn higher affiliate commissions.

So to earn more, I needed to either find a program that paid out high commissions, which I wasn't comfortable with because they were expensive for my customers and could have left them with debts.

Or, I needed to find a program with repeating affiliate commissions and one with a high retention rate.

No more chasing about trying to replace members who left after a couple of months.

No more monthly targets to meet. If I'm too busy with family or my offline business, I need to be able to take a month off worrying about my online business.

There are several programs that fit the bill and I researched a few before making my final selection, which was one that also grabbed my interest.

But there are no free lunches with any affiliate marketing business, IF you decide to promote, so there are varying amounts of work to be done with these programs. Make sure you pick one that matches the time you can spend on it. For me, there had to be the option of spending “no time”, on occasions!

Check out the program I chose