One way to increase your affiliate earnings, is to join two tier affiliate programs. With regular affiliate programs, you only earn money if and when you sell products and services for the program you’ve joined. With a two tier affiliate program though, you can also earn money when other people make sales… if they’ve signed up for the same affiliate program through your affiliate link.
You don’t make money just by having a new affiliate sign up under you. Instead you make money if that affiliate signs up under you, and then proceeds to make affiliate sales. These affiliates who sign up under you are usually called “sub affiliates”.
Now, you don’t usually make tons of money from sub affiliates. In fact, you usually earn just a small fraction from them compared to what you can earn by making sales yourself. Let’s say for example, you’ve affiliated with a company that pays you 50% commission on any sales you make through your affiliate link. If that company offer a second tier option, they’re likely to pay just 10% to you, for any sales your sub affiliates make.
Now the sub affiliates will still earn 50% of their sales too. Your commissions will not be taken from theirs. Your commissions instead, are taken from the profit of the actual company you’re selling for.
Having sub affiliates is an excellent way to make extra money. In rare cases, you can make a very good living from sub affiliates. But to do this you must first sign up many affiliates under you. Signing up hundreds of affiliates might work decently, but the more the better because not all affiliates make sales. In fact, only about 5%-10% of them will make sales.
You can help increase the amount of sales your sub affiliates make, but it takes a lot of time, effort and hard work. Some of the ways you can help improve their performance is to train them, mentor them, create custom sales material for them, and give them bonuses they can use when promoting the program. In essence, if you become an independant affiliate program manager for your own group of sub affiliates, you can increase their sales greatly and in doing so, help build your own income streams too.
This is a profitable way to approach affiliate marketing, but it’s much more profitable if you also make direct sales yourself.
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2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. |