If you’ve landed on this page, I’m guessing you’re a fellow affiliate marketer. Hey! One of the biggest questions I had as I was starting out was this – who in the world should I be an affiliate partner with? So today we need to talk about that.
This post will focus on bloggers and social media marketers who are specifically in the internet marketing niche. So if you’re writing content for consumers trying to create an e-commerce business of their own, this is for you guys!
Now of course most of us have heard of affiliate directories like Clickbank, Rakuten, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, VIGlink, and Amazon Affiliates, and these are all pretty awesome in their own ways, but what I’m talking about here are often lesser known and more lucrative affiliate programs that you need to join individually.
So what are the top affiliate programs that pay well in the internet marketing world?
Before We Jump In – What Does “Pay Well” Mean Here?
What truly defines an affiliate program that pays well?
1. The most obvious thing we’re looking for when we’re trying to find affiliate programs are the ones that pay a lot of money for every referral. There are lots of these out there, and I’ll mention a few. Obviously, selling something that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars, and PAYS hundreds or thousands of dollars, isn’t as easy to sell as something cheap, but when you learn how to market these “high ticket” products the right way, it’s more than worth it.
2. I can’t emphasize this enough. If you want to truly build wealth, retire young, and create a lucrative cash flow, residual pay is even more important than whether or not the affiliate program pays a lot of money! The best affiliate programs are not just the ones that pay a lot of money, but the ones that keep paying you every month or every year. These can compound into an endless stream of passive income you don’t need to even keep working for!
3. Long cookies. This isn’t so much about how WELL an affiliate program pays, as it is about making sure you get your credit. When someone clicks on one of your links, you want to make sure that even if they don’t buy for a while, or they stay on a free trial for a long time, you’ll still get your commissions when that money comes in. The best affiliate programs have long cookies, that will give you credit for that initial click through your link, even if the buyer takes AGES to finally purchase.
And no matter how many links they click through, you want to know that it’s all going to lead back to you at the top of the chain!
Now as an internet marketer yourself, you need to realize that if you want to sell higher ticket stuff, you’re gonna need to know how to woo your readers.
You can’t usually take a casual reader from one of your posts, and instantly convert them into a buyer for a $1,000+ product (though it’s NOT impossible!). That’s almost like asking someone to marry you on the first date.
Usually, when making a significant financial investment, people like to be very convinced that it’s a worthwhile purchase. And you want to make sure the person you’re helping has all the knowledge they need before they go through you to pay out some cash.
So with high ticket sales, the methods that most super affiliates use are sales funnels and email marketing.
A lot of your readers are probably starting out as “just browsers” or “tire-kickers”. These are people that are just dipping their toes in, but aren’t ready to commit.
The point of a sales funnel or email marketing is so that you can keep the conversation going. Catch their attention first with valuable knowledge that you share, capture their email or social media following, and then keep a stream of content to coax them into the actual purchase.
But we’ll have to save the details of sales funnels and marketing strategy for another time, because we’re looking into the coolest affiliate programs for the internet marketer.
1. Use Proof
PROOF is a state of the art marketing company that provides webstores with social proof software. If you’re not familiar with social proof, it’s one of the most successful and subtle marketing techniques being used today. You can read more of the details about it here,
You can encourage your readers to use PROOF on their websites and stores to increase conversions exponentially.
What it pays: The amount that PROOF pays it’s affiliates varies based on plan purchased – $31 to $80 per month.
Residuals: PROOF pays 40% every month of the plan purchased. You’ll get paid between $31 and $80/month endlessly.
Cookie Length: Unsure. Free Trial is 14 days.
Sign Up for PROOF affiliate program: PROOF affiliate program
2. SEMRush
SEMrush is an all-in-one online marketing tool. Bloggers, people selling physical products on Amazon and Ebay, and any other kind of entrepreneur selling on the internet can save hundreds of hours of tedious research just by using SEMrush.
SEMrush offers a keyword research tool, but also software that can track everything that’s working for your competitors. In addition to the marketing research advantages, SEMrush performs SEO audits on your websites, and can inform you about what changes you need to make to rank better.
What it pays: between $40 and $160 every month, depending on the plan your “clicker” buys
Residuals: $40 to $160 per month. In other words, get 100 sign ups of SEMrush’s top plan through your website and you’ll be making $192,000 a year on autopilot. Perspective.
Cookie Length: SEMrush cookies last over 10 years. Even if the person that signed up through you cancels their plan, if they resume their plan you’ll continue getting paid.
Sign up for SEMrush affiliate program: SEMrush affiliate program
3. Shopify
Shopify is awesome. When my wife and I started our dropshipping clothing brand, it was a no brainer for us to use Shopify. Essentially, Shopify is a resource you can use to build a webstore, integrate with hundreds of excellent tools, and grow an ecommerce or dropshipping business.
With over 500,000 business owners on Shopify it’s also a quickly growing platform. It also happens to have a great affiliate program! It also has a partner program, in which you can create webstores for FREE and basically sell them to people trying to start e-commerce businesses, including getting 20% of their monthly plan every month.
What it pays: Shopify pays a 200% commission, instantly paying the full price of the first 2 months of whatever plan your referral buys. This is between $60 and $598 on standard plans, and you can make up to $2,000 for referring their enterprise plan.
Residuals: as far as I have experienced thus far Shopify only pays residuals when you’ve sold off a partner store, of 20% of any monthly plan.
Cookie Length: 30 days
Sign up for Shopify affiliate program: Shopify affiliate program
4. Big Commerce and Volusion
Big Commerce and Volusion are Shopify’s most significant competitors. These are also all-in-one ecommerce solutions. They both offer a whole host of effective tools for building a webstore and running an online store.
These companies, and especially Volusion, are in my opinion inferior to Shopify, but if you look into them, and decide that they are equally good recommendations for your readers, you can score some good commissions through both companies.
They both offer a 200% initial commission like Shopify.
What it pays: with the 200% initial commission, you can make up to $270 with these referrals.
Residuals: no residuals
Cookie length: unkown
Affiliate program sign ups: Volusion and Big Commerce
5. Kinsta
If you know Google you know how important it is that your website runs fast, and stays up. A slow loading site will drop your sales enormously with every passing second.
For internet marketers with more established sites, managed cloud hosting is absolutely required. And Kinsta is by far the fastest and most powerful WordPress host in existance. Kinsta is a young company, but it’s already making a name for itself in the Google cloud, WordPress hosting niche.
It will also pay you a nice chunk of change for promoting them!
What it pays: Kinsta will up to $500 for every referral, plus a 10% monthly pay check
Residuals: the residuals are not high, with just a 10% monthly recurring commission, but as with any residuals these can add up very quickly.
Cookie Length: 60 days
Sign up for Kinsta affiliate program: Kinsta affiliate program
6. Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach is a part of the whole Ninja conglomerate, including Ninja Academy, and other tool sets for internet marketers. Ninja Outreach is specifically for managing email marketing campaigns.
Even more importantly Ninja Outreach helps you to connect with influencers, and build links. This kind of networking is what turns the struggling entrepreneurs into millionaires.
It also pays a 50% commission for both Ninja Outreach AND the Ninja Academy RESIDUALLY!
What it pays: as much as $300 for every referral, EVERY MONTH
Residuals: 50% every month, up to $300! Sell 100 of that plan and you’ll be paid more than many surgeons (without the insane student debt and 60+ hour work weeks)
Cookie Length: unknown
Sign up for Ninja Outreach affiliate program: Ninja Outreach affiliate program
What Are Some Great Affiliate Programs You Know?
These are some of the best affiliate programs I have experienced. They’re good products, easy to sell once you have an established audience, provide a lot of value, and pay well.
With the right affiliate programs and the right skills, you can grow your business into a multiple 6 figure business using just these programs!
How about you? Share the best affiliate programs you know of in the comments below!
Thank you so much for publishing this! With the exception of Shopify, I had not heard about some of these other affiliate programs such as SEMRush. The payout on some of these is amazing and I can see how they would easily make someone wealthy in the long term if they do the things necessary to make it happen. I know you’ve mentioned that you’ve used Shopify before, but which one of those would say is a close second?
Hi Brian, I’m glad you found it helpful! I would strongly encourage you to try out some of those affiliate programs, they’ve been really great for me. Residual payouts are especially awesome.
SEMrush is fantastic. And so are both PROOF and Kinsta. There are other great competitors to SEMrush, like Jaxxy, but you’ll find you can make a lot of money off of some SEMrush promotions. And Kinsta completely blows WP Engine out of the water, so if you have readers looking for superior alternatives to WP Engine as their website host, that’s the ultimate solution.
Uh, I have to admit I haven’t used either Big Commerce or Volusion extensively. I’ve looked in depth into their options, and they are almost identical to Shopify, including in price, but usually with slightly more limited options. My wife and I use the Basic Shopify Plan for just $29 per month, and it’s been amazing so I haven’t looked elsewhere. Have a few friends also in their early 20’s making over $500,000/year running webstores from their couches, so I thought it was about time I joined in.
If you have a blog that’s centered around internet marketing, once you have reader’s trust I highly recommend trying out some of these high ticket affiliates.
Wow great article! I learned a lot about these bigger affiliates and took the time to apply to pretty much all of them.
Do you know if each affiliate offers courses for their programs because they seem to be very in depth. I also need to find out somehow to use find places for their links in my traveling blog. Have other writers found it hard to place their links in non affiliate marketing niches?
Thanks Traci, I’m glad you found it helpful!
Some of these affiliate programs offer more education tools than others. Kinsta will set you up for deep linking, PROOF has an actual affiliate assistant ( his name is Dave). I would usually read through their websites to gather information, or find other in depth reviews.
Many of these could probably fit onto a traveling blog by using the angle of…. working from home allows you to travel more, and still make money while doing it. I would recommend checking out World Nate’s blog. (His blog is called World Nate). He’s a traveling guy, but he talks a lot about internet marketing too. 🙂
Thanks for showing us some great companies that pay well in the mmo niche. I have heard of a couple of them before, but others ones I have never seen in my life.
I think the best affiliate program you can sponsor be I the mmo niche or another one — is a program that has reacurring payments.
For example memberships, dating sites, online tools, and gym packages all have recurring payments.
So all you have to do is make 1 sale — then you can sometimes make m thousands of dollars off that 1 person.
Hey Michael, exactly!
The majority of affiliate programs I recommended here are programs that have recurring payments, and I promote most of them myself.
Recurring payments, or residual income, is something I stress a lot on Young Retiree, because it’s the ultimate way to build wealth. Keep getting money from sales you made in the past, even if it’s been years.
Hi there,
Thank you kindly for creating and sharing these affiliate opportunities with us all. It is really appreciated. Thanks.
I am building out a site in the Make Money Online niche and some of these programs I have heard of and are exactly what I am looking for. The best part is that they are top quality products, which is something I look at, the quality of the product on offer as it does help in the saleability of the product and aiding to retain that client (or residual income) for many months, often years!.
I seen you have SEM rush on the list, omg..someone has been making a sweet and easy $40 from me a month for the past 4 years!. It just goes to illustrate my point…quality products not only sell well, they have a high customer retention rate.
Hey Derek, thanks for commenting!
I’m glad you found it helpful. These are some of the best products I’ve found to promote, and some of the best I’ve also had the chance to use.
That’s great that you’ve been making use of SEMrush! It’s a really solid tool for an internet marketer. I’m sure you could also write an awesome review about SEMrush because of your years of experience with it! Might be worth a shot.