What Makes a Good Affiliate Program?

What’s the reason that most people keep working at a job they hate?

It’s the “security” of a consistent paycheck.

The truth is that there isn’t much security in working for someone else because you can be fired, laid off, or the business could go under at anytime.

But the dependability of a recurring paycheck is a luring thing.

That’s why it’s best if you can recreate something similar within your own business. It may seem that this is impossible with something like affiliate marketing, but the truth is that the possibility of recurring income is out there. You just need to find the right program.

An example. The ClickFunnels affiliate program offers recurring commissions on sales of their funnel builder software. This ranges from 20% to 40%.

What does this mean?

It means that if you get someone to sign up for ClickFunnels through your affiliate link, every month thereafter that the person pays their subscription fee, you get that 20% – 40% commission. Off the one time that you made the sale. 

They are tagged to you and your account, and ClickFunnels is so grateful to you that they keep paying you the same portion of the subscription fee on a monthly basis.

Image if you build up 100 people paying anywhere from $97 to $297 per month. That’s $1,940 to $11,880 per month on automatic recurring payments. Sure you have to deal with turnover (people cancelling their account) but that’s why you have systems in place to keep bringing more people in.

Once you have a good baseline of recurring income coming in, enough to support your current lifestyle, your time is vastly freed up, and you have the amazing ability to actually work on projects that you want to and strategize for your business on how to get to the next level. 

You’ve successfully replaced or even multiplied your previous paycheck, and now your life is free. 

It’s important to note that not all of your income will be recurring. There are good affiliate programs out there that won’t pay you that monthly fee for making that one-time sale. You have to have really good systems in place to make these types of programs work, because every time you get a commission for a sale, that’s it. You now have to go back out there and find an entirely new person who wants to give up their money for what you are marketing to them.

That’s a lot harder than making the sale once and collecting commissions for months to come. That’s why recurring revenue is king. You need to seek out a recurring revenue affiliate program to be the basis of your business to help replace that paycheck and free your time.

Otherwise you are constantly grinding for more sales, and that likely just makes you a worker again who is a slave to the timeclock.

Commission rates play a big part in which program you should be taking your valuable time to promote. These are the percentages of the sale that you get for driving the traffic, and thus the sale, to the company’s website.

Always keep in mind that not all affiliate programs are created equal, and we want something that fairly compensates us for our time and effort.

We must also consider commission rates in combination with the sale price and frequency as well. The percentage alone doesn’t determine if the program is a good one.

If we are only getting a 10% commission, but the product is a $5,000 product, it may be worth driving sales to this offer since we will be getting $500 per sale.

Conversely, if we are getting 40% commissions on a $10 product, we will need to drive an insane amount of traffic in order to make a living since we are only getting $4 per sale.

Some affiliate programs out there have a combination of bad commission rate and sale price. Some things on Amazon only give you a 4% commission on a $12 product. That’s the worst of both worlds, and traffic likely doesn’t exist that will make you rich off of $0.48 commissions.

As mentioned, we also want to consider the frequency of your commissions. If you are getting a 20% commission rate on a $97 product, but the payment is monthly recurring, it might not be a bad idea to pursue this because every sale will add $19.40 to your monthly recurring revenue. It may not seem like much, but if you build up to 100 of these, you will be getting $1,940 per month on autopilot.

Doing your math and knowing what you get out of an affiliate program before you sign up is a very important step. You don’t want to invest tons of your time or money into a program and find out you are in a bad deal that doesn’t pay out much. That’s a quick path to burnout and failure.

The ultimate affiliate deal is high commission, high sales price, and some type of recurring frequency of payments. SaaS (software as a service) is usually a good category to look into, because you will often find deals like this to promote.

It’s time to talk cookies.

No, not those cookies, though they are good to munch while writing a piece of content.

When we talk about cookies in affiliate marketing, we are referring to a piece of code that attaches to a visitor’s browser after they click your link.

That code tells the affiliate program that the visit to the site originated from your content, and that you should be given credit for the sale and get the commission payment.

The problem with cookies, is that they expire. A cookies life usually ranges anywhere from 1 day to 60 days normally, and can go on up to 365 days or more.

Essentially this expiration is giving you the benefit of the doubt. If you show someone an offer and they click your link but don’t buy that day, the cookie makes it so not all hope is lost. 

Instead what happens is that if the person returns to the offer within life of the cookie and makes a purchase, you are still given credit for showing that person the offer.

Amazon is another example of a bad program for this. Amazon get so much traffic and are so widely known that they only give you a 1 day cookie. That means that if more than a day goes by after someone clicks your Amazon Affiliate link, Amazon assumes the person made a purchase for some other reason not related to clicking your link, and you no longer get credit. Low commissions and small cookie window is why I usually don’t promote Amazon products that much.

On the flipside, lesser-known startups don’t have the household name that Amazon does. A software like Funnelytics may give you 365 days for your cookie, since the customer likely didn’t hear about them from another source during that time. Programs with longer cookies are good, and usually have higher sale prices since they assume people need more time to process their purchase decision.

Another thing with cookies to keep in mind is first-click vs. last-click.

With first click, the person who’s link was clicked first gets the credit for the sale, even if they click other affiliate links from other affiliates during that cookie window.

With last click, if someone clicks your link, but then clicks on another affiliate’s link during the cookie window, your credit is gone.

Make sure you know what type of credit is assigned within your program. 

This isn’t a course in personal finance, though I hope your personal finances get better after taking this course.

When I’m talking about a stock mix in this context, it’s more of a mindset.

When you invest in stocks, it’s well-known that you never put all of your money into one or two stocks. You have to mitigate your risk by investing in multiple companies across multiple industries. That way when one company or industry has a bad month or a bad year, you don’t lose everything.

Keep this mindset when working with affiliate programs. In the beginning it’s a great idea to focus hard on one program that you are passionate about, that pays well, and you know how to sell. But once you get automatic commissions rolling in for that, you can’t let that be your only stream of income.

Bad things can happen.

What if the company goes under? What if they decide they can sell stuff on their own and cancel their affiliate program? What if they start cutting commission percentages, or you break a rule you didn’t know about and get booted from the program?

A LOT of bad things can happen if you put all your eggs in one basket. That’s why it’s important to branch out and diversify once you get one good offer going.

When Traffic Secrets launched in March of 2020, I found a way to get good commissions rolling on a regular basis. This meant that I had a semi-reliable stream of income for my business. 

Even though it was good to finally get something to work for me, I knew that things could change, and so I continued to push other affiliate offers. Even smaller offers such as Noom that only pay $15 – $20 per trial signup have helped bring in other steady income to my business.

I like to include a mix of lower-priced and higher-priced offers, as well as offers directly from companies, like ClickFunnels, and offers that are a part of a marketplace, like Impact Radius or Brandcycle.

This helps me mitigate risk all around and make sure that if a marketplace or company goes down, my business doesn’t go down with it.

So my best advice for you is to go all in on one affiliate program until you get it to work on autopilot, and then switch gears and reinvest that money into getting other programs to work and to grow your business. This way you will be building assets (content, software, workers) for your business using automated payments and growing to the point that you don’t have a single point of failure.

I couldn’t imagine working so hard, sacrificing so much time with family and leisure activities only to have a single point of failure in my business and lose everything just because of someone else’s actions.

Work hard and mitigate your risk as you are able.

A good affiliate program is one that you love to promote.

If you hate the product, the idea of the product, or what the product stands for that you are trying to promote, not only will you hate what you are doing, but people will see it in your mannerisms and not want to buy from you.

You will likely also be morally opposed on a deep level to selling something you are overjoyed about, and you will sabotage yourself on a subconscious level so you never reach success.

Make sure that you are promoting what you love.

One way to get started in finding an affiliate program is to search for brands and themes you are already in love with.

You’d be surprised how many companies have affiliate programs. Just look down in the footer (very bottom menu) of their website, and look for something that says “Affiliates” or “Partners”. You should be able to click through to, read about, and apply to their program from there.

The company should list the specifications of their program (cookie length, commissions rate, etc) on the application page, so you will be able to judge whether it’s a good program or not before you bother to apply.

Try and think about brands you use on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Think about what you are good at, or what you like to do as a side-hobby, and looks for brands in those areas.

At some point you will likely be lead to an affiliate marketing marketplace (we will talk about these more in the next chapter of this course), where you can find other similar brands to promote.

Affiliate marketing is fun, but at some points it can be a real slog, and if you don’t have a product you absolutely love to promote, it can be hard to get through these tough times.

Seems like staying focus contradicts the “stock mix” advice from a few sections ago, right?

While it’s good to have a variety of offers to promote, it’s not the best idea to promote anything and everything that comes your way. Because as you start to build your blog, channel, podcast, or however you are promoting products, people will start to find you. They will find you and contact you to get you to promote their product.

Sometimes they will offer free products or software/app access to get you to create content around their product. Others will offer cash. While these offers may sound tempting, you best best is to stick with only those that truly fit your messaging and theme.

Find out who you want to reach and how you want to reach them, and don’t stray from that path, even a little. It can get expensive.

When I first started buying lifetime software deals I would buy a ton of the new products to hit AppSumo because I could just imagine using them in some capacity later in my business.

The problem was that they didn’t really fit my mission or what I was doing at the time, and now I have a ton of money locked up in programs that I don’t use because of some grand idea I had that I thought I could implement in the future. 

While it’s always good to plan ahead, getting off track will suck your cash flow right out of your business. Now I see a program that looks cool, but I refrain from buying it. I want to keep money in my business to spend on things that will truly help me grow. 

Make sure your stock mix is within your messaging and business mission, stay focused, and work hard. They say going an inch wide and a mile deep is the best strategy. Stick to it.