I started learning about affiliate marketing several years ago. I had bought a digital product in the form of an eBook from eBay. It seemed like a good business model straight away since the sales were automated, and the product could be downloaded instantly. I looked to do the same thing and created a few of my own eBooks to sell online. However, I struggled for a number of reasons.

But the thought of an automated business system never went away. I continued to look into the idea and this led me to the business model of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a form of referral based marketing which rewards the affiliate for a sale made on someone else’s website. Anyone can learn how to become an affiliate marketer. What drew me to affiliate marketing was the potential to work for myself from my laptop, without the need to actually handle products or even speak to any customers!

It was also the sheer scale of potential to earn income from digital sales worldwide.

In the first instance, after I created an eBook myself, I couldn’t get anyone to see my content. I figured people would just buy from a website once I had thrown it into the ‘cyberspace’ of the internet world. I suspect many people make this same incorrect assumption.

The truth was a little hard to bear after a number of failed attempts to promote digital products online. However, my first success came after selling a website building program I had used. I created a free blog from a site called hubpages.com. I wrote about the product and created a product review. This is a simple strategy which many affiliate marketers use to make money on the internet. It works if they can get their content seen by the right audience.

My first sale only made me $40 though but at the time it was huge for me. It was a breakthrough which spurred me on to keep going. For me, it wasn’t just $40. It was the future of my earning potential and the ability to earn from the internet without a boss or a crummy job; something which I was desperate to escape having to do!

Nothing much happened after I made my initial sale. I went from one strategy to another and kept getting distracted by shiny objects which promised more money for less work! It wasn’t until I discovered high ticket affiliate programs that thing really stepped up a gear for me.

Within a few months of joining a high ticket program, I was able to make two high ticket sales after advertising on Facebook. It was absolutely amazing and I thought I’d made it! I rested on my laurels though and because I didn’t have a steady income at the time, I pulled the money out, not even thinking about continuing the marketing.

After that I spent all my time focused on content marketing for a while. Content marketing is a pretty slow strategy but I did get some results from it. It was much, much slower though than the paid marketing I had done previously.

Until I had gained some more confidence in what I was doing, I hadn’t put more money into paid marketing strategies again. When I eventually did, I had another major success. High ticket programs can give you huge commissions, depending on how you position yourself in a business system. Products valued up to $20,000+ can earn you 40% commissions on a single sale.

I had a range of these products within my sales funnel but I didn’t have the right mindset or knowledge to trust the journey I was on! I was too scared to spend money on advertising for quite some time. When this changed, so did my business – dramatically for the better.

The power of subscription products also suddenly came into my awareness. Although I had this sales funnel, I didn’t understand it for a long time. It is ‘geared’ to pay you in multiple ways. Subscriptions are just one strategy which can pay you again and again for work done previously.

With subscription products, you sell something once, and it pays you an income – potentially for life. Even a small subscription commission month in month out, can be far better than the odd sale here and there of a much more valuable product. Over time, and as your number of memberships grows, your income grows too.

Multi-tier sales are another feature of the best high ticket affiliate programs. With multi-tier, you can earn commissions based on the sales of your referrals. This means that if you sell membership products of a certain business system, your members sales count as your own and you get a percentage of the commission.

Up-sells are another component of a good high ticket sales funnel. A good sales funnel will have a range of products which you can earn commissions on. You don’t need to sell every product personally because an in-house sales team will do this for you. Simply refer people into your sales funnel and let the funnel do the work.

As an affiliate marketer, your main focus is on marketing. With the right business model, you can earn in multiple ways for having referred customers to useful products and services which will be of value to them.

My journey to find the high ticket affiliate programs was a long one filled with a lot of failures! I tried selling smaller valued products in a variety of different ways. I used organic content marketing strategies and paid strategies to market products. But it wasn’t until I discovered the right business model that things changed for me.

With a good business model you can have more confidence in your marketing strategies. With the right training and mindset, you can accomplish a lot more in a shorter time period.

So, if you want to be an affiliate marketer, I would recommend looking at high ticket affiliate marketing. It is still a business and like any business it takes hard work and motivation to keep going and to make it work. But it takes the same amount of work to fail many times if you face in the wrong direction from the start!

Source by Tim Halloran