If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may be wondering which route is best for you. Should you start promoting high ticket affiliate offers or low ticket affiliate offers?
That’s an excellent question with a complex answer!
There’s a lot of buzz in the affiliate marketing community at the moment about high ticket affiliate offers. It’s understandable because affiliates stand to make a lot of money for driving considerably less traffic to those offers.
Less traffic required on your part can mean less work.
Less work and higher commissions. That sounds great, doesn’t it?
Well, before you rush in, there are a few things you should know about high ticket vs low ticket offers.
What Affiliate Products Should You Promote?
Before choosing an affiliate product to promote, and before we compare high and low ticket products, it’s highly advisable that you first consider two other factors:
- The quality of the product
- Your personal experience with the product (not necessary, but preferable when possible)
The last thing you want to do is run the risk of ruining your reputation by promoting bad products. Make sure the product has a good reputation and people are actually benefiting from using it.
Secondly, if you already have experience with the product because you’re a customer yourself, not only will you know it’s a good product, but you will also know everything about it. You will know the pros and cons of that product, but more importantly, you will have intimate knowledge of the target market and you will understand their pain points.
Knowing these things will enable you to be much more effective at selling that product.
Now let’s take a closer look at low versus high ticket affiliate products to promote.
High Ticket Affiliate Offers vs. Low Ticket Affiliate Offers: Which Should You Promote?
It’s true that if you choose the wrong niche or the wrong produce, you will struggle to make any decent money as an affiliate marketer.
However, this doesn’t mean that low ticket offers will make it harder for you to make an income online. This is a common misconception among new affiliates.
Take Amazon for example. Depending on the products you’re promoting, Amazon’s commission ranges between 1-10%, with the majority of the products around the 4-5% mark.
That’s a pretty low commission percentage.
There’s also a lot of low priced products on Amazon. So you’re gonna need to make a lot of sales on a regular basis to bring home the bacon.
But does that mean you should avoid promoting Amazon?
While I am not pro-Amazon when it comes to affiliate marketing, if you do choose to promote them you will benefit from having an easier time converting people into paying customers because let’s face it, everyone knows Amazon, and if you can get a person to click your affiliate link there’s a high chance they’ll buy.
I also know several people who have made over six figures per year building sites that promote Amazon products.
Although Amazon is not my choice of company to promote, you can probably now see how a person can make decent money promoting them if they know how to drive a lot of targeted traffic.
Although Amazon is not my choice of company to promote, you can probably now see how a person can make decent money promoting them if they know how to drive a lot of targeted traffic.
Basically, the message here is this:
Don’t rule out promoting low ticket offers just because they don’t pay high commissions.
High Ticket Affiliate Offers: Pros and Cons
High ticket offers are products with a high price point and that pay you out a high commission.
While opinions vary on the commission level, generally speaking, a high ticket offer will pay you out upwards of $100 per sale, although that’s on the low end. There are some products that will pay you several hundred, and even several thousand dollars for one single sale, so there’s quite a lot of variance here.
I love promoting high ticket offers. It’s a great feeling to log into your affiliate account and see a fat commission sitting there smiling at you.
For a lot of high ticket offers though, you’re going to need a constant flow of targeted visitors to earn those big commissions. Low ticket offers typically convert at higher rates for less targeted traffic.
However, it also depends on the products you are promoting.
My first product example to explain what I mean here is mattresses.
Mattresses are an expensive item and some brands will pay you as much as 25% or more for promoting them.
That’s quite a large commission per sale.
If you own a mattress site that receives a good amount of regular, targeted organic traffic then you’ll make sales all day long. The reason being is that the buyers are already searching for information on mattress brands and they already have an intent to buy. You just need to be able to get in front of them and push them over the edge to make a purchase.
Your main challenge here is to bring the traffic. The mattress niche is a competitive one, it’s not easy to rank a website in this space without experience, and PPC ads are expensive.
High Ticket Affiliate Offers May Require More Work
My second example of a different kind of high ticket offer is an internet marketing course. Let’s take John Crestani’s Super Affiliate System that is on the ClickBank Marketplace.
The course sells for $997 and pays you out an average commission of $681.27 per sale.
That’s a nice commission.
However, when you’re promoting a product like this, in most cases, you’re also going to need to do more work to convince your audience that it’s a good product, ideally share your own experiences if you have bought it yourself, and maybe even offer some attractive bonuses to entice people to buy through your link.
As you can see, there is quite a bit of work ahead of you in order to make those high ticket sales. Fortunately though, depending on how much commission you are being paid, you will only need to make a few sales per month to considerably increase your income.
That being said, another advantage of promoting high ticket offers is that you don’t need to drive as much traffic to make good money.
Driving traffic is probably the core skill of an affiliate marketer, but it can be tough, time-consuming and costly depending on your methods. If you’re able to make good money while sending less traffic then that’s definitely a bonus in my book!
High Ticket Affiliate Offers: The Take Home Positive Summary
- Earn more money per sale
- You only need to make a few sales each month to make a decent income
- You don’t need to drive as much traffic to your offers to make good money
High Ticket Affiliate Offers: The Take Home Negative Summary
- A lot of high ticket offers will also come with stiff competition (but not always)
- You will usually need to learn additional sales skills like copywriting to get people to take action
- You may also need to incentivize people and offer bonuses
Low Ticket Affiliate Offers: Pros and Cons
Now let’s look at low ticket affiliate offers.
The first obvious advantage of promoting low ticket products is that you won’t usually need to do a lot of extra work to convince a person to buy the product or offer bonuses, and so on.
A lot of low ticket products can also commend an impulse buy, so you can often benefit from making easier commissions. By promoting low ticket offers you will usually be able to make more steady sales if you are promoting good products.
The obvious disadvantage, however, is that you will need to send a lot more traffic to make enough sales to bring home a decent income.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing then a great type of low ticket offer to promote are CPA (Cost Per Action) offers.
When you’re promoting CPA offers you don’t even need to get people to make a purchase in order to get paid. All you need to do is get them to perform some kind of action, such as entering an email address, or filling out a survey and you will get paid a small commission for the lead.
It’s often easier to get people to complete an action than to make a purchase, so you stand a good chance of making regular commissions.
Low Ticket Affiliate Offers: The Take Home Positive Summary
- Some low ticket products can command an impulse buy, and therefore, an easier sale
- CPA offers don’t even require you to make a sale in order to get paid
Low Ticket Affiliate Offers: The Take Home Negative Summary
- Low commissions
- You need to make a lot of sales in order to make a decent income, therefore, you need to drive a lot more traffic to your offers
High Ticket vs. Low Ticket: Which is Best?
As you can see, both low and high ticket products have their advantages and disadvantages. You shouldn’t discount low ticket products just because they only pay a small commission.
The most important thing is that you’re promoting good offers that people want and that are converting well.
So, should you promote high or low ticket products?
Here’s my final answer:
You should promote both.
Choose a niche that has a lot of interest and high buyer intent, and there are also both good quality high and low ticket products available for you to promote in the niche.
This way you can benefit from consistent low ticket sales as well as the usually less frequent expensive purchases that will bump up your paycheck. Plus diversifying your affiliate promotions is always a good idea.
A good affiliate strategy is to choose products in your niche that revolve around your message, your angle, or your sub-niche, and preferably all tie into each other. Keep it small at first and focus in on just 3-5 good quality products with at least one of them being a high ticket offer. If you find that one or two of them don’t convert well for your audience then just switch it out for another product.
If you take this a step further and also ensure that at least one of your products also pays a recurring monthly commission then you have a great strategy that can lead to your affiliate marketing success.
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