One of the best ways to make money as a blogger is by using affiliate marketing as a method to monetize your blog.
It is a misconception that advertising is more profitable than everything else. I have to say, it is passive, but so is affiliate marketing.
I believe that not enough bloggers are conducting affiliate marketing properly. Some bloggers don’t even make use of it at all, while others focus on low converting and low ticket products.
This has to change! These bloggers leave too much money on the table.
If you are looking for affiliate programs that are ‘high-ticket’ aka ‘big money programs aka high paying affiliate programs in 2018, you should read on. Almost every company pays out through PayPal.
In this blog post I’m going to touch on:
What Kind Of Affiliate Programs Or Products Should You Promote?
Let me first warn you that you should never promote products that you have never heard of. Always do your research and even better, use it yourself or test it out.
The worst thing you can do is to promote a product to your audience and the quality is terrible. Your followers might get trust issues and they won’t believe you the next time you recommend a good product. This is really important, so keep that in mind.
I assume you already know what affiliate marketing is.
But all right, if you have no clue:
affiliate marketing is basically recommending products or services to others and if they purchase the product or service, you will earn a commission for bringing the customer and the company or vendor together.
The existence of the internet made it possible to make money completely passively.
How?
Well, everything you post on the internet is a sort of permanent and 24/7 accessible. Meaning that you, as a blogger, can write a blog post on a random day in which you recommend a product, and years later when someone visits your blog, is interested in that product and buys it, you’ll still earn a commission for that.
Affiliate marketing makes it possible to make money while you sleep.
What kind of products should you focus on?
There are basically two types of affiliate programs or products I like to promote.
I’m talking about high-ticket and recurring affiliate products.
High ticket products speak for itself right?
If you are able to promote services or products that cost, let’s say, $1000 and you will earn a 30% or 40% commission.
I don’t have to tell you, your income would shoot up to the moon. By recommending one product you’ll earn $300-$400, which means a full-time income if you manage to successfully recommend 10 people per month.
In order to earn the same amount of money with low ticket items such as 5% commission on $50 products, you have to refer 1200 to 1600 people successfully to the offer.
Which strategy do you think is easier to implement?
That’s right the first one.
Besides focussing on high ticket offers, you should try to promote recurring products as well.
Why?
It’s simple. You refer someone once and get paid month after month. So you do the work once and as long as that person is an active user of the service or product, you will earn commissions.
These recurring commissions could become very lucrative, especially when they add up.
Some companies have an incredible affiliate marketing program and are really generous. Some of them provide a 30% or more recurring commission. If the prices of these products are high as well, you can expect an amazing extra side income every single month.
All right, this is the most exciting part. What are these high ticket or lucrative recurring products?
Let’s take a look at the list.
The 20 Best High Paying Affiliate Programs For Beginning Bloggers
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels combines both, high tickets products and a residual affiliate structure. It allows you to create sales funnels really easily.
If I say easy, I do mean easy.
You basically drag and drop some buttons and text blocks and you have good looking landing pages that convert like crazy. They claim to give you everything you need to market, sell and deliver your products online, which is true.
A huge benefit is the sticky cookie. This means that if you send someone to ClickFunnels and that person doesn’t buy anything within a month or even a year, but then suddenly buys a product that ClickFunnels offered, you’ll still receive a commission.
ClickFunnels makes it really easy to spread your sticky cookies by offering products you can give away for FREE. I mean everybody wants to have free stuff right. For example, this 100% free ebook on digital marketing, or a free plus shipping hard copy book Expert Secrets.
Their affiliate commission program is impressive as well, because of their 40% commission on almost every product. Some products cost around $997, which nets a nice $398,8.
Talking about high-ticket affiliate programs…
They also offer services that cost $97 and $297.
If you successfully recommend these you will earn $39 and $120 every single month.
Plus you could expect a 5% commission on your tier 2 leads.
You can test ClickFunnels for FREE because of their 14-Day Free Trial.
ClickFunnels also provide a free training course that will learn you how to improve your affiliate marketing skills. So if you want to find out how to go from beginner to expert in affiliate marketing, you could try this training for free.
If you are looking for a top paying affiliate program, you can’t go wrong with both. The choice is yours.
Read more about ClickFunnels, FREE Trial and their affiliate program
Oh, and before I forget, I give away a FREE 4 Day Training and some exclusive bonuses if you are serious.
GetResponse
Every blogger or person that has an online business really must use email marketing to grow their blog or business. Email is still one of the best ways to interact with your readers or buyers.
Using a reliable and professional email marketing service is one of the key elements of online success. Gmail is all fun and games, but you really can’t use it for your blog or business if you want to be taken seriously. Apart from that, a lot of email marketing services these days offer advanced features which give you a better insight into the behavior of your readers and how to optimize your open rates for example.
I use GetResponse myself and I am pretty content with it. For me, the challenge of choosing the right email marketing service is to find a balance between price and deliverability.
Email marketing services tend to be quite pricey.
The rule of thumb is that the more subscribers you have the more you have to pay. If you have a following of around 5k people on your list, you can expect to pay between $40 and $80 per month.
On the other hand, if you monetize your blog or business properly, this expenditure isn’t that much of course.
But as a blogger in the early phase of your blogging career, you want to keep the costs low.
The best solution is GetResponse. It is one of the most popular email marketing services and is known for their great deliverability and realistic price, which makes it perfect for beginners.
Getresponse also has a profitable affiliate marketing program.
Successfully promoting GetResponse will result in 30% commission recurring, which is great.
Because email marketing is required to get online success, you will get sales.
If you want to test it out, GetResponse provides a 30-Day Free trial, so you have enough time to play around with it. You don’t even need a credit card to start.
TubeBuddy
Are there any bloggers here that also use Youtube to reach their audience? Well, let me tell you this, you should if you want to impact more lives!
Youtube is a growing platform and the best way to build trust and rapport is by using video marketing.
But all right.
There are tools that analyze the Youtube algorithm and show you all kind of useful statistics to optimize your videos to rank higher on Youtube. One of these tools is called TubeBuddy.
I’m not going to enumerate all the features, because I have to write about other high paying affiliate programs. You can take a look at all the features here.
What you are here for is to earn money and I have to say, this is one of the best affiliate programs for beginners.
You earn up to 50% commission as long as your leads remain paying customers, every month. That’s not it…
TubeBuddy allows you to earn a free Star or Legend license for yourself by just referring people (even if they don’t pay for an upgrade).
If you like Youtube, you need Tubebuddy anyway, so why not promote it?
It is a 100% free browser extension, but for additional features, you can upgrade (They offer special discounts and coupons, for example, 50% off if you have less than 1,000 subscribers etc.)
Use TubeBuddy for FREE and be an affiliate for it!
Siteground
Every blogger needs a website to publish blog posts on. Of course, there are free options like Tumblr or Medium, but it is always better to have something you actually own.
If you, for some reason, violate their terms of use, there is a possibility they close your account and you are left with nothing.
Siteground is the #1 web hosting company for a long time now. Websites load amazingly fast and their support has a quick response is and skillful. I’ve been using Siteground right off the bat for this blog and I am happy choosing for this web hosting provider over Bluehost for example.
If you do not have a website yet, or you want to switch from your current hosting company to Siteground, I wrote a detailed step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog on Siteground, so check that out.
Besides the excellent performance, their affiliate program is definitely impressive as well:
| Number of Sales per Month | Commission per Sale |
| 1 -5 | $50 |
| 6 -10 | $75 |
| 11 -20 | $100 |
| 21+ | $125 |
High affiliate commissions combined with a great conversion rate = big bucks.
Click here if you are interested in promoting Siteground
Convertkit
Again an email marketing software company? That’s right, this time I want to introduce you to Convertkit.
I hear and read numerous times that bloggers switched to Convertkit and are really positive they made that decision.
The deliverability is good and it is quite easy to understand how the software works.
But there’s a little drawback.
The price…
More advanced and experienced bloggers wouldn’t worry about it, but if you are a ‘new’ blogger you’ll likely look for a cheaper alternative (GetResponse).
As an affiliate, promoting Convertkit could become very profitable, because of this relatively high price.
Convertkit probably has the best affiliate program to make money regarding email marketing.
You receive 30% commission recurring and the most popular plans range between $49 – $179.
They also offer a 14-Day Free Trial to find out if you like it
WP Engine
WP Engine is a WordPress web hosting provider and is like a heaven for affiliate marketers.
How much commission can you expect?
$200 per new customer or 100% of the customer’s first monthly payment (which is higher). They also love sub-affiliates, because the reward is $50 per customer your sub-affiliates refer! So Refer other affiliates and earn $50 for every sale they refer.
This is a crazy amount of money if you ask me. WP Engine is definitely the king of high paying affiliate programs. But…
The conversion rate is lower because of the price of the hosting plans. WP Engine is able to pay out these high commissions because their plans are relatively expensive.
Nevertheless, it is worth checking it out if you like high ticket affiliate products.
Go to WPengine.com affiliate section
Elegant Themes
Everyone with a blog needs a good looking theme. Although there are 1000+ free themes available, if you really want to distinguish yourself from millions of other people, you need to install a beautiful, unique, paid theme.
If there’s one place you can find this kind of themes, it is Elegant Themes.
Think about the famous ‘Divi Theme’.
Elegant Themes will gladly reward you for sending new customers to their website. It is one of the highest paying of all other WordPress themes companies (50% commission of each sale).
They are so happy with you that they also pay out commissions on yearly renewals. This means that you will continue making money each year as customers pay their yearly renewal fees to continue using their amazing themes.
Click here to go to Elegant Themes
MyThemeShop
MyThemeShop is also a company that is focused on providing amazing WordPress themes and unique plugins that make your blog perform much better. They claim to have over 416.000 happy users!
The themes they offer have an exclusive design, are SEO-friendly and have ‘blazing’ fast speed.
Looking at their pricing page I expect their conversion rate is quite high. Everything looks clean and they offer a 30-day money back policy.
But what about their affiliate program?
You’ll earn 55% commission per sale and they also offer a tier two lifetime commission of 10%. So if your affiliates start making money you will get a 10% commission as long as they are active (btw why would they stop, if they’re making money?).
Frankly, I haven’t come across a better affiliate program for themes and plugins yet.
If you have a blog or write about blogging in general, this is an affiliate program you should take a look at.
Elementor
Do you want to build your own websites without technical skills? Well, Elementor is worth checking out. It is a free plugin and contains a lot of features to customize your blog. There is no single coding involved!
If you have an understanding of Elementor you are able to beautifully design websites. I know some developers that run a web design business by solely using Elementor as their page builder.
I’ve built my website with Elementor as well. You can do a lot with the free plugin, but if you want to have more advanced features and options to change the layout of your own or your clients’ website, you need Elementor Pro.
They offer 3 plans: $49, $99 and $199. If you are an affiliate, you’ll earn 50%, which is a lot, especially because the conversion rate is high. Elementor is a solid tool to use.
Click here to go to Elementor.com affiliate page
Teachable
Teachable is an online learning platform that hosts thousands of online courses. It enables millions to learn new skills from programming to playing soccer and drawing.
If you are good at something and think that there is an audience that is interested in learning that skill, you could create your own course on Teachable, without thinking about payments or refunds etc.
The commission of promoting this learning platform is 30%, which is nice because it is recurring. The most popular plan costs $99 per month, which nets $30 per person straight into your pocket.
Imagine recommending Teachable to 100 people. That is a full-time income!
Builderall
Builderall recently opened their doors to the English speaking market and would make every affiliate marketer happy with their AMAZING commission structure. First of all, Builderall is a digital marketing All-In-One product.
It allows you to build sales funnels and websites quite easily. In addition, they offer a lot of tools like a Facebook chatbot, SEO on-page scanner, browser notifications, design studio to create mockups and so much more. I wrote an in-depth review of Builderall.
If you are active in the digital marketing space, I encourage you to take a look at Builderall.
But what about their affiliate program? Their affiliate program is hands down, the best I’ve ever seen. You will earn 100% commission on the initial sale, which means you are break-even after 1 sold membership. Plus you’ll earn 30% commission recurring, every single month.
But that’s not it.
Builderall has a tier 2 system, which means that you will earn 30% commission recurring if the people that signed up through your link, will successfully recommend Builderall to others. It is only limited to the people that signed up through your link, so it cannot be considered a pyramid scheme or something like that.
You should definitely take a look at Builderall. It has a 7-Day Free Trial.
Semrush (Berush)
Semrush is an All-in-one Marketing Toolkit for digital marketing professionals.
Do you want to rank higher on Google? You should at least take a look at Semrush.
They are in the game for 10 years and one of the best in the field of search engine optimization.
You can expect technical SEO audits, position tracking for specific keywords, backlinks audit and analysis and much more.
It’s quite pricey, which means a higher commission for you! You’ll receive 40% commission if you successfully refer someone.
Click Here If You Are Interested In Semrush
Thrive Themes
Again a page builder. First I wrote about Elementor and now Thrive Themes. I have to correct myself.
Thrive Themes isn’t just a page builder. They offer much more than that.
- Unique Themes and plugins
- All-in-one email list building tool
- A fast and intuitive visual editor for WordPress
- Beautifully and conversion optimized 100% editable opt-in pages, sales pages, webinar registrations pages
- And much more!
You can compare it a bit with ClickFunnels except that Thrive Themes works with WordPress and ClickFunnels has their own hosting platform.
If you are already working with WordPress and you want to increase your conversion rate and thus getting more sales, Thrive Theme is something you can consider.
Their affiliate program isn’t bad either: 35% commission on single sales and 25% recurring.
Click here if you want to know more about Thrive Themes
Grammarly
A funny fact is that not every blogger is a great writer. I mean, we bloggers like to share our tips and experiences with our readers, but that doesn’t mean we all scored an A for English tests.
We all make linguistic mistakes and some people more than others. I know that I make a lot of mistakes, but English is not my native language.
That shouldn’t be an excuse of course, so that’s why I try to reduce grammatical errors as much as possible. I use a FREE tool called Grammarly, to help me write the best blog posts I can.
Google clarified that bad grammar doesn’t influence your rankings yet, but it is a fact that fewer websites would link to articles with incorrect grammar and poor spelling.
But all right, back to Grammarly.
It corrects your sentences right on the spot. This is something I would recommend to everyone, also if you are not a blogger at all. In case you want to upgrade to a paid plan in which Grammarly checks and correct more complex errors, you pay a monthly fee.
The affiliate program of Grammarly is fantastic as well.
You’ll earn $0,20 for every person that registers for the free version and receive $20 flat if someone purchases the premium plan.
Tripadvisor
The travel industry starts to become bigger and bigger. More people are traveling so travel companies keep growing.
I mean, who doesn’t like traveling? Whether you are going on a quick holiday or just want to see the world and dreaming about an around the world trip.
If I take myself as an example, I watch at least a 2-3 times a week travel vlogs. The world is beautiful and there’s a lot to be discovered.
Tripadvisor is a popular travel and restaurant company that shows hotel and restaurant reviews, accommodation bookings and other travel-related content.
It is really easy to find a good destination to travel to, read some reviews about a hotel you are interested in and before you know, you’ve booked your trip.
TripAdvisor will pay you at least 50% commission of the revenue generated when users sent from your site click on commerce links and/or ads throughout the TripAdvisor site.
The conversion rate is amazing (40%). Send 10 people to Tripadvisor and 4 of those will click on the links or ads.
That’s not it. They also reward you with at least 3% commission of the hotel booking value on any Instant Bookings made by your leads.
Tailwind
Pinterest is still considered one of the most underrated traffic sources.
People (especially women, 67%) don’t always use it to pin their favorite food or cute cat pictures.
No…
Pinterest also serves as a search engine.
Some bloggers get thousands of visitors a day just by pinning on Pinterest.
I know what you are thinking: this is too time-consuming.
It is, but there is a way to automate the entire process.
And here you have Tailwind, a company that automates and schedules all your pins and saves you lots of time.
If done right, you get tons of traffic straight to blog while it took you like a couple of hours a week to set everything up.
Tailwind has an affiliate program and offers 15% commission on every sale and $0,5 per lead as a small bonus.
Because every blogger basically needs this, the conversion rate is great. Send 2000 people in a year to Tailwind and you’ll earn $1000, just by referring them to Tailwind.
That’s a nice side income, isn’t it?
Read more about Tailwind and their affiliate program
Amazon Associates
“Huh, I thought this article is about high paying affiliate programs and the commission percentages Amazon provides are little”.
That’s right.
Amazon is the largest e-commerce company in the entire world, but their commission percentages aren’t that great.
Their affiliate program front page says ‘earn up to 10% advertising fees with a trusted e-commerce leader’.
But, just a few products qualify for the highest tier.
Most of the products range between 2% and 6%.
“Then why did you list it as high paying?”
Because some products are really expensive and with a 6% commission you still are able to make a lot of money.
Let’s say an incredibly expensive ring that costs $2000. The commission on jewelry sales is 7%, which nets a $140 dollar for just recommending one ring.
Or let’s say a brand new tv that costs $2500. The commission on televisions is 2%, which is still $50.
Not bad.
And the main benefit of Amazon is that you also earn commissions if your leads purchase a different item on Amazon.
If you combine it with an exceptional conversion rate, chances are you are making a pretty good income off Amazon.
Read more about Amazon Associates Affiliate Program
UseProof
One of the most important factors that increase your sales is social proof.
Research showed us that for some reason people are more likely to take action if others already have done the same.
That’s why you see testimonials on every sales page and reviews are indispensable on a product page.
People are influenced by what others are buying.
Whether you are a blogger or run an e-commerce business, it is really important to show any kind of social proof on your page.
UseProof is a company that helps you grow your brand by adding social proof on your website.
They claim that they can increase your leads and sales by 10% in less than 10 minutes!
If you want to promote UseProof you’ll earn 30% recurring commissions for all signups that come through your affiliate tracking link.
As their most popular plan costs $79, promoting this company could be very profitable.
ShareASale
Until now we have only touched on private affiliate marketing programs. What I mean by that is that most of these companies have their own affiliate program in-house.
But a company can also decide to take part in an affiliate program network.
This is especially beneficial for smaller businesses that do want to have affiliates to market their products but don’t want to deal with tracking and payments etc.
An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and merchant affiliate programs.
A popular affiliate network is Shareasale. Thousands of merchants are connected with Shareasale.
It doesn’t matter if it is in the Home & Garden, Fashion, Green or Business niche.
Some companies offer a commission rate of up to 80%!
It is worth checking out Shareasale.
Read more if you want to promote products on Shareasale
Clickbank
Here we have another affiliate network!
Clickbank is perhaps the most popular affiliate marketing network regarding digital products.
Let’s compare it with Amazon. 90% of the products they sell are physical, so they have high overhead costs which consist of shipping, packaging, storing, manufacturing etc.
Clickbank, on the other hand, is 90% focused on digital products. After you’ve created the ebook, course or software product, you send it with one mouse click through email for example.
Your costs are minimal.
The result is amazingly high commission rates. A commission of 80-90% is common. I’ve even seen a product that offered 100% commission on the initial sale.
The vendor made their money on the back-end with email marketing.
It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, Clickbank has a product you can promote to your audience.
Read more about Clickbank here
Did I Miss Anything?
All right, I hope you enjoyed reading this list of 20 high paying affiliate programs for bloggers in 2018.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Which affiliate program from today’s post are you going to try first?
Or maybe I didn’t mention one of your favorite high paying affiliate programs.
Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.
This is really a very timely post for me. We’ve been blogging for 2 years now. We started out with Amazon but did not have enough traffic, so got kicked off the program for lack of purchases. While I won’t try to approach them again for a while, I was urged by several bloggers to seek out high-paying, but low requirements affiliate programs to link with. In the back of mind, I was going to get around to it eventually. Now that I have read your blog post, I am convinced that even if I don’t go all out getting affiliate links that I should at least have a few sprinkled throughout our posts. I can see how some of them tie into posts that already exist. Thanks for motivating me to take action and get back on the affiliate bandwagon. 👍🏽
Hey Vox,
Thank you for dropping by! Yes, Amazon is really strict regarding the minimum number of sales you have to generate. Even though Amazon is huge and some people do make really good money by promoting their products, it’s not for everyone. I’m glad to hear you found this list valuable and I hope you are going to crush it!