You might already be an active affiliate, but are you making as much money as you could? Here are four big reasons to start selling digital goods to maximize your affiliate revenue.
- The payouts remain high for software affiliates and can hit as high as 85% CPS. For example, last year the average commission across the Avangate network was 40%, which is far above other verticals. For comparison, here are the average commissions for certain sectors:
- Recurring revenues have significant potential. The $30 billion SaaS market represents a huge opportunity for fast-moving affiliates and may also bring a bonus reward, such as a payout structure based on recurrent commissions. The following is a real example of the commission scheme applied by an Avangate vendor that illustrates how, after one year of a non-interrupted automatic renewal cycle, the affiliate gets paid three times the value of the initial commission.
Unit price = $99
New sale commission (CPS) = 30%
Commission for renewals (CPS) = 10%
- An evolving array of niche products and services that affiliates can explore, leverage and ultimately dominate. More and more affiliates, both newcomers and veterans, are becoming interested in the less competitive niches on the affiliate marketing battleground. These attractive new sub-verticals can often fall under the category of professional tools, such as project management, graphic design apps, or online marketing tools, just to name a few.
Top Selling Professional Tools in January 2014 (Avangate Affiliate Network)
Here you can see the top 10 products from January 2014.
- Geographical expansion opportunities are significant. Right now, the majority of software and online services affiliate programs are open internationally, without territory or language restrictions, and affiliates from home and foreign countries can always launch into less saturated markets or territories they are familiar with from a language and cultural perspective. This creates opportunities for affiliates to easily test and successfully sell worldwide with merchants that already have localized their marketing materials and products. In our network, affiliates outside the US and mature markets of Western Europe (UK, Germany, France) and APAC (Japan) represent 12% of total sales and it’s growing yearly. The top 10 countries are as follows:
From the affiliate perspective, the digital goods vertical is one of the easiest to scale internationally and this is thanks mainly to the electronic delivery model that can serve several markets with a minimal investment
We’ve given you four major reasons to explore selling digital goods as an affiliate. What are some others you can think of?
