How to Make Passive Income With 2-Tier Affiliate Programs
Do you like money? Do you like when other people make you money? Then a 2-tier affiliate program might be just what you’re looking for!
Read on to find out why two-tier affiliate programs are one of the best ways to make money online.
Below, you’ll also find a link to receive FREE affiliate training for the next 100 days!
What Is a 2-Tier Affiliate Program?
A two-tier affiliate program is an affiliate model that allows you to earn commissions from the customers you refer directly, as well as, any affiliates (your sub-affiliates) that you bring into the program.
A typical two-tier affiliate structure would be set up something like this:
- 1st Tier (you) = 30% commissions on all sales from any direct customers that you refer
- 2nd Tier (sub-affiliates) = 5% commissions on all sales that your affiliate referrals earn
It’s important to understand that on the second tier, your affiliates have to sell the product or service directly to customers. That is why you receive commissions; 2nd tier earnings are not made just for signing up new affiliates.
Why Do You Need Multi-tier Affiliate Programs?
In a previous article, I talked about why you need to earn passive income in order to grow your earnings online. Multi-tier affiliate programs make it a lot easier for you to achieve your financial goals because you get to leverage your affiliates’ hard work.
When you recruit an army of sub-affiliates to a program and they make sales, you get paid without having to do any extra work. So if you have a choice between making sales only when you sell directly to a customer or earning cash on auto-pilot, the answer’s obvious! You’d take both, of course!
Now that you know why you want to join a two-tier affiliate program, you should know what makes for a quality affiliate program to join.
Here are my recommendations on what to look for:
1. People actually use the product or service. Look for reviews from real people who have used the product or service before you join the affiliate program.
2. Affiliates trust the program to pay. If you see affiliates that have been promoting an affiliate program for a number of years, then you know that you can trust the company to pay you.
3. The commissions are high enough for it to be worth it. You need to make a good amount per sale or the product or service needs to sell like hotcakes if it doesn’t pay out that much per sale.
4. They offer referring commissions. You need to join programs that pay you over and over so that you put in the effort one time and get paid repeatedly.
5. They offer lifetime commissions. Even if a program doesn’t offer referring commissions, it should absolutely offer lifetime commissions on your sub-affiliates.
My Favorite Two-tier Affiliate Programs
Now that you understand how 2-tier affiliate programs work, I’d like to help you get started by recommending some of my favorite programs. I chose these programs because they are easy to promote and you don’t have to purchase the product or service in order to become an affiliate.
Planet Traffic
Planet Traffic has been around since 2003 and is a trusted website for purchasing traffic and guaranteed signups. I have verified that this site does indeed deliver real traffic since they are listed as an upstream site in Alexa for several PTC sites and online business programs.
With their affiliate program, you can earn up to $35 per sale for the sales that you make directly and you earn commissions on two referral levels. The traffic packages on their site are super easy to sell since they aren’t expensive and your referrals are likely to purchase them over and over again.
For a hint on where to promote this affiliate program, you can use traffic exchanges, safelist mailers, and PTC sites. The type of people who need the traffic that Planet Traffic offers are people who need to recruit referrals to their MLM programs.
Facebook is also a goldmine for finding people who want to buy traffic packages.
Pro tip: When you promote this affiliate program, make sure that you choose to promote the referral link for “Guaranteed Signups” that you’ll find in your Planet Traffic account.
Sign up URL: Affiliate Program Earn up to $35 per Sale
Commissions Rates: 10% of every sale; 2 referral levels: 1% on level 1 and 0.5% on level 2
Minimum Payout Amount: $15
Payout Schedule: As soon as the minimum payout amount is reached
Payment Methods: Perfectmoney, Bitcoin, PayPal
ClickFunnels
The ClickFunnels Affiliate Program is one of the most popular digital marketing software affiliate programs online today. They offer lifetime recurring commissions and a 2-tier affiliate commissions structure that allows you to earn recurring commissions from your referrals.
Another attractive feature of this affiliate program is the fact that they offer free affiliate training. The 100-day free Affiliate Bootcamp course teaches you how to use Facebook Ads and other techniques to promote ClickFunnels. Even if you’re a total newbie to online marketing, this training is really easy to understand.
The best part is that the affiliate training you will get there will teach you how to promote almost any affiliate program online so I highly recommend that you sign up for this free training even if you don’t want to promote ClickFunnels.
The training includes full-length videos and gives you tasks to complete each day that are guaranteed to help you make sales.
You can also get additional help as an affiliate by joining the ClickFunnels Facebook group which is by invitation only after you sign up as an affiliate.
One of the other reasons why I highly recommend this program is the fact that the company, Etison LLC, is always releasing new products, such as Expert Secrets, that are complementary to the ClickFunnels software offering.
In order for me to work with an affiliate program, I need to see real people using the company’s services. I don’t join affiliate programs if the only time I see the product or service being used is when some affiliate is trying to promote it. You can find companies all over the web who use ClickFunnels to manage their landing pages and sales funnels.
Finally as an added bonus, ClickFunnels will also pay for you to lease your dream car (up to $500/month) if you achieve 200 active members. So not only will you be earning $4,000 per month in recurring commissions, you’ll also have a new car to drive around.
Sign up URL: How To Retire In 100 Days As A ClickFunnels Super Affiliate – Join Here
Commissions Rates: 40% recurring for ClickFunnels monthly accounts you refer directly, 5% on everything your referrals earn
Minimum Payout Amount: $50
Payout Schedule: As soon as the minimum payout amount is reached
Payment Methods: PayPal
Affiliate Networks
You can also earn a ton of money by referring affiliates to popular affiliate networks. Check out my complete list of affiliate networks to join here: THESE SITES Are the Top Affiliate Networks
All of the affiliate networks listed in that article will pay you to recruit new affiliates to their networks.
How to Get Sub-affiliates
Now that you have some programs that you can join as an affiliate, it’s time to get started with making some money.
The first thing that I recommend that you do is learn all of the aspects of the affiliate program that you are trying to promote. If you don’t understand how the program works, it’s going to be really difficult for you to attract new customers, let alone sub-affiliates.
Once you feel confident enough to explain how the product or service and the related affiliate program works, start promoting it right away.
One easy way to get sub-affiliates that I highly recommend is to simply create blog articles or forum posts and do a case study of your journey as an affiliate. By doing this, you’ll teach sub-affiliates how to promote the program and in turn make them feel more confident that they too can make good earnings from the program.
In the same way that you recruit customers directly, don’t overlook your offline network or other online resources that you already use, such as LinkedIn and Facebook to find people who might be interested in becoming a sub-affiliate for your program.
Want to suggest a two-tier affiliate program that I should add to this article? Please let me know in the comments!
Thanks for the list of Affiliate Networks.
ClickFunnels looks like a great offer to promote as the product is top class.
Wasn’t aware of the affiliate program so will definitely be taking a look.
I feel like a bit of a coward.
Or maybe I’m a bit over-cautious … liking the wonderful promises you make above, but ‘not believing you’ since you don’t mention anything bad that could happen (oh, I agree that it’s always good to have ‘a positive outlook’; but I’d sooner take ‘honesty and a lot of money’ rather than ‘nothing but huge-huge-huge promises’
That, and I don’t necessarily want to promote a product I am-not/would-not use myself.
Thanks for your comment. Affiliate programs are just like any other opportunity to make money online: you might earn money or you might not. You’re responsible for your own success.
As far as things that could go wrong, just like any other business, there are ways to fail. For example, you could end up spending money on advertising and you are still unable to attract affiliates or sales. However, that could be the result of you paying for poor quality traffic or creating ads that simply don’t convince people to buy. But again that is not the fault of the program itself; it’s the result of how you chose to run your business.
As far as getting started, the free affiliate training that ClickFunnels offers is completely free. So you can always sign up and go through it to decide if affiliate marketing is the right opportunity for you.
The training also teaches fundamentals of affiliate marketing in general so you don’t even have to promote ClickFunnels if you don’t want to. You can apply what you learn to promoting any other affiliate program on your own. Hope this helps!
I’ve been chasing passive online income since I was a teenager and I’ve never been able to make it work. Because of this, I am rather apathetic about online ventures and feel doomed for failure.
If I have a niche website that gets maybe 500 to 1,000 visitors per month, would it be worth trying to promote multi-tiered affiliate programs like this one? How would it compare to offering my own products or services?
Joining a multi-tired affiliate program is a great way to get started with making some income fast.
However, you might find that developing your own products and services is more rewarding over the long term only because you don’t have direct control over the company that manages the affiliate program. That said, 500 to 1,000 visitors is more than enough to get affiliate sales, especially if you are also collecting email addresses so that you can send follow up emails to your visitors.
In fact, the ClickFunnels Affiliate Bootcamp program that I mentioned above will provide you with a full autoresponder so that you have emails to send to your audience and you can just tweak them to meet your own needs.
Let me know if you have any other questions! Thanks for your comment!