Let’s say that there are three prizes in a contest: the third-place prize, second-place prize, and the grand prize. Which one do you want to win?

Well, unless you don’t like WINNING, you probably want the grand prize. And this same reasoning should apply to affiliate marketing: make as many high ticket affiliate product sales as possible.

So why are so many affiliate marketers settling for third-place when they could be earning more money?

It’s easy: they don’t think they’ll be able to find buyers for high ticket products because they don’t know how to sell them.

So today, I’d like to help you learn how to make a lot more money by covering the basics of promoting high ticket affiliate programs.

What Are High Ticket Affiliate Products?

The term “high ticket affiliate product” simply refers to an affiliate product that pays out more in commissions per sale than the average affiliate program. While the average affiliate program might only pay out $50 for a sale, a high ticket affiliate product might pay out upwards of $1,000 per sale.

These affiliate programs offer more money because they believe finding new customers for their product or service often means a significant investment when it comes to customer acquisition costs. Another reason why a high ticket affiliate program might pay more is simply because the company’s product or service costs a lot more.

For example, a company might sell software that costs $10,000 to implement so their affiliate program might pay out 5% of every sale, or $500.

In addition to higher commissions, if you can successfully promote the company’s products you might be also able to negotiate better commissions rates.

Companies that do business at this scale understand just how important marketers are to their business and the fact that your promotional services can’t be easily replaced. Therefore, they are often willing to negotiate which is an added bonus for you.

So now that you understand what’s involved, here is my step-by-step tutorial to selling high ticket affiliate products:

1. Stop Thinking High Ticket Affiliate Products Are Harder to Sell

Let’s face it. You’re going to end up putting in just as much effort to sell some copies of that $17 product as you would in selling a product that will earn you $1,000. At the end of the day, you don’t get any sales at all, no matter how much commissions you’ll earn, until you find a promotional strategy that works.

So the first step in this tutorial is for you to stop thinking that high ticket affiliate products are automatically more difficult to sell. It simply isn’t true.

2. Identify Your Buyer

You’re not going to get anywhere unless you have a good understanding of who your buyer is and why they want the affiliate product in the first place.

You’ll need to do some extensive research to figure out who this person is and where they hang out online. Identify their problems, desires, difficulties, wants, and needs.

Make sure that you also gather demographics that you can target, such as age, income, sex, location, and language. The better you understand your target prospect, the more likely you are to make the sale.

3. Build Your Funnel

When you’re selling a product or service that cost $25,000, your buyer is going to want to do a bit more research than simply reading a few online reviews. While you might get lucky with getting a few one-off sales that way, it is not the best way to maximize your earnings or use the traffic that you’re bringing in effectively.

Therefore, you also need to build a sales funnel. ClickFunnels offers some excellent tools for building sales funnels quickly and you can even get access to a free 14-day trial here. After you set up your funnel landing pages, you need to have a system in place that includes follow-up emails and even phone calls so that you can work on building relationships with your sales prospects.

Myth: Many marketers believe that you have to offer a whole series of cheaper offers in your sales funnel as you work your customer up to the most expensive offer.

This is simply not true. If you make sure that you are promoting the offer to the right qualified audience with the right message, you can completely eliminate these intermediary steps.

4. Create a Trustable Brand

In addition to having sales funnels, you also need to back your offer with a trustable brand. That doesn’t mean that you have to have a million Facebook followers.

All you need to do is show potential buyers that you are in it for the long-haul and truly want to connect them with a quality vendor. Here are a few ways to do this:

• Create blog posts about the product or service (a review or tutorial, but not a sales pitch).
• Conduct interviews with employees of the company that you are promoting.
• Publish testimonials that you’ve collected (positive, neutral, and negative).
• Promote it in a high value marketing channel, such as a podcast.
• Create a guide to using the product or service.

All of these techniques help to establish trust between you and the potential buyer thus increasing the likelihood of a sale.

5. Follow Up on the Phone

You’d be astonished if you knew just how many affiliate marketers never consider calling their prospects. You could be just minutes away from $5,000 in your pocket but you don’t want to pick up the phone?

Instead of leaving your sales prospects to give up on their own, start calling your prospects when you see that they taking longer to make a decision which might indicate that they are not ready to convert.

When you get on the phone, you can also ask the important questions to uncover and resolve any sales objections directly.

Final Hint: Where to Find High Ticket Affiliate Offers

There are tons of places to look for high ticket affiliate offers on the web. The best place to start is within your industry. Research all of the top companies in order to see what kinds of products and services they offer and if they have affiliate programs.

From there, you can also try the Payment Proof method that I shared with you in a previous blog post: Easy Make Money Online Strategy: Payment Proof Inside.

Finally, there is a blog called High Paying Affiliate Programs that is a good starting point for your research.

Here’s Why You NEED High Ticket Affiliate Programs

Before we end this tutorial, I’d like to point out why this matters at all. While making more money sounds great on its own, NOT making high ticket affiliate sales could make or break your business if the majority of your income comes from affiliate sales.

You should know that without high ticket affiliate products to promote, you’ll:

• Have trouble covering your advertising costs. If every sale that you make is only netting you $37, or even $7 per sale, and it’s costing you nearly that much to bring in a new customer, you’ll blow your ad budget in no time.

• Have to rely on your upsells. Upsells are what make or break affiliate marketers when they promote low ticket products. If you don’t have a sales funnel in place to sell your customers additional products, you’ll lose money.

• Have to change your affiliate offers more frequently. Low ticket affiliate products are often created as temporary money makers by marketers. They aren’t usually meant to be long-time revenue generators because they aren’t evergreen products.

In short, not promoting high ticket affiliate products simply makes earning from affiliate marketing harder than it needs to be. So stop the bleeding before it starts.

Have questions or feedback about this article? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!