Two Tier Affiliate Programs
Posted by admin | 
July 27th, 2007
If you’ve only been an affiliate marketer for a short while, you might not have heard about two tier affiliate programs yet. Or maybe you have, but you’re not sure what they are.
A two tier affiliate program is a way for you to make additional money with affiliate products and programs you promote. Basically, it’s a recruitment program. If you’re an affiliate of a great program and you tell others about it, they might sign up to be an affiliate too. If they sign up using your referral link, they become your sub affiliate. And as your sub affiliate, you can make money each time they make affiliate sales of their own.
Two tier affiliate programs are sometimes confused with MLM, or Multi Level Marketing programs, so let me explain the difference:
With a MLM, big earnings depend on you signing up lots of people. Not only that, the people you sign up must also sign up lots of people. In fact, many MLMs concentrate more on signing up sales people, also referred to as representives, in their downlines than they do actually promoting or selling products. There are some MLMs actually, that make money because everyone who signs up is required to buy a certain amount of products each month themselves.
With two-tier affiliate programs you don’t earn money when your sub affiliates sign up their own sub affiliates. You only make money if you make sales, or if your sub affiliates make sales. Usually the amount you make from your sub affiliates is a pittance compared to what you can make yourself too, so there’s a much greater incentive for you to promote the products or services directly.
Having sub affiliates can add to your bottom line earnings nicely though, particularly over long periods of time. If you make 50% commissions on direct affiliate product sales, and 5% on sales your sub affiliates make, you could try building a large number of active sub affiliates. 1000 people making sales that earn you 5% really adds up nicely.
More often than not, the bulk of people who sign up as sub affiliates with you will never make any money. In fact, usually only about 2% of affiliates make sales on any kind of regular basis, so signing up 1000 affiliates might get you only 20 who make sales on a regular basis. And if those 20 only make small sales regularly, you won’t make much additional money. It’s not usually easy to live off of sub affiliate sales, unless you devote a lot of time and effort into building a very large, active affiliate sales network.
Unfortunately there are not as many two tier affiliate programs around today as there used to be. And those that are left tend to require ongoing monthly membership fees, which affiliates must pay also, so it can be harder to promote the service to begin with.
If you’re looking for good two tier affiliate programs, start with a basic web search and explore what’s out there. Then check in with a few active affiliate marketing forums and see what others have discovered about this type of affiliate marketing model.
