How To Do Affiliate Marketing for Software and SaaS Products

Ive been an affiliate for a lot of different products but the number 1 best type of affiliate product to recommend and promote by far has been software products and especially those with a monthly subscription built in. I wasted a lot of time just selling software that had a one time fee making that commission and then poof the customer was gone. The realisation came to me when I checked my bank account and saw the number of monthly subscriptions I was paying. An insane amount of monthly payments being made by me and I wasn’t even using half of the softwares.

Then my entire focus shifted to getting in front of those softwares that had monthly subscriptions built into their offering. It just made sense. Also I am a huge geek for software, tools and any automation I can get my hands on I am the perfect audience for any SaaS business or fellow affiliate marketer promoting software.

Key Takeaway: I needed to cover my basis each and every month so I could pursue what ever my heart desired. This was the basics and I do live well under my means already but to please my other half I keep a healthy buffer between every bill instalment, debt, payment, want need and desire haha.

I needed to cover the following

Mortgage payments
House insurance
Food bills
Electricity
Fuel for our cars
Pet food and insurance
Other bills

Now I had my baseline number of what I had to aim for I could start promoting with a goal insight. Lets for this example say I needed to cover $2,800.00 a month. This was achievable for this type of affiliate promotion especially since it was a monthly commission payout. I just had to harness the power of compounding. This is where you stack up the offer pages and continue to build out while the first round of sales offers and web pages get their initial traction. The money come sin and then it keeps coming in while new people are added as customers, this increases my commissions by way of compounding the monthly sales commissions.

This is absolute genius!

At least thats what I think. By focusing on my target number I can also be very strategic with my choice of affiliate offers that I select. I typically look for 30%+ commissions for this exercise, but thats not overly common in the affiliate SaaS model. There are several SaaS affiliate offers that I use that have 40% commissions per signup paid monthly and they work really well as those companies are very aggressive in their growth strategies.

Get paid by recommending software that has a monthly subscription

Affiliate marketing for software and SaaS products. What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s products for a commission on a monthly fee. In essence, you are an online broker. Get ready to broker some serious deals. There are many online businesses that utilize affiliate marketing, the most notable of them are Amazon, eBay, ClickBank, and BestBuy. It is estimated that in 2006 affiliates earned over $6 billion in commissions and bonuses.

What is an Affiliate? An affiliate is a non-ational, non-business website owner who makes money by referring customers to the products and services of another company. The affiliate is compensated when the customer takes some form of action, such as making a purchase, registering for a newsletter, or filling out a form.

The affiliate does not incur any marketing expense unless and until the action is completed. You can promote as hard or as passive as you want no one is bossing you to push hard. You can also do a bootstrap approach saving where you can or once you know the numbers scale that b##ch to the moon with paid advertising.

Disclaimer: While you can literally work from anywhere when doing affiliate marketing I would never ever take my primary money making device I absolutely required to do my job TO A BEACH!! This photo was used just to show the work from anywhere in the world emphasis and in no way shape or form do I work from a beach when promoting affiliate offers. LOLS.

Becoming an affiliate.

It is a good idea to choose a niche or specialty to which you will send your traffic. By focusing your energies on fewer products you are more adept to understand and become an authority in the marketplace. In addition, when you focus on a specific niche you are able to relate better to your clients, develop a relationship, and market to them more effectively.

Customer targeting

Target your traffic to people who are interested in the product or service you are promoting. Everyone likes to get something for free. Free tools can include reports, software, ebooks, or free services. As an affiliate, you can do free marketing by writing reviews of the products or services you are promoting. To attract visitors to your affiliate re-direct page, you can create a free e-book or report that is related to your re-direct page subject and name your report with a title and URL to your re-direct page.

URL redirect

You can also use URL redirect to get buyers to your affiliate re-direct page. Create a redirect page on your site, and then you can link the old page to the new one. But make sure to tell your affiliates the new URL to their re-direct page.

Multiple sections

You can create sub-affiliates for your product, that will direct buyers to your affiliate’s sales pages. A sub-affiliate is someone who signs up to your affiliate program and receives a personalised link. When a customer clicks on the link, he/she is brought to the affiliate page instead of your sales page. You have to create an affiliate section on your website, and then create a second affiliate section.

Note that there is a problem in Plus and minus program. If one affiliate buys product from merchant X and decides to direct buyer to another affiliate who buys product from merchant Y, you will lose X% of the price from that affiliate, because you will be paid only if the buyer decides to keep buying. In addition, you lose percentage off of that associate resulting in less profit.

You can use PPC marketing to get around this. PPC stands for Pay Per Click. Instead of selling a product this way, you would select keywords for your ad campaign. Your ad would only appear when someone searches for keywords you select. Instead of losing profit each time someone clicks your ad, you will profit only when someone buys the product. This is much better than selling a product this way.

However, PPC is a harsh lesson all in one. You need to pay for every click. This means some clicks might pay, but you have to pay a large bid to get your ad on the front page. Because the clicks are so expensive, this is often not possible for most affiliates.

This is at least part of the problem. Another problem is continuing to build your site for more visitors hoping to buy everything you promote. It is not efficient. You need to build a site that attracts constant traffic. You should also select merchandise that pays high commission rates.

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Today, there are a number of software alternatives available to help you in building your site in affiliate marketing. Some are free and others charge monthly fees. The reason for this is that some software do not perform as well on the cheaper price products. As an affiliate for SaaS products you should embrace this as it means you get paid monthly when someone stays with that software. You just need a handful of people to take action and before you know it you have a affiliate promotion making you $2,000 a month. This is a beautiful business model.

So, software like the Automizy, SendFox, ClickFunnels, GroovePages and GoHighLevel can give you some of the mission critical features that you will need for affiliate marketing to the SaaS community. The key is never the tool that you use, really you could use anything. But it sure helps if you have a reliable tool AND a clever appealing message to your target audience.

At this point, you need to analyse and evaluate all the data about your web site. Remember to put your product and your website on the same page for the best results. Take time to review where the best traffic comes from, who the buyers are and what the best offers are you may start to see patterns and insights that allow you to scale and build another $2,000 a month from doubling down on one SaaS affiliate offer.

I hope that you learned something from this article. I love affiliate marketing and the ability to dial in on patterns and trends. If you have any questions about this model of affiliate marketing shoot me a email. Thank you for reading.