Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative career, with high-ticket commissions in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per sale. So, how can you get those high ticket commissions?
I’ve been in the affiliate space for over a decade and even sold an affiliate site for multiple six figures. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to earn big commissions—and I’ll show you how you can do it.
Below, I’ll discuss high-ticket affiliate marketing, share some examples of high-ticket affiliate marketing programs, explain how to find high-paying affiliate programs, and show you how to make big commissions yourself.
What is high-ticket affiliate marketing?
High-ticket affiliate marketing promotes products or services with large payouts. A payout becomes “high ticket” once you reach above $100, but it can go as high as five figures.
It’s a way for affiliate marketers to make more money from fewer sales. Compared to traditional affiliate marketing, you need far less traffic to make more money. However, your conversion rate will also typically be much lower.
High-ticket products or services include things like:
- Courses or memberships
- Insurance
- Loans
- Software
- Machinery
- Jewelry
- Electronics
- Heavy metals
How much do high-ticket affiliate marketers make?
We examined how much money affiliate marketers make and found that, on average, most affiliate marketers (~57%) make less than $10,000 per year.
However, on the high end, 3.78% of affiliate marketers make over $150,000 per year, and an additional 7.94% of affiliates make $100,000–150,000 per year (according to a study done by the Influencer Marketing Hub).
I can say that I have made over six figures per year from high-ticket affiliate sales, and I know several others who have done the same.
The study above considers all affiliate income, so here are some examples of high-ticket affiliates.
15 examples of high-ticket affiliate marketing programs
Want to start making big commissions? Here are 15 examples of high-ticket affiliate programs you can join today.
1. Authority Hacker
Authority Hacker, led by Gael Breton and Mark Webster, is well known within SEO circles for running their online marketing courses. Still, it’s less well known that they have a high ticket affiliate program that can earn you $1,979 commission per sale and lifetime commissions on future purchases. Affiliates can track their performance through a ThriveChart dashboard.
Key points:
- Huge commissions of $1,979 per sale
- Payment via Paypal via ThriveChart
- 60-day cookie duration
2. Kinsta
Kinsta provides managed WordPress hosting and has a referral program where affiliates can earn up to $500 per referral and 10% of the monthly plan fee as long as the customer stays.
Affiliates can make ~$135 per month for each Pro plan referral. Kinsta also supports affiliates with marketing resources through its Affiliate Academy.
Key points:
- Between 5%–10% commission
- 10% recurring monthly revenue
- 60-days cookie duration
3. Shopify
The Shopify Affiliate Program offers competitive commissions to educators, influencers, and content creators who target business and entrepreneurship audiences.
Shopify supports affiliates with creative assets, educational materials, and performance tracking through a personal dashboard.
Key points:
- ~$150 commission when you refer new merchants to Shopify plans or Shopify POS Pro (dependant on location)
- 30-day cookie duration
4. Thinkific
Thinkific is an online platform that enables you to build your courses, sell memberships, digital products, and more. It’s a good choice if your audience is content creators, business leaders, or entrepreneurs.
Key points:
- $1,700 per referral per year
- 30% lifetime recurring commission on all monthly or annual plans
- 90-day cookie duration
5. Empire Flippers
If you want to buy an online business, then one of the first places you’ll look is Empire Flippers. It’s a premier online marketplace for buying and selling established websites and online businesses, facilitating over $500 million in sales since its founding in 2011.
With a focus on businesses valued between $100,000 and $1 million, Empire Flippers provides a hands-on service that includes detailed business evaluations and support throughout the transaction process.
Key points:
- 20% commission
- No ceiling on commissions
- 2-year cookie duration
6. Flippa
Flippa is a global platform where you can buy and sell online businesses, websites, and other digital assets. They have sold 450,000 businesses.
The platform offers a wide range of listings, including eCommerce sites, SaaS products, and blogs, allowing users to connect with potential buyers or sellers easily.
Key points:
- 20% referral commission of Flippa’s fees
- Can get commissions for generic referrals as well as referring people to a specific asset
- 120-day cookie duration
7. Bluehost
Bluehost is a prominent web hosting and domain registration company, founded in 2003, that powers over two million websites globally. It is officially recommended by WordPress, offering various hosting options, including shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting, along with 24/7 customer support. Known for its user-friendly interface and competitive pricing, Bluehost is particularly popular among beginners and small to medium-sized businesses looking to establish an online presence.
Key points:
- Earn at least 70% for each qualified sale, capping at $100 per sale
- 90-day cookie duration
8. Villiers Jets
Villiers Jets is a private jet charter company that offers luxury air travel services. As you can imagine, this type of high-ticket affiliate marketing can be particularly lucrative if you’re good at it.
Key points:
- Earn $1,000s for every flight booked
- 30% profit share on each flight introduced
- 365-day cookie duration
9. WP Engine
WP Engine is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider specializing in high-performance hosting solutions for businesses of all sizes, powering over 1.5 million websites globally.
It offers features such as automatic updates, top-tier security, and a fully managed environment to optimize site performance and reliability. With partnerships with major cloud vendors like AWS and Google Cloud, WP Engine ensures scalable and efficient hosting tailored for WordPress applications.
Key points:
- Up to $200 commission or 100% of first-month payment
- 180 days cookie duration
10. Teachable
Teachable is an online platform where you can create and sell online courses, digital downloads, coaching products, and memberships. It’s a well-designed platform with a high earning potential due to recurring payments—described by Pat Flynn as the “holy grail of passive income.”
Key points:
- Up to 30% commission
- Send traffic once, get a recurring commission for the first year
- 30-day cookie duration
11. Monday.com
Monday is one of the most well-known online project and task management platforms, but it also has a generous high-ticket affiliate program.
Key points:
- Earn up to 100% commission on the 1st year’s sales from each customer referred.
- Tiered commission model incentivizes generating more referrals
- 90-day cookie duration
12. HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular cloud-based platform that facilitates inbound marketing, sales, customer service, and business operations. It provides tools that help organizations attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
Key points:
- 30% commission recurring for a year
- 180 days cookie duration
13. WPX
Founded in 2013 by Terry Kyle in Bulgaria, WPX Hosting aims to provide a user-friendly experience with robust features tailored for WordPress websites. It has a generous affiliate program.
Key points:
- Earn up to $20,000 per month
- 60-day cookie duration
14. FreshBooks
FreshBooks is cloud-based accounting software for small businesses, freelancers, and self-employed professionals. Its affiliate program is run through ShareASale, a third-party affiliate network.
Key points:
- Up to $200 per paid subscriber
- 120-day cookie duration
15. Superside
Superside is a subscription-based design service that provides scalable creative solutions for enterprises and growing companies. You’ll need to sign up for an account to refer people through the program. It’s technically a referral program—you’ll need to share emails within the platform to land one of these high-ticket commissions.
Key points:
- $200 for a completed demo
- $5,000 for an annual closed deal
How to start high-ticket affiliate marketing (seven tips)
So, where to begin? Let’s dive into how to make big payouts.
1. Find a high-ticket affiliate program to promote
You can find high-ticket affiliate programs through affiliate networks like AvantLink or Impact Radius, or try some of the examples above.
You can also use Ahrefs’ Web Explorer to find affiliate program opportunities. Here’s how you do it.
- Start by navigating to Web Explorer and enter a high-ticket affiliate niche – I’ve chosen web hosting
- Then, add a Page URL filter that contains the phrase “affiliate-program”
- Hit search, and you’ll get something like the below
Even with this basic search, you can uncover random affiliate programs with over $100 commissions.
If you want to take it further, you can experiment by adding more filters. In the example below, I’ve added a Page title filter to find keywords that mention “$ per” in the title.
This gives us 363 potential affiliate programs to investigate that are likely to be high ticket.
However, based on my experience, if you want the absolute highest-paying programs, they will typically be found through direct brand partnerships that aren’t always advertised.
If you know of a high-ticket item or service you like and want to promote, consider contacting the company to discuss a partnership.
Half the battle of succeeding in high-ticket affiliate marketing is finding a good product worth the high price. You need to believe in the product, which is where tip #2 comes in.
2. Focus on building trust and authority
It doesn’t take a genius to sell a $5 product on Amazon (not that there’s anything wrong with Amazon affiliate websites). But if you want someone to buy a product worth thousands on your recommendation, you need them to trust your advice.
Trust is earned in several ways:
- Transparency – You’re legally required to have an affiliate disclaimer on your website. While you can hide it in the fine print, it’s better to be upfront about the fact that you are making a commission on sales.
- Honesty – If a product or service isn’t the best, tell people about it—even if the company pays you big bucks to say otherwise.
- A good about page – Tell your readers who you are and why they should trust you. Did you actually use the product? If you’re reviewing batteries, are you an electrician? Show off your qualifications. Better yet, have a video about your brand that shows your face. Let people know you’re a real person with real experience worth listening to.
For example, here’s the About page for The Wanderful, where Scott shows his face and his dog and talks a bit about his expertise (living in a van full-time for five years).
He also has some videos on his About page to show he knows what “van lifers” care about and why his products and recommendations are worth listening to.
Not only will these things help you sell expensive products, but it will also help with Google’s recent E-E-A-T update (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust). Signaling these attributes gives a better chance of ranking higher in Google’s search results.
3. Build quality backlinks to signal E-E-A-T and rank higher
Most successful affiliate marketers rely on search engines (mainly Google) to drive traffic to their websites and make conversions. And backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors that determine how well you rank for a given keyword.
If we circle back to E-E-A-T, Gary Illyes from Google said that backlinks have a huge impact on E-A-T (the former version, excluding experience):
For example, here’s a link to a high-ticket affiliate site from Forbes that signals E-E-A-T:
Screenshot taken from the Backlinks report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
If you don’t currently have a lot of good backlinks, here are some tactics you can use to start building more:
4. Invest in video
I believe that video builds more trust than words on a page; people trust you more if they can see your face and hands-on experience.
This is true across the board. You can use video to promote products on social media, improve trust on your website, and even occupy multiple spots on the SERPs.
Ahrefs has done this. Take a look at this SERP, for example:
You can see that we were able to rank two pages for the keyword “learn seo”—once with our YouTube video on the topic and again with our blog post on how to learn SEO.
But what about using video as an affiliate marketer?
One of my favorite examples of a high-ticket affiliate marketer using video is Hobotech. He does in-depth reviews of electrical components like solar power stations and batteries.
This video has received nearly half a million views. It promotes a $1,600 product with a 10% commission rate ($160 per sale):
His videos aren’t the fanciest or highest-quality, and they’re long (30+ minutes).
But he is very honest in his videos about what works and what doesn’t and whether or not he recommends you buy it. He goes on to explain things in layman’s terms and rigorously test the batteries, showing everything on camera with his expert feedback. He does a great job at building trust through video.
5. Capture people at different stages of the funnel
As affiliate marketers, we often focus on commercial-intent keywords relating to product reviews or comparisons. However, when it comes to high-ticket items, these keywords are usually extremely competitive and difficult to rank for.
Like the keyword “best health insurance,” which has a KD score of 80, according to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer (meaning you’ll need a lot of backlinks to rank on page #1):
Compare that with the keyword “can a doctor treat a family member and bill insurance,” which only has a KD of 1 (meaning you don’t need to care about backlinks to rank on page #1):
In the long run, you’ll build more trust (both with your visitors and with Google) by spreading your content across the entire marketing funnel—i.e., publishing blog posts on topics from when people start being interested to when they’re ready to make a purchase decision.
This way, you’ll also likely end up with more sales over time because you’re capturing people before they get to the buying research stage, allowing you to skip the competition entirely in some cases.
For example, here are keywords someone might search for at different stages in the buyer’s journey while researching kayaks:
In this case, you can get your brand in front of people long before they’re thinking about buying something. Not only does this build trust, but it also allows you to get these visitors into an email funnel that guides them through the journey from awareness to purchase.
Covering all your bases is especially important for high-ticket items where the competition is fierce and there are fewer potential buyers.
Research suggests it takes anywhere from 28 to 62 (or sometimes even more) “touchpoints” before someone will buy a product. A touchpoint is any time someone sees a brand, whether that’s on a billboard or your blog.
The number of touchpoints can be even higher for more expensive items since people need more convincing before they buy.
Of course, not all of the touches need to be done by you. If a company invests a lot in advertising, you only need to be one of the last touchpoints before someone buys in order to make the commission. Most of these affiliate programs have a 30-day or longer cookie.
But the more touches you can contribute, the more sales you’ll ultimately make.
That’s why, in addition to creating content for SEO, you should also grow an email list, be active on multiple social media platforms, and even consider running retargeting ads to get people back to your content so you can be the final touch before someone buys.
The “stickier” your brand is on your followers, the higher the chance you’ll make that glorious high-ticket commission. Get your visitors to follow you on multiple channels and subscribe to your email list to stay at the top of their minds.
6. Only promote quality products
This one’s simple—don’t try to trick people into buying expensive crap that won’t benefit them. It may work in the short term, but it will ruin that trust I keep talking about. If you want a serious long-term business, only promote products you find useful and worth the investment.
7. Don’t be afraid to tell people not to buy
Your product may not be for everyone. And by being honest about it, you will build more trust and have a higher conversion rate for the people the product will truly benefit.
One of my favorite things about Hobotech, who I mentioned before, is that he will tell you NOT to buy the product he’s promoting or reviewing if it’s not a good fit for you.
Take this video, for example. He mentions who it’s good for and who shouldn’t buy it.
Final thoughts
High-ticket affiliate marketing offers higher earnings from fewer sales. Choosing a niche with pricey products can be very profitable.
But to succeed, you must be honest, build trust with your audience by creating regular high-quality content, and show that you use the products or services yourself.
