What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing? (Ethical or Scam?)

There are some really hyped-up talks about promoting these high ticket affiliate marketing programs. Owners and affiliates promoting these sites will tell you it’s the only way to be financially successful online. In this post, I’ll tell you the ethical side of high ticket affiliate marketing and the scams behind it.

First, let me define what Affiliate Marketing is…

In layman terms, affiliate marketing is the process of selling other people’s stuff. To do this you need to have a website to make money online. 

What is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

When you read this, it’s exacting what it sounds like.

High ticket affiliate marketing is the selling of expensive affiliate products/services in the company’s range of products. Because the products cost more and the value justifies it, the company is able to offer higher commissions.

Normally, you would think of products like a fridge with an ice-maker or an Apple iPad Pro as being expensive.  Another example of a high-end product to sell is a MacBook Pro 15″. These high ticket products can be over $1,000 and so their affiliate commissions are also higher.

Even though Amazon’s typical commissions range around 6% to 8%, you can still make quite a bit of money. Of course, there are thousands and thousands of other affiliate programs in the internet world.

Imagine what your affiliate commissions could look like when someone purchases these high-end products. It could be from a couple of $100s to $1,000 and more.

Let’s look at a couple of Amazon products…

1) Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS USM Super Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras

Price: $10,999.95 USD

Commission Potential: $880 (8%)

This price may seem rather ridiculous, but there are many professional photographers who would think nothing of spending this amount.

Picture yourself just selling one of this product if you had your own “camera and accessories” niche website. Sell 20 in a year, that comes to around $17,600. Sell 100 and your commissions can come to $87,999.60 not too shabby, right?

2) Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Ice Blue Men’s Watch

Price: $69,955 USD

Commission Potential: $4,757

This is definitely a high-end product and if you look on Amazon’s site you will see people are buying this. People are spending their money online at even a much higher rate.

I’m thinking you’d be quite content on selling just one of this Rolex a month but imagine if you sold 10 of this watch with a “men’s watch” niche website, it would come to $47,570. Can you make this much in a month? With the right training, you can!

So what if you sold 20 or 100 of this watch… now I’ll let you do the calculation on this one…

You don’t have to even sell very many of these to have a successful year. You could just sell 20 and you could be living your dream lifestyle.

By the way, this Rolex Cosmograph is also waterproof up to 100 meters.  

Here’s the reality…

If people can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Lamborghinis, they’ll also spend the money on expensive watches and camera lens.

You may not be aware of this but there are thousands and thousands of affiliate marketing programs around that you can use to promote high-end products in any industry.

You will see more of these coming. but please, don’t believe these high-end products are easier to sell 1 product at $10,000 than selling 100 of the lower-end products at $100.

From my experience, it’s much easier to sell a large volume of the lower-end products with good value than it is to sell LESS volume of the high-end products that don’t really have the value.

It’s all about helping your customer…

Whether you have an online business or local business, it still boils down to what’s best for your customers. If you’re passionate about helping your customers this will help you become an authority online.

If you risk branding yourself for your sole purpose of potentially making higher commissions, at some point, your online business will fail because of trust issues.

This brings me to the next discussion, the “high ticket affiliate marketing” that you hear more and more people talk about in the internet world.

Well, I can tell you from what I have seen, there are lots of scam sites in this area. People are given the wrong interpretation and meaning of affiliate marketing and what its true purpose is. Their customers are no longer in the center of their business.

So let’s take a hard look at why these people who “think” they’re the “know it alls” consider this high ticket affiliate marketing as the only way to earning big money. Why do you think this is perfectly ok??

The people who do this high ticket affiliate marketing promote their high-end products like coaching, masterminds, memberships, and conferences. You might have unscrupulously even been taken advantage of into their crooked schemes paying thousands and thousands of dollars for their “so-called services”.

If you’ve been to any of their live coaching events, they’re so hyped up that many ex-members have stated they felt they were in a “cult” and they just had to do what they were told and felt “forced” to pay more.

In fact, you probably noticed their high-end products/services didn’t even have the true value of what you paid for them. That’s because they were never worth the price.

Why are these people doing this high ticket affiliate marketing at bizarre prices? They’re still making some money and they use that as their sales bait to entice people like you and me to join and sell for them. They don’t show you the real value of their product meaning they are only in it to make money for themselves.

This type of high ticket affiliate marketing is unethical and you will lose your hard-earned money. The owners and their affiliates want to take advantage of you.

I can tell you, this is definitely not the affiliate marketing business model in its true sense. In fact, it’s a business that’s only interested in taking your money.

It is these “high-ticket” companies like that are making the name “affiliate marketing” a bad name.

I’m a member of Wealthy Affiliate (WA), an online affiliate marketing training platform that teaches people how to make money online.

The platform has been around since 2005 and has over 1.4 million members and nowhere in their training do they teach ludicrous behaviours of what these unethical high ticket affiliate marketers do.

Its true affiliate marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s products/services in order to earn commissions. An honest affiliate marketer is to going promote products that are in the best interest for you as a customer, not your wallet.

If you’re only interested in someone’s wallet, you can fall into some serious implications like losing your retirement fund or fall into the hands of an investigation with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

A product that costs $5,000 or $10,000 does not necessarily mean it’s better than the lesser-priced one.

What happens is these scam unethical affiliate companies try to sign you up to join as affiliates into their extremely over-priced products by offering you higher commissions.

The other noticeable tactics these scammy companies do is they get you to do paid marketing methods that could run you into thousands of dollars without even learning the real basic fundamentals of affiliate marketing. Actions like paid ads for Solo ads, Facebook, and Google Adwords.

These paid ads, if you’re not trained properly can be quite risky.

I have done hundreds of reviews on companies that offer high ticket programs and have read hundreds of complaints from people who signed up as affiliates promoting coaching and mentorship, and mastermind products. Many of them lost their “shirt”.

Have you come across sites that claim they do affiliate marketing when in fact, they are actually doing MLM? The sad part is you don’t this until you put money into the system, a shocking revelation especially if you don’t like MLM.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Companies May Be MLM

Have you heard of companies referring to their platform as “MLM affiliate programs”? Seriously? MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) is nowhere near or identical to the Affiliate Marketing business model.

The 2 are totally different business model entities! I wrote an article that will help you distinguish the differences of Affiliate Marketing and MLM if you’re interested, CLICK HERE.

                    This image is MLM                                    This image is Affiliate Marketing

Take a look at the images, are they the same?

You see, there are many MLM companies, even some of the largest like Avon are now stating they have an affiliate program and saying it’s free to join. It’s desperate times for them.

You might be wondering now how on earth can you tell if a company you want to join is an actual affiliate marketing company, a possible scam or a pyramid scheme.

Many of the unethical high ticket affiliate marketing programs are get rich-schemes.

Here are some unethical signs to look for:

1. Sometimes they refer themselves as ‘MLM Affiliate Programs”.
2. You have to pay to join first. This is the “pay to play” game.
3. It’s hard to determine what the actual product/service is.
4. There are 3 levels and more, hence MLM.
5. Upsells after upsells.
6. Must pay or achieve certain goals to promote the level. 
7. Live conferences where coaches and so-called masterminds hype you up to where you pay more money.
8. Expensive coaching.
9. When owners insist on looking after your email list and make contact with these people. They close the deal for you.
10. When owners have a scammy background.
11. Get rich quick schemes who claim to give you the opportunity to make big money overnight.
12. You don’t have to work hard because the owners do the majority of the work for you.
13. The training/information is highly inflated.
14. The “good stuff” of the training/information comes at the end after paying a horrendous amount of money. Often times, the value is non-existent. 

The main subject is money and the training is on how to make money but the value of the training is extremely low at the lower levels and when you get to the higher levels even then it’s pretty basic.

To be honest, I haven’t come up with any high ticket affiliate marketing program that’s high priced and teaches how to make money of any worth whatsoever. BUT I did find a low-priced online affiliate marketing training platform that teaches everything you need to know and much more and it’s FREE to join as a Starter Member. 

By the way, just because it’s low-priced doesn’t mean it doesn’t have quality. The platform I’m talking about is Wealthy Affiliate. Not only do they offer the best affiliate marketing training platform in the industry, but they also teach the ethical way of using the business model and that is it’s all about your customers’ needs. 

If you’re looking specifically to join an affiliate program, Wealthy Affiliate has that too and so I invite you to take a look for free and why not take advantage of the training? Learn the basic fundamentals of affiliate marketing all the way to advanced marketing. 

If you’re thinking of joining unethical high ticket affiliate marketing programs for the sake of making high commissions from sites that don’t have real value on the products/services be very, very careful!

A lot of these unscrupulous websites might be under the watchful eye of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and other worldwide regulatory entities and founders of the companies have been sentenced and jailed.

The scary part is this is happening to a wide variety of industries. The skincare products, health and wellness, vacations, and more.

I’m just saying, be cautious when looking for ways to make money online. Don’t become a victim to scammers and worse yet, don’t scam other people.

The Case of MOBE and Digital Altitude – Lesson to Learn

When it comes to MOBE, you could pretty much think of it as the “inventor” of high ticket affiliate scam programs.

Both MOBE and Digital Altitude were selling high ticket membership products as much as $30,000+. Their big claim was to help innocent people make huge commissions with very little work but the only way you could this was to recruit, recruit, and keep recruiting.

Now if you thought all this was bad, they went further. In order to make your commissions, you had to spend a whack of money to get to each level of memberships first otherwise the commissions go to someone else. Definitely, a pyramid scheme wouldn’t you say

Each of these two companies only focused on teaching you how to generate paid traffic which can be very costly and yes lessons on how to recruit.

Unfortunately and sadly thousands of people lost money.

Because of all the complaints. The FTC stepped in and boom that was the end of MOBE and Digital Altitude.

A Bit of Psychology Behind The High Commissions Promise

Say you found a website that said: “join now and make $5,000 overnight and we do all the work for you.”

Probably the first thing that catches your attention is “$5,000”, “overnight” and they do “all the work for you”.

Would you even care what product/service you promote if you can make this amount of money overnight?

Or perhaps your thought is “Wow, this must be really good stuff/training. They must know a lot”. Or perhaps you just think they’re soooo successful because the owner or the affiliate said they made millions, hundreds of thousands of dollars…

You imagine the lifestyle you dream about and how all this can be possible… was I here? You bet I was and I fell for it!

“But I Still Want To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing”

If you still want to promote high-end products/services that are going to cost you thousands of dollars, you need to find out if the value is worth the price.

This means doing some industry research by checking out comparisons and if there are other options that are better costs on similar products/services to help your customers.

Avoid joining companies that promote high ticket affiliate marketing products that require you to promote these same products/services to other people. You could not only be scammed but other people thru your efforts could be scammed.

Remember if you want to join high ticket affiliate marketing companies, the products/services need to have quality. The value needs to justify the cost. Look for legitimate products/services like a watch, fridge, cameras, etc.

Playing with the owners of the affiliate marketing company who do scam actions may eventually catch up with you and the consequences can be costly and embarrassing should FTC do investigations. You may just be the affiliate but you could be construed as being guilty of playing with the bad owners.

I spoke briefly about Wealthy Affiliate. By now you know I’m a member of their affiliate marketing training platform. It is low-priced and it is my #1 recommendation if you want quality training and sincerely want to learn how to help your customers, build your brand, establish trust and generate sales.  NO RISK AND NO CREDIT CARD IS ASKED!

Hey Folks, thanks for reading and I hope you found my article helpful. Have you had any personal experiences with high ticket affiliate marketing programs? If you have I would like to hear from you. I would appreciate some feedback and comments.

Monica