The 3 Best Affiliate Marketing Niches for High Ticket Commissions

We use affiliate links and may collect a share of sales or other types of compensation from the links on this page if you decide to shop and buy from them. However, we would never recommend products that we wouldn’t use ourselves.

Affiliate marketing has been a buzzword in the digital marketing space for quite some time.

It’s associated with multi-level marketing (MLM) and other questionable methods of making quick and passive income. 

But did you know that most people doing affiliate marketing are doing it wrong?

That’s right. In fact, 90% of the people who claim to do affiliate marketing haven’t even made their first sale yet.

So what does this mean for someone new who wants to get into affiliate marketing?

It means that there is no better time to get started. There is so much opportunity for new affiliate marketers, and the people who start now will reap the rewards in the future.

Before you start your affiliate marketing journey, it’s important to know what affiliate marketing is, the pros and cons of affiliate marketing, and the best affiliate marketing niches for high-ticket commissions.

Continue reading to find out the answers to these questions and more helpful information so you can get started with affiliate marketing this year.

What is affiliate marketing?

Before you can learn the best affiliate marketing niches, you should know what affiliate marketing is. 

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is essentially selling and marketing products that you yourself don’t produce or manufacture. 

Affiliate marketing comes in many forms and takes place across many different channels, but the most common method of affiliate marketing (and the most lucrative) is through a website with a blog.

These methods of affiliate marketing make use of the Google search engine to generate traffic to your website in hopes that people will use your affiliate links and buy the products or services you are promoting. 

Google is the largest search engine in the world and they also own YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world.

This means if you can rank on Google for relevant search terms relating to your business, you’ll also be able to rank on YouTube as well.

Affiliate marketers spend most of their time creating content for their website or YouTube channels.

“Content” can include any type of material that is used for social media, email newsletters, ad images, or long-form articles.

Without creating content and doing effective content marketing, affiliate marketers will never be able to make any money.

Being an affiliate marketer means you’ll be wearing plenty of hats in your daily routine.

You’ll need to know advanced SEO techniques and do plenty of research on how you can rank your website so people actually find you online.

Affiliate marketers must also know web design to make changes and update their websites on a daily basis. 

Affiliate marketers also do a lot of prospecting to generate more sales, join more affiliate networks, and build relationships with other people online in their industry. 

Successful affiliate marketers know that this game isn’t played by just one person.

You’ll need to build a team around you if you want to make real money with affiliate marketing.

High ticket vs. low ticket affiliate marketing

If you're looking for the best affiliate marketing niche, you’ll want to target high-ticket niches that pay a high percentage for each sale you make for your affiliate partners. 

Some affiliate companies like Amazon pay 4% or less per sale, while some may pay up to 30% per sale.

While most people think they should only go after high-ticket affiliate marketing niches, this is actually the wrong way to think about it.

Plenty of affiliate marketers make six figures or more from selling low-ticket affiliate products. 

However, in order to make money with low-ticket affiliate marketing, you’ll need to do a significant amount of volume to make up for the low commissions. 

Let’s take an example. If you want to generate $10,000 per month in affiliate commissions, you’ll need to do one of the following:

• Make 2,000 sales of products with a $5 commission on each sale

• Make 834 sales of products with a $12 commission on each sale

• Make 250 sales of products with $40 commission on each sale

• Make 100 sales of products with $100 commission on each sale

As you can see, if you’re selling low-ticket products that only generate $5 per sale, you’ll need to sell that product 2,000 times per month to get to your goal of $10,000 per month. 

Next, let’s take a look at some of the most popular affiliate marketing niches and how you can choose the best niche to get started with.

The best affiliate marketing niches

The best affiliate marketing niches aren’t necessarily the ones that are high-ticket.

The best niches are the ones that have opportunity and the potential to make a lot of money from being an affiliate. 

So instead of only targeting the high-ticket niches, you should do some research into affiliate marketing niches that may be underserved or that you think you can bring a fresh perspective to and stand out from the competition. 

Niches that have too much competition, although they may be high-ticket, aren’t good niches to target since they will be very hard to break into as a beginner.

Below is our list of the best affiliate marketing niches that you can get started with today.

Camping and outdoors

The camping and outdoors space is ripe with opportunity.

There are so many different types of products that you can market as a camping and outdoors affiliate which are considered high-ticket, and there is considerably less competition than other niches we will discuss.

Camping and outdoors affiliates sell a wide range of products. However, the most common types of products that these affiliates sell include:

• Camping gear

• Hiking gear

• Tactical knives

• Shoes and boots

• Jackets and coats

• Sunglasses

• Kayaks

• Ski and snowboard gear

• Luggage

• …and much more

One of the best parts about the camping and outdoors niche is that you may be able to work with brands that give you free products to review and use.

If you’re a strong affiliate bringing in money for the brands you work with, they may offer you special perks that most other affiliates don’t receive.

Camping and outdoors can be a very lucrative niche, but you may find it difficult to keep coming up with new ideas and product reviews for camping gear and related products.

If you don’t have a passion for camping and outdoors, you risk burning out and quitting your affiliate journey altogether.

Finance

Finance is one of the most lucrative niches available for affiliate marketers.

There are plenty of high-ticket products you can sell that generate a substantial amount of income. 

Below are some of the most common types of products or services that affiliate marketers sell and make money with in the finance space:

• Credit cards

• Home loans

• Retirement programs

• Insurance plans

• Robo-advisor subscriptions

• Investing platforms

• Personal loans

While ripe with opportunity, finance is perhaps the most competitive niche of all.

It’s dominated by many large publications that drive most of the revenue in the space.

However, doing effective keyword research and spotting opportunities in the finance space is a great way you can break into the industry.

You’ll want to target keywords that have low difficulty but still enough search volume where you can make some money from your visitors.

You should understand that, with competitive niches, it will take longer to see results.

But those that stick with it can make lots of money in the finance niche.

You should also be aware of the regulations regarding disseminating financial information and advice.

There are rules that agencies like the FCC and CFPB put in place to protect consumers from false information and bad product reviews.

Make money online

The make money online niche is so vast which means there’s plenty of opportunity to make money with it as an affiliate.

The big players in this niche are the software companies that provide services that digital marketers use to make their lives easier and automate their business.

Some of the most popular programs that affiliate marketers sell in the make money online niche have to do with:

• Email marketing

  • Mailchimp

  • Constant Contact

  • AWeber

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

  • Moz

  • Ahrefs

  • SEMRush

  • Surfer SEO

• Communication

  • Slack

  • Microsoft Teams

  • Google Chat

• Writing

  • Grammarly

  • Jasper.ai

• Graphic design

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Canva

• Video software

  • VidIQ

  • Splice

  • Adobe Premiere Pro

As you can see, there are plenty of different products you can market to people who are trying to make money online.

This is my niche, and I can tell you that it’s one of the best affiliate marketing niches available for people that are passionate about making money online.

An added benefit of the make money online niche is that a lot of these programs are software subscriptions that have recurring monthly fees.

This means affiliate marketers get recurring lifetime commissions as long as their referrals remain a customer for the service.

Another way to think about this is with Moz, for example. If you’re an affiliate with Moz and you get someone to join Moz Pro (which is $179 per month), you’d get a recurring 10% commission each month that person stays with Moz.

This means almost $18 per month of recurring revenue. So if you get 10, 20, or 30 people, you can see how this has the potential to add up to big numbers.

Is affiliate marketing saturated?

In short, yes. However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t any opportunity for new affiliate marketers.

Most affiliate marketers don’t know how to do it right to actually make real money.

They spend a few weeks creating content to market a single product and then give up when they don’t see any results.

They try to research the best affiliate marketing niches that can make the most money in the shortest amount of time and don’t have a long-term plan.

The cold hard truth is that affiliate marketing takes a long time to see results.

But the ones who can stick with affiliate marketing long enough will see that all the time and effort is worth it.

While affiliate marketing may be saturated, it’s saturated with low-quality people who think they can make a quick buck and get rich by choosing one of the best affiliate marketing niches that are high-ticket. 

Those who learn affiliate marketing the right way will find that there isn’t much competition at the top, and it’s relatively easy to get there with the right approach and a long-term mindset.

How much do affiliate marketers make?

While there is little data to show how much affiliate marketers make, I will share some of the numbers I’ve heard that are possible with affiliate marketing.

As I mentioned above, most affiliate marketers haven’t made their first sale and never will.

This means that the vast majority of people who are trying to be affiliate marketers make no money.

So on average, most affiliate marketers don’t generate any income.

However, intermediate affiliate marketers often make between $1,000 and $5,000 per month.

Since this usually isn’t enough to do it full-time, most of these affiliate marketers also work a regular job while running their marketing business on the side. 

Intermediate affiliate marketers typically know what they're doing and tend to choose one of the best affiliate marketing niches that generate the most revenue.

Experienced affiliate marketers make real money and can support themselves solely from their affiliate marketing business.

These affiliate marketers typically make over $6,000 per month and may be doing affiliate marketing full-time.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that there is no limit on how much you can make.

There are some top-level affiliate marketers that make over $1 million per year from affiliate sales and bring in over $100,000 per month. 

One example is Adam Enfroy, who revealed his income statements and explains how he went from nothing to making over $150,000 per month just from his blog.

Today, Adam has a popular YouTube channel where he educates people who want to make real passive income with affiliate marketing.

You may be surprised to find out that some of the most popular online publications act as affiliate marketers.

These publications often write reviews on product roundups that contain affiliate links for their visitors to shop from.

Each time a website visitor clicks an affiliate link and makes a purchase, the affiliate collects a commission of sometimes 10% or more.

One great example is Nerdwallet. They are nothing more than a review aggregator and are trusted by many people looking for helpful financial advice and the best tools for personal finance. 

Nerdwallet is one of the largest websites in the world and is at the top of the affiliate marketing industry.

They reported revenues of $379 million in 2021, which is an average of over $31 million per month.

The sky is the limit with affiliate marketing and you could very well be the next seven-figure affiliate marketer if you put in the work and learn how to do it the right way.

Final thoughts

Finding an affiliate marketing niche isn’t hard to do.

You should start with promoting products related to what you have an interest in and ones that you won’t get burnt out creating content for.

While high-ticket affiliate marketing niches are great, they typically have the most competition and the highest barriers to entry.

Our advice is to start with low-ticket affiliate marketing niches with little competition and then gradually begin to transition into high-ticket products down the line.

For more information on affiliate marketing and how to get started, check out our YouTube channel for the best free information about affiliate marketing available today.

Interested in learning more about partnering with us to grow your business? Contact us today to find out how to advertise with us and grow your business organically with the power of SEO.