Multi Tier Affiliate Marketing 101

Partners who join a multi tier affiliate marketing program have found a way to maximize their revenues by tapping into the work and effort of others operating in the same niche business. If you’re already doing many of the phases of affiliate marketing, perhaps it’s time to step up a level and see if you can become a super-affiliate of sorts.

Merchants want to recruit and retain partners who can convert sales, and offering an affiliate marketing multi level program is one way to keep the online sales force motivated. The top tier performers are as concerned as the merchants in building a large team of affiliates to help to drive profits for everyone.

How Multi Tier Affiliate Marketing Works

A multi level program is one that distributes income through several tiers in a network of sub-partners. For example, the lead publisher runs ads for an advertiser; and attracts another publisher who signs up for the program using his affiliate code; and a third publisher signs up on the next level. The second and third tiers pay less of course, but a multiple number of affiliate marketers below the top can create volumes of easy, passive streams of income.

Building that downline is not an easy thing to do. One problem with trying to establish multi tier affiliate marketing is that the lower levels can choose to bypass the sign-up at the partner’s level and go to the network or merchant directly to join the affiliate program. They (erroneously) believe being in a downline will somehow give them less of a commission.

On the other hand, we’ve also seen some accidental income from these tiered programs. Some affiliate marketers have seen commissions deposited into their accounts at networks and not known they had even generated sub-partners or that a multi level program was in effect with that particular advertiser. It’s a nice surprise when you log in to check your account balance and see something like that.

Who Benefits from Multi-Level Marketing?

And yet this is what super affiliates have been doing all along. They’ve built downlines of two tiers or multiple levels and have people doing much of the heavy lifting by writing, blogging, producing videos, social networking and so on, building links and selling goods and services. (And you though super affiliates only lived off selling their eBooks!)

There’s one important point I need to mention: keep in mind that multi tier affiliate marketing is not the same thing as MLM. With multi-level marketing (MLM), a member usually must subscribe to the company and pay a fee or buy a product. Not so with affiliate marketing; there is never any obligation to buy anything and never any fees to pay to participate in any of these programs. In fact, the vast majority of MLM companies are actually illegal pyramid schemes.

Unless you are very lucky, plan on 99% of your income to come from single tier programs rather than multi tier affiliate marketing efforts. That doesn’t mean you can’t become a super affiliate yourself. If you do acquire a huge downline, there may be 25 or 50 or even 100 sub-affiliates who won’t make you much but it only takes a few whales to generate some serious multi-level income for you.

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