Who doesn’t love earning passive income?
It is a fact that affiliate marketing opens up new avenues for online businesses that help increase revenues by several folds, without spending significant efforts. This begs the question – what is the best passive income affiliate marketing opportunity I’ve come across lately?
Affiliate Marketing is a thriving industry. It’s here to stay. With fierce competition in the digital landscape, businesses and brands have embraced affiliate marketing as an important channel for earning passive income.
Cloudways Understands the Needs of Affiliate Marketers
To cater to the needs of affiliate marketers, it’s important to understand what affiliate marketers need in the first place. In most cases, affiliate marketers need a platform to connect directly with the brand they are marketing to clear out ambiguities. The second need of an affiliate marketer is a knowledge resource where they can find out the solutions to most common operational issues and the latest tips to increase sales and commission.
Cloudways has an excellent affiliate program that takes care of all the operational requirements of the affiliate marketers. As such, Cloudways provides support chat, tickets, and a lot of information about affiliate marketing on the Cloudways blog. I have discovered some great ideas while reading articles about optimizations, generating more conversions, lead generation, and tips from leading affiliates like Ryan Robinson
I’ve also discovered that affiliate marketers get a dedicated support contact that is there to take care of all affiliate marketing related issues. Although I’ve never had the cause, in case you need any clarification, just create a ticket and the Cloudways affiliate marketing support team will take things from there.
Three Commission Structures
Instead of just one, Cloudways Passive Income Affiliate Program gives affiliates three different commission structures:
- Slab
- Hybrid
- Custom
The Slab Payout Model
The Slab model is great to earn consistently by generating multiple referrals every month. This model works best for performance marketers and entrepreneurs. In this payout structure, the final payout for the month is calculated on the final number of referrals recorded by the system. For instance, if an affiliate lands five referrals during the month, but get another two before the month-end, the total commission is calculated for 7 referrals. In this model, the marketer has a chance to earn more by aiming for higher slabs.
Hybrid Structure
The Hybrid payout structure works for marketers who are after the long game. These marketers are not aggressively looking to earn commissions and want their earnings to spread out over months. This structure works best for bloggers, freelancers, and digital agencies that wish to leverage recurring commission affiliate program earnings.
Through this passive income system, the affiliate earns a $30 up-front signup bonus along with a 7 percent recurring commission for every active Cloudways customer they refer. As you can see, the affiliate marketer continues to earn as long as the referral continues to host on Cloudways.
Custom Structure
The third passive income structure is ideal for affiliate marketers who can bring in a high number of referrals to Cloudways. Since they can potentially bring in a lot of business, Cloudways offers a custom payout structure that borrows from both Slab and Hybrid payout structures. Another great benefit of this structure is the higher commission per sale.
But, Why Opt for a Recurring Passive Income Affiliate Program?
Now, the discussion boils down to the need for a recurring commission affiliate program?
Well, the answer is simple. When you opt for a passive income system, you get a side revenue stream for your business operations. The commission continues as long as the referral continues to do business with Cloudways. Thus, the higher the number of referrals per month (or the designated invoicing cycle) AND the longer these referrals stay on the Cloudways platform, the higher would be the earnings of the affiliate marketers. It is as simple as that.
The Best Fit for the Recurring Affiliate Program?
Essentially, Cloudways Affiliate Program is a great fit for all affiliate marketing strategies. In my experience, this program has something to offer to all major affiliate marketer segments. I will now go into some details of how the following segments can use the Cloudways affiliate program to their benefit.
- Bloggers
- Trainers
- Freelancers / Developers
- Digital Agencies
Bloggers
It is a fact that every blogger wants to generate a handsome amount from their blog. Monetization takes time. And bloggers can shorten this duration by opting for affiliate promotion. Once the traffic and conversion build-up, the bloggers can see the start affiliate earning that can be scaled as per the efforts of the bloggers.
Trainers
Trainers work with large and small groups that present great opportunities for affiliate referrals. Since they can potentially send a large number of referrals, trainers can benefit from both the Hybrid and Custom payout models. Since the quality of their referrals is high, they can potentially earn commission over a prolonged period as their referrals ten to stay to the trainer-promoted solutions.
Freelancers / Developers
If you are a freelancer, your income depends on the time you invest in a project. Freelancing is such an unpredictable niche that you can never be sure of your final earnings.
In this context, Cloudways affiliate program can help you set up a dependable income that you can scale as your freelancing business grows and you can refer more clients to the Cloudways Platform.
Digital Agencies
I have already mentioned in the earlier paragraph(s) that there is a fierce competition going on within the digital business landscape. The digital agencies are the ones that feel the heat of the competition the most. This is why digital agencies need to play it smart in order to maintain their revenue.
In order to stay ahead in terms of financial stability, the digital agency must ensure that there is a continuous stream of revenue. This is where recurring passive income affiliate programs come into play, as it ensures passive income generation for the digital agency.
How come? Let’s look at an example.
Say, you own a digital agency and are using a reliable hosting service for your website. Once you know that the hosting server delivers on the promises, you can refer your clients to the hosting provider, and in return get a commission. If the clients continue to use the hosting service, you will continue to get the commission, maintaining a steady stream of income.
How Does One Join the Cloudways Affiliate Program
The process of joining the Cloudways passive income Affiliate Marketing Program is simple and easy. A description of the three-step process of signing up and creating an affiliate account can be found in the Cloudways FAQ section.
The Cloudways Affiliate Panel Features
Cloudways Affiliate panel has it all – support tickets, live chat sessions, and scheduled training. Furthermore, the Cloudways blog covers topics centered around affiliate marketing in order to help clarify misconceptions and reveal shortcuts.
The Affiliate Panel
The affiliate panel is divided into segments such as analytics, marketing campaign metrics, and data related to the traffic. You’ll notice the easy and minimalistic UI that makes navigation quick and easy.
The first thing you see when you open their affiliate program is the home screen. This is the central location where you can carry out the bulk of the tasks. You can also see your affiliate link at the top of the page here.
The side menu in the Affiliate Panel comprises of reports, campaigns, ad channels, and subID tracking.
Reports Tab
The Reports tab is a single place where all the reports related to your affiliate activities are present. These reports cover quick stats, trends reports, commissions & payouts, and raw clicks.
Quick Stats: Check current, the previous day, monthly stats for the number of clicks (repeat/ unique clicks), number of sales and commissions. It summarizes Click to Sales ratio, Earnings per Click and Average Commission Per Sale.
Trends report: Here affiliates can analyze impressions, clicks, commissions and sales trends in a visual format.
Commission report: This live dashboard automatically reflects existing and new signups and sales status. The users can apply custom filters to get personalized data and export data for analysis.
Payouts to me: Here an affiliate can check payouts history and the amount of paid and unpaid commissions.
Raw Clicks: This reflects near real-time data of unique and repeated clicks.
The Quick Stats view is perhaps the most useful feature of the affiliate panel. Here, the affiliate can view metrics pertaining to sales, earnings per click, and average conversion per sale
One of the top features of Cloudways affiliate panel is the Subid tracking feature through which users can monitor their ad channels and the flow of the traffic on these channels.
Creating Ad Channels and Tracking Conversions
Next up is a short description of how easy it is to set up and track the ad channels. The interesting thing here is that I got in touch with Cloudways Affiliate support to ask about how the subID feature works. Their reply was a set of simple instructions to create and set up these ad channel links.
Reply from Cloudways Affiliate Team:
Suppose as an affiliate, you promote Cloudways through two mediums; a Blog and a Social Media platform. Now you can create two separate channels. Just click Add Channels button on the left side and add Channel Name and Code for each new channel. Now the most important part, how to track channel with the help of the affiliate link. Suppose you want to route visitors to Cloudways sign-up page. The affiliate link for this is https://platform.cloudways.com/signup/?id=XXXXX, now add &CHAN=channelname to the affiliate link. In the case, for a social media channel (already created through AdChannels feature), the affiliate link would be https://platform.cloudways.com/signup/?id=XXXXX&CHAN=SocialMedia
Tip on creating custom affiliate links
You don’t always have to click on create a custom link for every ad banner you place online. A simple copy-pasting the affiliate ID (provided in your account homepage) followed by the URL you’re placing should do the trick. The ‘XXXXX’ in the above example is the place where your affiliate link needs to be placed.
The interesting thing is, Cloudways offers two custom parameters data1 and data2 for additional tracking purposes. The good thing is, you can directly add data1 and data2 parameters in the affiliate link with any value and can keep track of signups and conversions. Suppose you have a blog with multiple optin forms for homepage and blogs. And you have created a new channel with the name “optin”. In case you want to track sales through the homepage main option, the affiliate link would be https://platform.cloudways.com/signup/id=XXXXX&CHAN=optin&data1=mainoptin.
Your screen should look something like the screenshot above of a Commission Report. Data1 parameter reflects as Extra data 1 and Data2 parameter reflects as Extra data2 in reports. In this report, you can see that blog has sign-ups from multiple channels, but the one converting is from mainoptin that was easily trackable through the data1 parameter. Hence, mainoptin is a way of further optimization.
Here is another important aspect of SubId tracking feature, it helps in understanding the attribution and which affiliate link resulted in conversion. In the following image, a visitor came to Cloudways website through Campaign A but converted later through Campaign B. Hence affiliate can now work on Campaign B improvement since this is the one which has generated conversion.
Cookie
The Cloudways affiliate panel has the ability to show status and data of the affiliate current conversion progress. Every link placed using the affiliate link has the ability to store data for up to 90 days. So affiliates have about 3 months before the cookie expires.
…And that’s a wrap!
That’s all. Whether you are a freelancer, a blogger, a digital agency, or a startup business – you can take full advantage of Cloudways’ flexible and simple passive income Affiliate Marketing Program and continue to earn passive income through minimal efforts.
If done effectively, this passive income strategy can turn out to be the best recurring affiliate program for you. It’s high time that you check the provisions of this flexible program and explore new opportunities to generate a healthy stream of passive income. All you have to do is just to sign up with Cloudways Affiliate Program and start earning through this passive income system to get your well-deserved reward.
