Our list of the best pay-per-lead affiliate programs to earn fast commissions.
Pay-per-lead affiliate programs are not as common as some may like. Most businesses that have affiliate programs offer a commission for every sale you bring them. These are great, assuming you can convince leads to make a purchase.
However, not all leads make their way through the sales funnel. That is where pay-per-lead affiliate programs come in. These programs will pay you whenever you get a qualified lead to sign up. No sales are needed!
Now that you know the power of PPL, here is our list of the top pay-per-lead affiliate programs for 2024.
This is not the first time that the Semrush affiliate program has been on one of our "best affiliate program" lists.
Semrush offers pay-per-lead affiliate payouts as well as the standard pay-per-conversion. It's a win-win! They will give you $0.01 for every sign-up, $10 for a free trial sign-up, and $200 for a subscription.
Semrush also offers a generous 120-day cookie, meaning that you will receive your commissions if someone completes one of these actions 120 days after clicking on your link.
To make this program an even better deal, Semrush offers the customer who signs up with your link a 7-day trial. This can go up to a 14-day trial once you reach 5 sales per quarter. An offer like this can make converting customers much easier.
Acorns is a finance app that helps you save and invest money. Acorns is a widely-known company in the finance space, as they have over 10 million users.
As for the affiliate program, they offer commissions for every lead you get to put money into an account. As of now, Acorns will pay you $50 for every person that makes a deposit after clicking on your affiliate link.
The cookie life for the Acorns affiliate program is 30 days. This gives your leads enough time to open an account and make a deposit.
The Acorns affiliate program is easy to sign up for and can be done in only a few minutes. To make things more convincing for your leads, Acorns sends everyone who clicks on your link to a sales funnel that is designed to convert them into customers.
FreshBooks is an accounting software. It was founded in 2003, so it has been around for a while. They offer a variety of plans that range from $7.60 to $24.00 per month.
The Freshbooks affiliate program offers a commission for free trial sign-ups as well as plan subscriptions. That means you will get paid each step of the way. They pay $10 per free trial and up to $200 for a plan subscription.
The 120-day cookie life is another strong point of this program. This gives leads plenty of time to convert to a plan even after the 30-day free trial.
Buildium is a property management software that makes it easy for people to manage their properties. This offer will be good for people who have an audience that is interested in real estate.
The Buildium affiliate program will pay you $10 for every customer's free trial and 25% of the purchase amount.
The Buildium affiliate program has a cookie life of 60 days. This allows leads to make a purchase after the 14-day free trial, which earns you another commission.
We have all heard of Grammarly before. It is one of the best-known grammar tools on the internet. This makes it an easy product to be an affiliate for, as they already have awareness.
Grammarly pays a $0.20 commission for every sign-up. This isn’t much, but it will begin to add up due to the little resistance there is to signing up. They also offer a $20 commission when someone upgrades to the premium plan.
As for the cookie, they will keep it active for 90 days. They also mention that their cookies will track across multiple devices.
Pluralsight is an online learning service that focuses on IT and software development. They offer plans for large teams of up to 50 people and also for personal use.
Pluralsight will pay you whenever someone starts a free trial or buys a paid plan. The commission rate for a free trial is $5. The commission for a plan purchase is 50% of the monthly sale, and if it is an annual plan, they will give you 15% of the sale.
Sage is a tool that businesses can use for all of their accounting, HR, and payroll needs. They focus on small businesses, and their affordable plan pricing reflects that.
The program will pay you £5 for every customer that starts a free trial. If that customer goes on to make a purchase, you will receive a 7% cut on the sale. These aren’t the most impressive numbers we have seen on this list; however, if this software aligns with your audience, you will earn the most using it.
The Sage pay-per-lead affiliate program offers a 30-day cookie.
Now that you have seen some pay-per-lead affiliate programs, you might be asking yourself: are these more profitable than the traditional pay-per-sale programs?
Pay-per-lead programs will likely not be as profitable as pay-per-sale programs for several reasons.
Limited Availability of PPL Programs: As I put together this list of PPL affiliate programs, I had a hard time finding them. Some niches don’t have any PPL programs at all. With this being said, if you can find a PPL program that fits your audience, you won’t make much from it, if anything at all.
One-Time Commissions Another problem with PPL affiliate programs is that they often only pay you once. You are leaving a lot of commissions on the table by only getting one commission upfront, compared with the recurring payments that many subscription based businesses offer.
