what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?
We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel.
If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc.
If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.
5% of $20 is $1, meaning you won't be able to cover operation costs even if you sell 100 of it every month. If the product/course/service is $2997, and your commission is 5%, you are looking at $10k+ net profit every month if you sell 100 of that.
In addition, because the author/creator/founder of the $20 doesn't have a high profit margin to begin with, the commission rate will be very low compared to premium products/services. E.g., 5% for $20 product vs. 20-30% for $2997 product.
To drive $200k was not simple, we partnered up with a person who had a record of 6 figure launches and had a good relationship with JVs.
To be honest, most of the tech savvy people would be hating jvzoo type audience but the reality is if you have good following you can generate good revenue from your side projects and feed that revenue into your main Saas startups for bootstrapping. This is something that we are doing without involving any VC for our core product.
One another example is a shopping cart product is Samcart.com, the co-founder Brian also captured the top Jvs for his launch including Jeff Walker, Todd Gross etc. These Jvs I have mentioned actually have the similar type of audience like Jvzoo.
Also, on the Saas side, one of my buddy Thomas from pagemodo (previous co-founder) did a similar thing while running the startup. And later he sold his venture for $114 million.
And the Voluum founder Robert gryn used the same approach to scale his product.
For advertising and marketing related tools(SEO,PPC,social media, marketing automation,etc) works better because their main clients are marketers, many have an audience and know how to market a product.
However, it also works for sales tools and CRMs for ex., there are lots of influencers in this space.
Works amazingly well for e-commerce, which is where influencer marketing is most used, everyone with a good following on Instagram can become an influencer.
If your space doesn't have too many influencers, start a referral program.