FreshBooks Affiliate Program Review
If you’ve been looking for new ways of monetizing your website or your social following and you can’t seem to have found the right choice yet, perhaps the FreshBooks affiliate program might be a good option.
In today’s article, we are looking at everything that this earning opportunity entails, from what exactly FreshBooks can be used for and how you can join the program to how much you can expect to be paid.
FreshBooks Affiliate Program Review
What is FreshBooks?
Before you even decide whether or not this affiliate program makes sense for you, it would be a good idea to take a look at what this software can be utilized for. FreshBooks is one of the most popular choices when it comes to managing personal finance right now, but it can do many more things.
For example, it can help users with tracking their daily expenses, setting up invoices for clients, and even accepting payments online. The financial reports that the software creates are quite detailed and offer users pretty much everything they ought to know about how good (or bad) they are with money.
But who is the ideal buyer persona for FreshBooks? Well, from what we’ve gathered, it seems to work best for small to medium-sized businesses, but it can also be a rather nice alternative in terms of accounting and expense tracking for solo entrepreneurs.
What services can you recommend to your audience?
We’ve already covered some of the things that this software can achieve for customers, but let’s take a look at the plans that are now available and how much they cost.
As you probably know, the price of such an accounting and bookkeeping service can largely influence a prospective buyer’s decision, so it would be important for it not to cost an arm and a leg. This also translates into how easy or how hard you’ll have to work to convince your followers to try out FreshBooks.
The company has three plans available in terms of cost transparency. There is a ‘Select’ option that comes with unlimited billable clients and specialized features, but that one is mostly designed for larger businesses.
The smallest plan is called Lite and is billed at $6 per month (usually $15 per month). As you can expect, it includes only a limited number of features compared to what you can get with the larger plans, meaning that people can use this plan to track expenses, send estimates, send invoices to up to five clients, and track sales tax. A mobile app is for both iOS and Android devices for easy tracking.
The next plan is called Plus and it can be used for up to 50 clients. In this case, expenses are tracked automatically and so is receipt data, so your job as a user becomes much simpler on the whole. Other features of the plan range from the ability to set up recurring billing to being paid via bank transfers or credit cards. This one is billed at $12 per month (normal price is $30 per month).
Finally, the Premium plan comes with all of the features previously included in the two other plans we’ve already mentioned along with unlimited billable clients, the ability to track project profitability, bills, bill payments, and payable account vendors, as well as other customization features. The Premium plan costs $22 per month (normal price is $55 per month).
In a nutshell, these are the plans that you can market to your audience for the affiliate program.
Becoming a FreshBooks affiliate
Off the bat, compared to some of the other earning opportunities that we have reviewed in the past, FreshBooks stands out from the crowd because the brand did not choose to have a self-managed affiliate program.
In fact, you can rely on two separate networks for this and they are ShareASale and FlexOffers. You might have heard of either of these two platforms given that they are two of the biggest names in the field of affiliate marketing. Seasoned affiliates certainly use them on a regular basis.
The biggest advantage when it comes to this is that if you already have an account, joining the FreshBooks program is very easy – you join through your preferred network and then check your stats and performance on that website as often as you want to, without needing to go to the FreshBooks website every single day.
From the information that we gathered in this sense, the approval process is rather smooth on both of these networks. You basically have to be the owner of an established website and if they’ve previously approved you for other programs, you have an even higher chance of being approved for this one.
Commission structure and payment information
When it comes to how much you can earn with this program, we have to note that we found some conflicting information in this sense. However, it seems that you can receive $5-$10 for every referral that signs up for a free trial and $55 for every person that creates an account and pays for their subscription.
Some resources suggest that the commission rates can vary depending on the affiliate platform that you choose for your convenience.
To that end, on ShareASale you can make up to $200 for paid subscriptions whereas on FlexOffers, that rate can be as high as $88. Naturally, it all depends on the exact plans your audience picks based on their needs.
Another aspect that we have to note here is the fact that the tracking cookie lasts for 120 days, which is a significant detail given that most other affiliate programs come with a cookie of just 30 days.
In terms of payment methods, the ones available range from direct deposit and bank transfer to wire transfer. There’s a threshold of $50 which should not be an obstacle to you in any way, given that the minimum amount you can make per every referral’s sale is $55. Therefore, you will be able to withdraw your money after making just one sale.
Read more: Webflow affiliate program review
Pros and cons to being a FreshBooks affiliate
As you can expect when it comes to promoting any type of services or products for monetary purposes, there are both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to this affiliate program. Although we do have to note, the pros seem to be outweighing the cons in this case.
The commission itself, along with the length of the cookie and the fact that you can join the program through not one, but two separate networks that show you all the data you need, are the most significant benefits.
There are endless opportunities when it comes to how you can promote FreshBooks and it all depends on the type of content you produce.
You can write a review of the service itself after you’ve tried the most basic plan, for example, you can create videos about it, place promotional banners on your site, or just use other types of social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or even Twitter.
While we couldn’t come across this specific rule, we couldn’t help noticing that many other companies don’t really appreciate when affiliates use their brand names in their PPC ads, so you may have to come up with a creative way of using paid ads to get more commissions.
In terms of negatives, there aren’t that many compared to other programs. Perhaps the most important one, though, is the fact that FreshBooks doesn’t work with affiliates based everywhere around the world.
To date, the program is strictly available to residents of countries such as Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and several select others such as Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain (just to give you a few examples).
Finally, given the niche it is in and what the service does for its owners, it can only be promoted by a limited number of people, mainly those that talk about personal finance, taxes, budgeting, improving credit scores, and other similar topics.
So, in a way, this program doesn’t work for everybody because their audience might simply not relate to the services or might just not be interested in this type of subject.
You might also like: Mailerlite affiliate program review
Alternatives to the affiliate program through FreshBooks
If for any reason, you feel that FreshBooks might not be the right choice for you in terms of making money online, you should take some time to check out some of the options we have showcased below.
Personal Capital
This service is more or less similar when put side by side with FreshBooks, but there are different features to Personal Capital that your audience might be able to enjoy. To name a few, there’s the ability to create financial objectives or calculate a user’s net worth, not to mention create a budget. Investment account management is also available with Personal Capital.
The program is now run by the Impact Radius platform, a widely known affiliate network that lots of seasoned marketers all over the platform use all the time. You can make up to $100 for every referral you send their way so long as they sign up for a paid plan.
Experian
This one is developed more for people who want to keep track of what’s going on with their credit cards so that they can gradually improve their credit score or just keep it to a healthy level. The app is very easy to use and works on a variety of operating systems, so that’s one less thing to worry about.
From what we were able to discover regarding the Experian affiliate program, it seems that the commission you can expect for every lead you send their way is $8 — which is not a lot, when comparing it to your earning possibilities with FreshBooks. To make matters a little worse, the cookie lasts for just 10 days.
ZarMoney
This service resembles what FreshBooks has to offer a lot, in the sense that it is a cloud-based accounting and bookkeeping solution that works for pretty much anything that an entrepreneur may need — whether that’s managing payments and billing or invoicing and sales tax.
Before you join the ZarMoney affiliate program, you should know that you can make $10 for every free trial your referrals get after clicking on your affiliate. Paid plans will award you with a $60 commission (less than the one you can expect with the FreshBooks alternative).
Sage
While the product itself is absolutely great when it comes to convenience and efficiency and it also comes with most of the features that we have already talked about when describing FreshBooks and other options, the cookie duration of the program is just 30 days.
Free trials can get you a $5 rate whereas any sales will convert into a 7% commission for you. To give you an idea of how much you can earn, the Accounting plan is usually billed at $25 per month.
QuickBooks
As its name suggests, this is a pretty nifty and more importantly, easy to use platform for people who need an accountant or bookkeeper’s assistance, especially when it comes to managing their taxes.
With the QuickBooks app, you can do anything from managing your expenses to monitoring your financial reports and more. As an affiliate, you can make 40% out of whatever your referrals choose to pay on the QuickBooks website.
Zoho Books
Zoho Books can be looked at as an accounting software rather than one that can assist individuals with their personal finance goals. It’s more designed for small entrepreneurs and small businesses, so that’s the audience you need to be able to address in order to get it to convert.
As an affiliate, you can make up to $100 per referral sale (in Zoho credits). There’s also no minimum payment threshold, which we appreciate. The cookie lasts for three whole months so while it is shorter than that of FreshBooks, it’s still longer than the 30-day industry standard.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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