Hi Jay.
I have a SaaS software company - one of our newly released products is the ONLY completely integrated marketing automation offering accessed from within your WordPress admin.
I have been exploring the affiliate and JV world for several years now as we have learned the vast majority of your affiliates will never produce much in terms of revenue.
So with our new WPMktgEngine offering, we are making connections with some top affiliates who sell to small business & entrepreneurs. You don't get them to work with you for less than 50% of the front end sale. Most are not interested in recurring commissions - it's too hard to track.
Our solution is an annual subscription. We also offer a payment plan - but it's more expensive and there are three or four payments that are automatically processed every 30 days until done.
We did a few internal launches to a small list, to get an initial EPC (Earnings Per Click) -which is what they are interested in to evaluate whether they will promote for you.
Then we did a Webinar that was promoted by one of our first big affiliate partners. With that Webinar and subsequent offer, we returned approx $6 EPC total, so the affiliate earned approx $3 EPC.
Understanding the EPC allows an affiliate to look at their list (and they know what their clickthrough rate is likely to be when they send out emails promoting your offer) and know what sort of revenue they are likely to bring in from it.
Our first "launch" with an affiliate in this manner brought in 499 new leads to our system in the span of 2 days. Plus we got some great new customers.
So we now don't have an 'anyone can sign up' affiliate program. We are interested in the affiliates who will promote us to their list - not just put an affiliate link in a blog post or page. We are looking for JV's in the small business & entrepreneurial market that will promote for a launch - which includes us providing some free training videos, and an offer to buy our solution (at the end of the free training).
Hope this helps. If you'd like to check out our training go to WPMktgEngine dot com and click the button that offers our free training right on the home page.
There is also the Marketers Cruise event - held in January each year. I went this past year - 8 days - and met some fabulous marketers who became friends and are also helping me promote the product. I'll be going next year also - it was a great event. That might also be a good resource to check out.