2nd tier earnings are very slow in coming and will never match 1st tier earnings. I have numerous websites devoted to recruiting second tiers, and in retrospect I would probably have earned more if that time had been spent building other 1st tier websites. I earn around 4-5k a month with second tiers accross all programs and industries. That’s including casinos, herbs, satellites, etc.
From owning an affiliate network in a different industry it is clear to me why targetting 2nd tier usualy fails. It takes a minimum of 100 affiliates signed up to get 1 decent affiliate. A quarter of the affiliates I get are questionnable in nature or are outright scammers. The bulk of the remainder are people with homepages, or people who expect to get rich quick by placing a banner up. These people for the most part dont care about learning SEO, how to market effectively, various methods of advertising, etc.
Probably the most effective methods of recruiting second tier is by promoting a program and having your website listed high in search engines. If someone is considering promoting a new industry they will check out who the top affiliates are promoting.
Another comment is that not all programs are good at tracking 2nd tier sign ups, and some programs steal those 2nd tiers from you. Some programs even go as far as promising a special commision to you if you recruit 2nd tier for them but they fail to credit those webmasters under you. Some of those programs are very popular casino affiliate programs, some of them are promoting heavily by top casino affiliates. Please dont ask me for information on who these programs are.
Lastly, it takes months and semetimes years to build a good base of 2nd tiers and the program can remove those at a whim. One example is rapid satellite in the satellite industry stole all of my second tiers after 2 years of promoting them because I happened to live in Canada. I was earning 4 figures a month at the time and it was increasing exponentially.