Aim for residual income
Some merchants who charge their customers monthly or yearly fees pay affiliates residual commissions.
I earn residual income from AWeber Follow Up Autoresponder System because it's an excellent service which charges a monthly fee.
You can find dozens of residual income and lifetime commission programs reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com. Remember that name.
When will you be paid?
Some companies pay you only after you have accumulated $50 or $100 in commission. If you have a very busy site, that's OK. For a small site without much traffic, it could take a long, long time ...
There's even the odd company which won't pay you at all unless you generate a certain level of business. Read the affiliate agreement before you sign up.
Rule number 1: Go for quality
The most important consideration when assessing affiliate programs is to examine the product or service offered. The better the product or service, the more enthusiastic you will be about recommending it - and you'll have a better chance that people will want to buy.
For example, Ken Evoy's Make Your Site SELL! and Make Your Knowledge SELL! Ken is a strong believer in OVER-delivering - giving the customer far better value for money than expected.
Beware of anyone who raves on about the money you can make and forgets to tell you about the product or service. The sales blurb can be tempting, but make sure you don't promote something which will harm your reputation.
Earn good commissions
Remember, those links and banners are helping persuade people to leave your site - away from the products or services you're promoting. So look for programs which reward you generously. The MarketingTips Internet marketing course, for example, pays me a very generous $65 commission. Of dozens of programs I've tried, it was my top-earning one for many months. My commissions fluctuate but are usually about $1,000 a month.
Of course, high commissions alone are useless if people don't buy when they reach the site. As well as using products and services which match the theme of your site, it makes sense to experiment and see what interests your visitors.
Seek sites that SELL!
It's no use having a good product and a high commission unless you also have good salesmanship. That's why I'm really keen on Marlon Sanders' The Amazing Formula. Marlon, who has a double major in journalism and psychology, knows which buttons to push. He offers real-time stats, a 60% commission, and a site which is very definitely designed to sell.
It really DOES sell like crazy - and that's the test.
Perhaps even better designed for selling is Ken Evoy's Make Your Site SELL! which pays lifetime commissions. When I announced that site in my newsletter, an astounding 9.5% of the people I sent there bought Ken's book. (In comparison, about 1% of the people I send to MarketingTips buy their marketing manual. Of course, with their high commissions, 1% still gives you $65 for every 100 people you send - an excellent result.)
I highly recommend Make Your Site SELL!
Seek good tracking
When you experiment with your promotional efforts you want to know straight away how effective your work has been, so you need immediate, or real-time, tracking.
You want to be able to see quickly which of your promotions work and which ones don't. Then you can increase your sales and commissions by concentrating on the things that work.
Look for LIFETIME commissions
Imagine you set up a bookshop as an associate of Amazon. Someone visits your site and - hey! you're in luck - buys a book. You earn 5% or 15% from Amazon. Next time, however, that customer will probably just go straight to Amazon, and might buy $100 worth of books. You won't receive a cent on that purchase.
(Amazon has a fairly good program but there's a weasel clause in its contract. If you send people to buy a particular book at Amazon and they click around and then buy something else, you will earn only 5% instead of 15%. Also, if they click around, delay a decision, and return next week and buy, you won't earn anything from that purchase. That's unfair.)
A few affiliates programs DO pay you for the second and third and fourth etc purchase by the customer. The best one I know of is Ken Evoy's SiteSell program (you'll find I mention it a lot), whose products include:
Make Your Site SELL!
the BIBLE of site-selling
Make Your Knowledge SELL!
The BIBLE of selling what you know on the Net
Site Build It!
A site-building, site-marketing, web hosting suite of tools.
I strongly recommend Ken's 5 Pillar Program. Click here and join now.
You can also earn lifetime commissions from:
Rob Marlbrough, my friendly, helpful web host. My LifetimeCommissions.com site is hosted by Rob. No matter how many questions I toss at Rob, he always has a helpful, useful reply. His offers very good quality web hosting, too.
Yanik Silver, co-author of 33 Days to Online Profits and several other fast-selling books.
Source
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Residual Income Affiliate Programs
An important point about the single tier, single purchase Amazon model is that it requires you constantly find new customers in order to sustain your income. But look around – most websites are investing in ways to become more "sticky" and keep visitors coming back again and again.
Why are they doing that?
Because attracting new visitors is a costly business.
It's easier to sell to existing customers than to new prospects
Whether you're running advertising campaigns, employ search engine optimization for positioning, or engaging in any other method of promoting your site, you're paying for each new visitor that your marketing efforts bring. Nothing is really free. Even if you do everything yourself, as I've said before...
Time is Money!
Once you've managed to get people to your site, it's much cheaper to keep them coming back, than to replace them with an entirely fresh crop of visitors every day. Of course either way you should still be spending on promotion, but your focus should be to gradually add to the number of visitors you get each day and grow your site.
The unit cost of each visitor is effectively reduced the more repeat visits you generate. Your site will also grow much faster when you are constantly adding to an existing user base as opposed to creating a new one everyday. Without repeat visitors you need to spend much more on promotion to see the same rate of growth as with them.
So many visitors ...
The necessity of a procuring a constant flow of new visitors is a major shortcoming of most current affiliate programs and one that few affiliates realise.
Because of the "one customer = one payment" nature of these programs, building your business and increasing your income can be a very slow process.
Generating repeat visits with interesting content you might have built your traffic up to 1000 visitors per day, but maybe only 300 of those are new prospects for your (one time payment) affiliate products. The rest have been to your site several times before.
They have either already bought or don't want the products you promote.
If they are still undecided, they have almost certainly bookmarked the merchant site directly, or having surrendered their email address for further information (newsletter or free report, etc.), now receive emails containing the direct (non-affiliate) link to the site that cut you out of the loop. The same applies if they later wish to buy another product from your affiliate vendor.
So what can you sell to those 700 repeat visitors? In short... nothing!
Unless you join another affiliate program to offer them more products that is. Obviously this is an oversimplified example, but nevertheless it effectively demonstrates that you can have done a great job in making your web site successful, yet still be earning relatively little.
This is the importance of residual income affiliate programs.
They are the key to earning from those 700 repeat visitors.
Whilst some two tier programs can perhaps be considered as providing a residual income, what we really mean by a residual income program is one that pays ongoing commissions following a single affiliate initiated sale.
There are a few affiliate programs that value their affiliates enough to provide them with Commissions for the lifetime of the customer. That means that once someone has made a purchase through one of your links, they are "tagged" as belonging to you, and you'll get paid a commission on anything else they buy in future from the merchant.
That's how it should be!
How can they do that?
Affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions generally fall into 3 categories:
Those that sell more than one product
Those that offer some kind of monthly service
Those that offer a combination of both
Of the first NitroMarketing is a great example. You can promote a wide range of products through this affiliate program (I've not counted, but it must be close on a hundred) in an equally wide variety of ways.
Whatever product you decide to promote, if someone buys that or any other product via your affiliate link, they become your customer for life. When at a later date that same someone decides to purchase another product (very likely considering the range of products), you'll automatically get another commission payment without having to do anything further.
PushButtonPublishing fits the bill for the second category perfectly. When you send someone through your affiliate link and they become a member, they do so on a monthly basis. To remain a member they pay a membership fee every month. Each and every time they do this, you get paid your commission!
An example for the third kind of program is Webwizards Hosting. They offer comprehensive, high quality hosting packages. These again take the form of monthly service payments from the customer that will generate commissions for you every month. In addition Webwizards also sell various other "extras" for which you get a generous commission too!
Merchants like these feel that offering commissions for life is not just good for the affiliate. It also makes sense for them. Their program is more competitive in what is rapidly becoming a very crowded market. They gain greater loyalty from their affiliate network and a more dedicated team of marketers.
Programs that provide residual commissions enable you to get the most from your traffic!
They remove the need for you to constantly find new customers in order to sustain your income. Some will provide a regular monthly income that can last for many years, gradually growing as your sales and customer base increase.
Satisfied customers that have bought on your recommendation once will trust both you and the merchant. That's a perfect combination if you can recommend a new product from the same vendor at a later date.
If you plan to derive most or all of your online income from affiliate programs your core programs must provide a residual income for long-term stability.
Ready to find out how affiliate link tracking works?
Source
Why are they doing that?
Because attracting new visitors is a costly business.
It's easier to sell to existing customers than to new prospects
Whether you're running advertising campaigns, employ search engine optimization for positioning, or engaging in any other method of promoting your site, you're paying for each new visitor that your marketing efforts bring. Nothing is really free. Even if you do everything yourself, as I've said before...
Time is Money!
Once you've managed to get people to your site, it's much cheaper to keep them coming back, than to replace them with an entirely fresh crop of visitors every day. Of course either way you should still be spending on promotion, but your focus should be to gradually add to the number of visitors you get each day and grow your site.
The unit cost of each visitor is effectively reduced the more repeat visits you generate. Your site will also grow much faster when you are constantly adding to an existing user base as opposed to creating a new one everyday. Without repeat visitors you need to spend much more on promotion to see the same rate of growth as with them.
So many visitors ...
The necessity of a procuring a constant flow of new visitors is a major shortcoming of most current affiliate programs and one that few affiliates realise.
Because of the "one customer = one payment" nature of these programs, building your business and increasing your income can be a very slow process.
Generating repeat visits with interesting content you might have built your traffic up to 1000 visitors per day, but maybe only 300 of those are new prospects for your (one time payment) affiliate products. The rest have been to your site several times before.
They have either already bought or don't want the products you promote.
If they are still undecided, they have almost certainly bookmarked the merchant site directly, or having surrendered their email address for further information (newsletter or free report, etc.), now receive emails containing the direct (non-affiliate) link to the site that cut you out of the loop. The same applies if they later wish to buy another product from your affiliate vendor.
So what can you sell to those 700 repeat visitors? In short... nothing!
Unless you join another affiliate program to offer them more products that is. Obviously this is an oversimplified example, but nevertheless it effectively demonstrates that you can have done a great job in making your web site successful, yet still be earning relatively little.
This is the importance of residual income affiliate programs.
They are the key to earning from those 700 repeat visitors.
Whilst some two tier programs can perhaps be considered as providing a residual income, what we really mean by a residual income program is one that pays ongoing commissions following a single affiliate initiated sale.
There are a few affiliate programs that value their affiliates enough to provide them with Commissions for the lifetime of the customer. That means that once someone has made a purchase through one of your links, they are "tagged" as belonging to you, and you'll get paid a commission on anything else they buy in future from the merchant.
That's how it should be!
How can they do that?
Affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions generally fall into 3 categories:
Those that sell more than one product
Those that offer some kind of monthly service
Those that offer a combination of both
Of the first NitroMarketing is a great example. You can promote a wide range of products through this affiliate program (I've not counted, but it must be close on a hundred) in an equally wide variety of ways.
Whatever product you decide to promote, if someone buys that or any other product via your affiliate link, they become your customer for life. When at a later date that same someone decides to purchase another product (very likely considering the range of products), you'll automatically get another commission payment without having to do anything further.
PushButtonPublishing fits the bill for the second category perfectly. When you send someone through your affiliate link and they become a member, they do so on a monthly basis. To remain a member they pay a membership fee every month. Each and every time they do this, you get paid your commission!
An example for the third kind of program is Webwizards Hosting. They offer comprehensive, high quality hosting packages. These again take the form of monthly service payments from the customer that will generate commissions for you every month. In addition Webwizards also sell various other "extras" for which you get a generous commission too!
Merchants like these feel that offering commissions for life is not just good for the affiliate. It also makes sense for them. Their program is more competitive in what is rapidly becoming a very crowded market. They gain greater loyalty from their affiliate network and a more dedicated team of marketers.
Programs that provide residual commissions enable you to get the most from your traffic!
They remove the need for you to constantly find new customers in order to sustain your income. Some will provide a regular monthly income that can last for many years, gradually growing as your sales and customer base increase.
Satisfied customers that have bought on your recommendation once will trust both you and the merchant. That's a perfect combination if you can recommend a new product from the same vendor at a later date.
If you plan to derive most or all of your online income from affiliate programs your core programs must provide a residual income for long-term stability.
Ready to find out how affiliate link tracking works?
Source
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