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?

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