The best recurring affiliate programs are those which offer a lifetime value to the customer. These are often products such as software products and memberships. If you refer the right people you’ll earn an income for life from your sales. Of course some people will drop off over time and attrition is a natural by-product of doing business.

But if you choose products and services which offer lifetime value, and find customers who will value this, you can earn lifetime commissions from your efforts. That’s far more worthwhile than selling one-off items where you only get paid once!

Best Recurring Affiliate Programs

The best recurring affiliate programs I’ve found are ones which offer huge value to the user and are important for business growth. With a business, online or offline, if a software or membership product can help its growth, the owner will continue using that service; potentially for life!

• Aweber – an email autoresponder service for online businesses. Aweber provides software for online and offline business owners wanting to build a list of email subscribers and automate messages to build relationships over the long term. Earn 30 percent commission throughout the life of every Aweber order made through your affiliate link.
• The SFM/Mentors – A membership program for starting an online business from scratch. SFM also offers multiple earning strategies including high ticket commissions, multi-tier commissions, recurring membership commissions and has a built in sales funnel (and sales team) anyone can use. Earn up to 40% commissions on a range of high ticket products valued up to $20,000, plus recurring commissions on memberships.
• Convertri – Convertri pays 30% commissions every month for membership subscriptions you have referred. Convertri offers super fast landing pages and split testing software for online business owners and marketers
• Leadpages – Similar to Convertri, Leadpages offers landing page software and split testing software which is useful for online businesses. Earn up to 50% recurring commissions for as long as your referral remains a Leadpages customer.
• SEMRush – Offers multiple software and features for businesses to help improve website traffic – from SEO, competitor analysis, rank tracking, social media management, content optimisation etc. You can also earn 40% recurring commissions promoting the SEMRush affiliate program.

Promoting Affiliate Programs – Training

So that is my list of best recurring affiliate programs. With any program though you still need to actually make the sale in order to make the recurring commissions. If you’re a new affiliate, I would suggest getting training and support in order to so do. If that’s the case, I recommend joining the SFM/Mentors program for a number of reasons:

• You’ll get access to a high ticket digital sales funnel which has multiple products and earning strategies included in it. See SFM Digital Business System.
• You can choose you own level of positioning and commission structure according to your budget and commitment level.
• Benefit from high ticket commissions of up to 40% on items valued up to $20,000
• Earn recurring commissions of $20 per month on any referred members
• Offers a two tier commissions structure (according to your positioning) which allows you to earn from sales made by your members/referrals.
• Earn 100% commission on Mentors All In sales – even at a basic level membership
• Offers a variety of commission structures according to your membership level
• You’ll be able to access mentors and coaches to help you build your affiliate (or other) business.
• 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching is also available through SFM/Mentors.

The SFM Mentors is my pick of the best recurring affiliate programs because it offers much more than most of these other softwares and membership do. SFM Mentors is a coaching and training program which also offers recurring commissions on top of everything else.

Access a free video series to learn more about the SFM program.

Why Use Recurring Programs?

Since you’re here, you probably already know that recurring programs are the best ones to promote as an affiliate. With standard products, you only earn once per sale. Many such programs will benefit from your advertising for years to come – all without rewarding you properly!

In many such cases, a software or membership program will pay affiliates only $20 for customers who will bring in thousands in membership fees over the coming years. It’s far cheaper for these companies to have such an affiliate program than to advertise themselves!

Affiliates then get the raw deal in such cases. New affiliates particularly are susceptible to being taken advantage of. Just looking at Amazon, for example, affiliate commissions are slowly being ebbed away as the company becomes more powerful! See this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

Amazon of course uses physical products not digital. But it’s wise to arm yourself with the knowledge of which companies pay well and for life, and those which take advantage of affiliates and don’t value their input. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

A good product/company will continue paying for the lifetime of the customer you have referred. With some companies, you also benefit from any other sales purchased from your referral throughout the lifetime of their custom. See SFM digital business system.

Recurring Commissions & Compounding

Recurring commissions compound over time and although $20 a month doesn’t sound like much, with 100 members it becomes $2000 a month. With 1000 members it becomes $20,000 a month. Although these figures are hard to believe when you start out as an affiliate marketer, they are attainable. In the first instance of being an affiliate, this seems like an impossible dream.

However hard you work, it can seem as though you are not getting anywhere! But if you stick with it, your work has a compounding effect too. At first, you struggle. Nothing seems to work. As you make the odd sale, you’re encouraged and persevere. Once sales start coming in more frequently, you focus on the work which generates the most effect (Pareto’s principle 80/20 rule).

When you get to this stage, small effort product larger results. Your income soars. But initially it seems like nothing is ever going to happen! In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he mentions this and represents it in this graph.

We expect results to be linear but instead there’s a long time of not much happening. If we stick with it, results can take off exponentially as in the picture above.