By far the best choice you can make as an affiliate marketer is to use recurring commission affiliate programs. With referring commission programs you get paid over and over again for each sale you refer.

Most affiliate programs don’t offer recurring commissions. So once you’ve made a sale, you lose that customer to the product owner. The product owner gets a customer – potentially for life and only pays you (the affiliate) once for them!

But recurring commission affiliate programs are different. Once you’ve referred a customer once, you can continue to earn commissions month after month, year after year. With some products too you can benefit from a range of products too.

This means you only need to refer customers to the lowest value product in a range, and a built in sales team will “up-sell” your customer, making sales on your behalf. You still earn a commission and on a higher ticket item, but you’ve only referred a low value sale.

Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs – Some Examples

A good recurring commission affiliate program can pay you far more than a “one-off” offer can, over time. With “one-off” sales, you can earn only one commission. So a sale of a $100 product, for example, will pay you $40 assuming a 40% commission.

But even a low value recurring product will quickly catch up and overtake a one-off sale commission. A recurring commission affiliate program which offers $10 a month might not seem like a lot. For each sale you make you’ll make $10 a month. Doesn’t sound like a lot does it?

But, if you sold 100 of your single products for $100 each you’ll make $4000. If you sold a 100 of your recurring income products (at $10 a month) you’ll make $1000 per month. For a one-off sale, you might have a couple of quiet months where you don’t sell anything. So eventually your recurring income will beat your one-off sale income.

Some Recurring Commission Programs

Recurring commission programs are often membership programs, training programs and software products. Here’s a few examples:

• SFM Mentors– Offer training and support for affiliates, a range of high ticket products and an online business community.
• Aweber – offers an automated collection and delivery email marketing software (for online marketers and business owners)
• Hostgator – Offers online website hosting for website owners and online businesses
• SEM Rush – Offers online visibility support, data collection, performance metrics, SEO help and advice etc. for online businesses.

Best Affiliate Products To Promote

Did you notice anything about these products? They all offer a lifetime value to those in need of them. When I started out with affiliate marketing, I found products from Clickbank and threw up content in an attempt to sell them. But the products were cheap one-off sale type products which sold for $100 and made $40 commissions. They were courses, ebooks or downloadable material but only offered $100 worth of value.

They didn’t offer a lifetime value to the customer. With the right products, and if you find the right customers for them, you’ll continue to make commissions long after your referral sale goes through. That’s because people really need these products. An online business can’t be built without the use of websites (hosting) and email marketing software (Aweber). So, even if you sell these low value items, you’ll need to sell them over and over again just to make a reasonable living.

With high value recurring income products, you only need to find people who need them in order to make a recurring income – potentially for a lifetime.

Other Considerations

There’s a few other considerations to think about too when approaching which affiliate products you should promote. Ideally choose affiliate programs which give you recurring commissions to maximise the income you can generate from your efforts. But you can also leverage your online business more cleverly if you also use:

• A product range – a product range lets you earn from products your referrals purchase later on, even years after they initially purchase.
• Up-sells – up-sells are part of a product range and give you larger potential earnings from the product you initially promote
• Multi-tier sales – With 2 tier sales you can earn commissions based on the sales generated by your referrals
• Digital products – offer the best value for affiliates not just because you can earn ongoing monthly commissions but also because your rate of commission is usually much higher than that of physical products.
• A built in sales team – Having a team of sales people working on your behalf is worth it’s weight in gold to an affiliate. You don’t have to personally sell high ticket items yourself if you choose a product range which includes them.

Access an online business system, range of high value products and training and education resource which includes access to all of the above benefits. Click on the banner below to access.