Subscription affiliate programs are one of the best ways to make a stable and predictable monthly income from affiliate marketing. Without them, it can be much more difficult to do so. One of the main problems with affiliate marketing is consistency. You don’t know from one month to the next what you’re going to earn, unless you’ve been in business for years. Even then, some months are better than others.
A drought one month can be followed by a tsunami of sales the next. Subscription affiliate programs help to smooth out the ups and downs of affiliate marketing and give you a predictable and stable income.
As a beginner in affiliate marketing, the early few months and years can be the most difficult. Once you’ve sold a subscription affiliate product, it’s easier to believe that the affiliate marketing business is a realistic possibility. Getting fired up with this belief can carry you through the tough times you’ll need to endure as you get your affiliate business going.
What Are Subscription Affiliate Programs?
So what are subscription affiliate programs? And why are they a good idea for affiliates? Subscriptions are everywhere today. You’ve probably got a subscription for your electric bills, your gym access and other utility bills too. With an affiliate business, it’s worth choosing subscription products online which you can promote too.
Most affiliate products don’t have subscriptions attached to them; they are just single products which are bought once. So for these products the affiliate only makes a single commission.
With membership products and software products the customer keeps using a service for the long term. Examples on of online subscription affiliate programs are things such as autoresponders (email marketing services), or training and mentorship programs which carry a membership cost. The benefit of programs like these to the customer should be of course to provide ongoing value. To the affiliate, it means regular and recurring affiliate commissions, month in and month out.
Monthly Subscription Affiliate Programs
With monthly subscription affiliate programs, you’ll get paid over and over again for your referrals. With a single sale of a physical product, you only get one commission. Let’s look at an example of why monthly subscription affiliate programs are better than single sale products.
Let’s use a high ticket example of a digital product for a fairer comparison. With high ticket affiliate programs, you can earn larger commissions because your products are digital (giving you larger commissions), and the price is high for the item. So an example product might sell for $2500 and you’ll receive $1000 in commission (at 40%).
It’s obvious that a monthly commission of $10 a month is better than the sale of a low cost single product. A $100 product which pays the affiliate 40%, ($40) will be overtaken in just 5 months in terms of commission. But for a high ticket product which pays out $1000 in commission, a recurring commission of $10 will take 100 months to match the commission.
However, when you add a few more monthly recurring commissions, this gap soon closes. With just 10 sales, you’ll be earning $100 a month, each and every month (when a recurring commission pays out $10 a month per member referral). With 100 members, you’ll be earning $1000 a month, every month. Over time and through compounding your sales, monthly subscription affiliate programs can overtake commissions from even the high ticket items.
Affiliate Subscription Programs
Here’s a few affiliate subscription programs which I’ve come across:
- The Six Figure Mentors – Digital Online Business Mentorship Program.
- Aweber – For email marketing
- Leadpages- For custom landing pages
- Get Response – Email marketing
- Elegant Themes – WordPress website themes
- Social Pilot – Social Media Tool
- SEM Rush – SEO tool
- Snip.ly – Conversion/opt-in tool
- Shopify – Online Store Builder
Much of this list are business tools and software type products which are used for online business owners and affiliate marketers. There’s a good reason why you would want to choose such tools. For one, they provide massive value to business owners. Without these tools, online businesses wouldn’t run very smoothly or as well as they do. Some online businesses simply wouldn’t exist without some of these tools.
This makes them massively important to online business owners. Should you promote one of these tools to a business, and they subsequently generate income from its use, you’ve created an income stream for life. Of course businesses change their tools and subscriptions from time to time. But if you’ve referred someone to a business tool which they vitally need for their business, they are more likely to use it for life.
Lifetime commission affiliate programs are what you really want to look for in subscription affiliate programs. Those which offer huge value to their users and which are used for businesses to function properly or become more lucrative.
Finding More Programs With Recurring Incomes
You can find many more affiliate programs which offer subscriptions. Just google “subscription affiliate programs” and you’ll see a number of lists of them. Another way to find them is to look for subscription programs through Clickbank using a website called CBEngine.com.
Once you’re on CBEngine you can find the recurring commission products listed on Clickbank by looking down the left panel for “CB Recurring”.
Click on the tab at the bottom left hand side market “CB Recurring” and you’ll find a huge list of recurring income products on Clickbank. The main problem with Clickbank however is the standard of products is much lower in many cases. Make sure you have a good look at what you’re promoting before doing so. Products which don’t offer massive lifetime value will be much harder to sell and you’ll get a larger drop out rate with them too.
Subscription Based Products
Subscription based affiliate programs should offer great value. One of the products I promote is The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program. Their membership fee is $97 per month of which the affiliate receives $20 a month. This doesn’t seem like much but once you start building up your memberships it soon adds up.
Another subscription based affiliate program I like is Aweber. I’ve used Aweber since becoming an affiliate so I can stand by the product knowing it offers huge value. I wouldn’t be able to run my affiliate business without it. Of course some affiliates will move when they find Aweber isn’t meeting their requirements, but for most affiliate’s Aweber is a great fit.
Aweber will pay it’s affiliates 30% recurring monthly commissions. So if you sign up someone for $19 a month to the service, you’ll get a recurring income of $5.70 every month for that referral.
Affiliate Subscription Programs – Other Considerations
Subscriptions are very useful for affiliates if they want to sustain a business for the long term. Having those monthly subs drop into your account month after month makes all the difference, especially when your starting out and struggling. Another consideration is to focus on only digital products which typically pay out much larger commissions.
With digital products, you can typically earn upwards of 30% commissions on sales you generate. Compared with physical products which typically pay from 3% to 11 %, and you can see a massive disparity. Physical products carry many more costs than digital products, such as handling and postage costs. So they can’t compete with digital products in terms of commissions.
High ticket products too are another consideration for affiliates. High ticket products offer the best of both worlds: High levels of commissions and a large price tag.
Multi-tier commissions are commissions paid based on your members making sales within a specific product range. With a multi-tier affiliate program, you earn based on sales generated by your referrals. See best two-tier affiliate programs.
A product range is something else to consider too. With a single product, you can only earn once, and recurring subscriptions tend to be small. A product range offers multiple ways to benefit from having sold the first product in a range; including a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf. See SFM digital business system which has the benefit of a product range, recurring commissions, high ticket and multi-tier.
Get Started
If you’re ready to get started out online, but don’t know how, you can access step by step training and a recurring income business system through this link, or click on the image below.
