To make an affiliate marketing passive income you need to do more than just sell an affiliate product. A single affiliate sale only generates a single commission. The first sale is a great achievement for any affiliate. But to make consistent sales is the ticket to a passive income from affiliate marketing. Of course if you can make one sale, you can make many more. If you can make sales passively, you’ve cracked it. If you can make a passive sale scalable and automatic, that’s even better.
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and some of them are more passive than others. Certain marketing tactics which affiliates use can take years to start generating traction, such as blogging. Other strategies are faster and more scalable, but require more investment. If your goal is to make an affiliate marketing passive income, there’s a few things you should know.
An affiliate marketing passive income is a wonderful thing. It means you can live your life and forget about working for a living. But first you have to make it work. Many affiliates fail and success isn’t a given.
Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: Blogging
With blogging you can make a passive income from affiliate marketing, once you’ve done the work! Blogging can take months or even years though before you see the fruits of your labour. That’s not something every new affiliate is prepared to do. A new blog is unlikely to produce the kind of traffic, leads and sales as one which has been around for many years. So with blogging, although you can earn passively from free traffic, it takes some time and dedication to create the content you’ll need to generate traction.
If you’re not prepared to put at least a year into blogging, it probably isn’t going to work as a passive income source. You’ll need to create and promote a huge amount of content for it to start generating any authority with Google. Without Google, or the help of the search engines, it’ll be much harder to generate traffic in large amounts.
Blogging is a cheap way though to generate an income online passively. If you’re prepared to work at it for a long time with little to show initially, it can work wonders over the longer term.
Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: V’logging
V’logging, like blogging takes some serious commitment. But once you have a heap of videos on YouTube (or TikTok), that content can work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, bringing traffic to your affiliate website passively. YouTube (owned by Google) is the second most popular place online for traffic after Google. Many YouTube videos are also shown in Google’s search results and it’s a good source of traffic for anyone prepared to put the work in. However the platform has become more competitive over the years and there’s many thousands of YouTube’ers competing for views.
Still, YouTube is less competitive than Google, so building a channel might be a good idea if you decide that video is your thing. See also blogging vs vlogging. It can take several months or years to break through and start generating a lot of passive traffic through uploading videos to YouTube simply because it’s a hugely competitive platform. But if you stick with it long enough, you’ll be rewarded with free traffic.
Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: Memberships
Yes membership products are one of the best ways to make a passive income from affiliate marketing. With most affiliate products you only get paid one time. So when you sell one time commission product you need to keep making sales over and over again. With membership products you can earn passively from sales you’ve made already. So it’s obviously a good idea to choose subscription products if you’re an affiliate.
Subscription affiliate programs tend to be those which offer ongoing value to the customer. Things like training programs, software products and business tools often carry a membership fee which can be passed on to the affiliate. One sale can make you a passive income, unlike most affiliate products.
Of course there is attrition and some memberships you sell will be cancelled. But if you choose products which offer the most value, you’re more likely to attract longer term memberships. Business tools are a good example of this because business owners need them in order to run their businesses.
High Ticket & Subscription Products
Unless you have been blogging or v’logging for some time, it’s tough to get traction with an affiliate business organically (with content). The much faster method of selling affiliate products is through paid marketing. However, with low value products, it can be difficult to determine whether a paid advertising campaign is going to work without spending a huge amount of marketing budget on testing ads.
Even with a subscription program, you can spend a lot of budget testing out whether your strategy is going to work; often to no avail. A good solution to this problem is to use a high ticket sales funnel which contains a subscription product within its range.
A range of high value products allows you to earn much larger commissions with high ticket sales. This helps recover your marketing budget much more easily when a sale is made. You can also make residual income on the subscription products within the funnel. It’s much easier to make a profit and use paid marketing with a high ticket product range. Paid marketing is faster to implement with an affiliate business and much more easily scaled than using blogging or other slow content marketing strategies.
Summary
You can make an affiliate marketing passive income through using multiple methods of course too. A blog or YouTube channel will take some time and serious effort to build up organically. But over the longer term this can give you free traffic which means you don’t have to pay for it. Paid traffic is much faster of course and much more scalable. So when you find a winning campaign, you can simply scale up by increasing your marketing budget.
Consider using a high ticket sales funnel and subscription affiliate products too which pay out recurring commissions.