Yes, residual income affiliate programs are key to making affiliate marketing work. Without a residual income coming in month after month, it’s very difficult to get traction with an affiliate business.
Without residual income, you need to rely on selling products over and over again. This takes time to learn and there’s two main strategies for selling affiliate products: creating content or running paid advertising.
When you’re starting out, it’s doubly difficult because you’re probably working a job and juggling your affiliate business in your spare time. If not, and you’re time rich, you may be money poor. This could mean you’ll be relying on creating content for your marketing. This can take a long time and without a residual income product, a single sale doesn’t go very far.
Residual Income Affiliate Programs
With content marketing, sales can be sporadic. But if you’ve used a program which pays a recurring income, your income will compound over time.
Some of the best residual income affiliate programs are software tools which affiliates use themselves. This is because once someone starts having a successful affiliate business, they really can’t do without the software. They need it in order to keep their business alive.
Tools like autoresponders, hosting providers, SEO optimisation tools and training and mentoring programs fit into this category. Here’s a few of my favourites:
- 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
- HostGator – Hosting provider
- Shopify – Online Store Builder
Residual Income Affiliate Programs – Other Considerations
Any program which offers residual income is far better than one which doesn’t. However, some affiliate programs pay far more than others too. For example, compare a high value digital mentoring course with a book from Amazon. One will cost only £10/$15 so you’ll only make a few cents/pence on the sale. Plus you’ll only earn the commission once. After that you need to sell another item and then another.
But with a high value digital course, you can earn up to 40% commission on a sale of a $10,000+ digital marketing mentorship course, for example, which also offers membership residual income.
As a new affiliate, it’s easy to latch on to doing something, anything, to get things going. But you can spend the same amount of time selling low value physical products which only pay a fraction of the larger value digital products; the same amount of time and effort for a much smaller reward!
Marketing Your Affiliate Program
How you bring your affiliate products to market is an important factor too. It’s not just about choosing the right products for the residual income and those products which you’re aligned with; but also about how you intend to put them in front of people and how you convey your messaging.
The two main marketing strategies fall into two categories: paid and free. Free marketing is usually done through content marketing of some kind. Create great content, build a list of fans and promote your products through your list. This takes time and a lot of patience. You need to be passionate about what you’re doing or you can easily burn out. The money is not a good enough reason for most, who drop out before they even reach 1000 subscribers.
Paid marketing is different because you can build your list very quickly if you have the money. However, you also need to consider the value of your products and your likely return on investment. Anyone with a large bank account can easily blow a fortune on paid marketing and sell nothing. Also, some products lend themselves to paid marketing more than others.
For example, if you’re selling cheap physical products from Amazon, it’s simply not a viable option to run YouTube or Facebook advertising and expect a profitable return.
Time Rich Or Time Poor?
Are you time rich or money rich? Or neither? Depending on your individual situation and circumstance, you’ll need to approach your affiliate marketing business in a different way. If you’re burned out working 60-70 hours a week in a corporate career, you can build an online business very quickly using paid marketing and purchasing some high ticket affiliate products to sell.
If you take the right steps and get the right help you can replace your income within a year. However, if you’re working a part time job and doing affiliate marketing on the side, you may not be as desperate. Perhaps you have the time to spend less and use your time to better effect through using cheaper and free marketing strategies such as blogging or building a YouTube channel.
Get Help
One of the first things you should do as an affiliate marketing is connect with other affiliates who are doing better than you are! It’s the same in all walks of life. If you want to excel at something, learn from people who are further ahead than you.
Affiliate marketing can be tough, especially in the beginning. You spend a lot of time doing many things which simply don’t work. It’s easy to see why so many people quit. But when you can get something working, it gets easier to make sales. Over time, if you stick at it for long enough, you’ll be making sales in your sleep and won’t even have to work anymore!
Access an online business community through this link and learn from people who are already full time entrepreneurs online.
