There are different types of income you can make from affiliate marketing and they are usually broken down into 2 categories:
- Earning one time commissions where you make 1 sale (high or low ticket) and that’s where it ends.
- Or recurring commissions where you make 1 sale, but it keeps paying you every month over and over and that adds up.
The one I want to focus on is the second because I have a great deal of experience with promoting affiliate offers that pay recurring income (through the 5 options I have to show you here) and that’s because:
I’ve made $600,000 in recurring affiliate commissions:
Since 2015, I have been making a very passive income from recurring affiliate commissions, and one in particular that has earned me the $600,000. About 80% of that income came from recurring commissions.
If you look at my affiliate income reports page, anything past 2015 shows this.
An example of how profitable recurring income can be with affiliate marketing:
Let’s take a simple niche: Promoting affiliate marketing programs. And let’s say there are 3 different programs one can promote in this niche and each one has their own commission structure:
- Affiliate program 1: Pays you $50 one time.
- Affiliate program 2: Pays you $1,000 one time (It’s a high ticket affiliate promotion).
- Affiliate program 3: Pays you $40 a month for each sale and then $40 every month recurring. And usually, each referral sticks around for 12 months, so that means you can make $1,200 per person.
Long term, the last option offers the best benefits because:
- It has the recurring commission model.
- A long retention rate (people stick around for 12 months).
- You are more likely to get sales for that offer than something high ticket as it costs less to buy (you’ll make more sales).
- It can provide a passive income for you as each sale can pay you 12 months ahead.
Before you start earning recurring income from affiliate marketing, do this:
- Create a list of niches which you know a ton about.
- Find products that offer an affiliate program and recurring commissions for promoting it.
- Apply for the affiliate program and get approval.
- Once you get it, start promoting it with one or more of the 5 options.
How to find affiliate programs that pay recurring commission:
It’s much easier to find regular affiliate programs that pay you one time, than recurring commissions, so you may have to dig a bit further to find an offer for the niche you chose. Usually, you can find them by doing the following:
1) Going to Google and typing in “Product name + affiliate program + recurring”.
2) Heading directly to places like Clickbank, finding a product and looking for words like “AVG Rebill”. It means there’s recurring commissions.
3) Looking at membership sites and programs that cost monthly to use. If they offer an affiliate program, this is where you’ll most likely find recurring commission offers. Here are a few examples (using the make money online business example):
- ConvertKit.
- Wealthy Affiliate.
- Income School.
- SEMRush.
- Aweber.
- Clickfunnels.
All of these are membership websites and services, and all of them have their own recurring commissions. I am using this niche as an example because it is one I am very familiar with, but you will typically be able to also find similar opportunities in other niches, especially if they are health or wealth related.
Here are the 5 ways to make a recurring income from affiliate marketing:
Once you have found your promotion and you’ve been approved, here’s how you can make recurring sales with it:
- Review the offer on a blog post.
- Create a video review of the offer on YouTube.
- Create an ad linking to your review of the product (could be to your blog).
- Find niche audiences that ask questions for which your recurring affiliate promotion answers the question.
- Review other competing products against your recurring affiliate promotion.
I have personally used every single one of these methods to generate the $600,000 in recurring sales and I’ll get into the specifics right now.
1) Review the offer on a blog post:
If the product you are promoting is popular, you can bet there’s people on search engines looking for reviews of it, which is why you should absolutely write one!
1) Check out my tutorial on writing affiliate product reviews if this is new to you (see right image for reference):
2) You’ll notice one of my top suggestions to make it profitable is to KNOW the product. If you don’t know it, wait until you read the last method on this list, it’ll explain how to do that.
3) Write up a great blog post and talk about how awesome this product is.
For example:
1) I wrote up a personal review of Wealthy Affiliate here. That promotion pays me recurring commissions.
2) I know this program extremely well.
3) I wrote up what I consider a great review of that program and you can probably tell I know my stuff when you read it too.
You’re going to want to make your reviews stand out and the better you do that by sharing personal experiences, the more visitors it will get to make you sales.
2) Create a video review of the offer on YouTube:
YouTube product review videos are also awesome for promoting affiliate offers with recurring pay and two of the reasons why is:
A) Because (if you’re skilled), it’s easier to create a video review than to write one up. Making a 5 minute video is faster than writing 2,000 words of content.
B) And also because you get traffic to that video way faster than to a blog post.
I personally do both things (and every other option on the list like I said before) and that just gets my promotions more exposure. More exposure means I can get more sales and more sales means I can get more recurring income.
1) Make the video review and if you’ve never done it or need help, read up on my YouTube affiliate marketing guide here.
2) If you know the product (which I highly suggest), share the experience you had with it, go into as many details as possible, and absolutely share your success story (doesn’t matter what the niche is, people love a product that works).
For example:
Results:
I may not have made a lot of sales, but thanks to the recurring commission model, I’ve made over $1,400 from it.
3) Create a pay per click ad linking to your review of the product:
Pay per click is another major method I use to drive traffic to my pages or videos that promote my affiliate promotion. Specifically, what I do here is I use networks like Bing Ads, and lately YouTube ads to get more traffic to my reviews that are:
- On my blog.
- Or on my YouTube video.
1) I will create an ad for the product I am promoting.
2) I will make an ad and only make it show to people who know what this product is.
3) This will drive more of the same audiences to my review of the product (in addition to my blog and YouTube video which is organic audiences) and make me more sales.
For example:
- I made an ad promoting the Wealthy Affiliate program.
- That ad shows up on Bing when people type in that program name.
- The ad received 2,000+ clicks and it went to my blog where I review it (method 1).
- I paid about $200 for the clicks.
- The ad made about 10 sales.
- 10 x $200 = $2,000 that this ad earned me in recurring commissions.
- Minus the $200 in Adspend, I earned $1,800 in profit.
And if I were using YouTube Ads, it would be the same idea, except I’d link to my YouTube video and then determine the sales from that independently.
4) Find niche audiences that ask questions for which your recurring affiliate promotion answers the question.
With this method, you goal is to:
- Understand the product you are promoting.
- What kinds of people would love this product (your niche audience).
- What types of keywords (in the form of questions) these people type into Google and YouTube to find the answers.
With this option you can really go very far because you expand beyond just product reviewing, but it really requires good knowledge of the niche for you to pull this off.
For example:
1) Let’s take my promotion like Wealthy Affiliate.
2) Here I am targeting audiences who don’t know what this program is, but are looking for answers to things like how to make money online or affiliate marketing, and I am writing written or video content answering that and pitching it to them.
3) Here I am brainstorming keywords that my audience would type that is relevant to this promotion and here are some ideas:
- Affiliate marketing success stories.
- How to do affiliate marketing with a blog.
- How to start affiliate marketing.
- How much can you make with affiliate marketing.
- Affiliate marketing case studies.
- 10 ways to make money online.
- How much does affiliate marketing cost to start.
I can honestly give you dozens if not 100’s of ideas here, but notice how every single keyword I just used is popular. This is because I know the types of audiences who are in this niche, what they type and how to write content so they can find me on Google and YouTube.
I’ll literally take ALL of those keywords and write great content and make YouTube videos on them so they can find me, it’ll get me the traffic and then I’ll promote Wealthy Affiliate to them and make recurring affiliate sales from that.
5) Review other competing products against your recurring affiliate promotion:
Just like with method 4, I am still targeting audiences here that don’t know what Wealthy Affiliate is. But what happens is, I find other similar products, each of which has their own popularity and people looking up reviews for it.
What I’ll do is, I’ll create reviews of these specific products and ethically compare them to Wealthy Affiliate. You will find countless products to review in your niches and this will be a great way to find more traffic to promote your recurring paying affiliate offer to.
I’ve gotten 100,000’s of extra visits from doing this and promoting Wealthy Affiliate to people, both to my blog and YouTube videos. See my YouTube channel for instance and you’ll find a lot of my videos are reviews of other programs.
Here’s how it works:
- Make a list of products related to your niche.
- Find which ones are popular.
- Make reviews of these products through a blog or YouTube video.
- Compare the product to your promotion and promote yours.
- Your job is to (honestly) convince people that your option is better.
In this regard, you will often run into a common issue which is, reviewing products you may not be able to buy and if you still wish to ethically review them, then read this tutorial on promoting affiliate products you don’t own.
Connecting all 5 methods and making passive affiliate income from the recurring sales:
My advice when starting on the path to making a stable income from this is to begin with 1 method only and gain experience from that before moving into the next ones.
Beginners can probably start with blogging and YouTube and use methods 4 and 5 to drive more traffic to their affiliate offers that way.
And more advanced people can use pay per click affiliate marketing methods to expand on that later on.
I used a very narrow example of Wealthy Affiliate and it’s recurring model, but again, I want to stress how important it is that you apply these methods for YOUR niche, not one like mine (if you don’t understand it).
This is why before I even got into the 5 methods, I talked about the 4 steps to have before you even begin them. This is huge!
Now if you’re worried about getting started or unsure, see my affiliate coaching page or my Wealthy Affiliate review page for details on getting that necessary starting point so you can get to the same success I have.
I shared the same methods I use to this day to help me continue growing my affiliate income through recurring sales, but to do this yourself will probably require a good blueprint, and those 2 links I just gave you will help in that department.