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Secrets of Passive Income from Affiliate Programs
How to Make Passive Income with Affiliate Programs and Joint Ventures
The secret to hands off passive income is based on recurring sales like subscription products and can make you a lot over time with little effort. When you sell recurring billed products you can earn money in addition to just the original transaction increasing your return on effort. I’ll show you how!
While it may be lucrative to make money with Adsense and PPC, it can also be profitable to promote the right affiliate products. Why not make money from both Adsense or Yahoo PPC ads and selling affiliate products you get a commission on???
I’ll show you how it works.
Most every product that is marketed has an affiliate program. Some are great! Some really suck!
In my humble opinion, the success of any product is dependant on the quality of it’s affiliate program.
For anyone with a product or service to sell, an affiliate program is like having a staff of sales people who go out and sell your stuff. Only that you do not need to pay them UNLESS they sell something!
What a brilliant concept! Why hire sales people when you can sell your products online with the aid of affiliate marketers???
OK, so what happens when you do not have your own product to sell???
SIMPLE: join an affiliate program and sell someone else’s product!
You’ll get commission for each sale!
The best kinds of affiliate program product sales involve recurring commissions, which means once you make a sale you continue to earn commissions month after month without any further work. That’s passive income! It’s the same concept as a salesperson and their client list. When the client buys they will get credit - but only if they’re on the list. Same with recurring commission on an affiliate program.
I’ll show you how easily you can do this affiliate marketing thing yourself and show you based on my personal experience. Get ready though - I have some eye opening info!
Whether you have a product yourself, or want to sell products, you’ll find this info helpful.
I have an affiliate program for my product The Article Underground Content and Traffic System and I owe a huge amount of the credit for my success to the great affiliates who along with me have struck a “win-win” partnership!
Article Underground Affiliate Program Details
http://www.articleunderground.com/affiliate-programs/
Allow me to share some data on how much money has been earned by Article Undeground Affiliates.
In 2006 since opening in Mid February I have paid Article Underground affiliates over $227,000 in commissions. And 2007 is going strong!
The top 5 Article Underground Affiliate Marketing Partners and what they earned in 2006. Net commissions I have paid to them.
(not including bonuses)
1. $38,768. affiliate since February 2006
2. $35,087. affiliate since March 2006
3. $21,453. affiliate since March 2006
4. $21,346. affiliate since June 2006
5. $19,701. affiliate since August 2006
The above amounts do NOT include bonuses and all of them are still earning recurring commissions in 2007.
While not every affiliate marketer will earn those kinds of numbers with every product they promote, if you pick the right products to promote you will be ahead of the pack of those who are promoting lame products that have no appeal.
The goal is to find several top notch current products that appeal to the base of your web site traffic/mailing lists. Promote products with features and benefits that your traffic will appreciate and you will be successful!
First off allow me to describe three types of “affiliate marketers”
and how they are each unique:
1. Affiliate Marketing Partner - someone who signs up to an affiliate program and uses the links, banners and sales tools with affiliate tracking code on their web pages, emails and other marketing to sell products for a vendor/company and receives a commission for each sale/transaction based on the rules of that affiliate program. Each program has different terms and rules.
Often no extra effort is made other than using a banner or text link and putting it on a web page or in an email.
2. Super Affiliate - someone who has mastered the art of product promotion and basically uses his web site traffic and customer/mailing lists to promote a product often with a large degree of success. Super affiliates also often buy ads to promote products that are especially profitable. Some super affiliates write reviews about products and help prospective customers look beyond the features outlined on a sales page. This often results in more sales.
Super Affiliates take an interest in learning about the product and they do the extra work that ensures they’ll make more sales.
3. JV Partner - a “joint venture” partner is a super affiliate that coordinates a “customized” marketing effort with a vendor/company.
Often the vendor will offer additional tools and/or special assistance to make it easy for the JV Partner to sell the product.
In most cases a JV Partner will have a substantial “mailing list”
of customers and/or subscribers. The best results come when a vendor helps a JV partner target his list with an offer that appeals to the special needs of their customers. This is considered a targeted offer. Targeted offers often have far greater success because the features and benefits are explained with the target’s needs in mind, as opposed to the more general promotional material that often targets a more “mass” audience.
If a trusted JV knows what his customers/subscribers want and need
- promoting the right offer can be hugely successful. Promoting junk and unrelated products can have a negative impact and lessen trust.
I consider all 3 types of affiliates important in promoting Article Underground, but I’ve found the most successful affiliates take the extra time to describe the features and benefits with a personal touch.
If you want to be especially successful promoting a product, I suggest you do your best to learn about it and explain it’s features/benefits and even point out the negative, as often being honest about what is not so good about a product will help establish your credibility.
Article Undeground has been a huge success and I owe a lot of it to the efforts of all the affiliates who have promoted it. Regardless of how good a product is, it will never be heard about unless someone promotes it! From the beginning I realized that I needed to generously share in the profits and have offered a 50% commission to affiliates for the first sale and also pay for each month that members renew. This is a recurring affiliate sale. Once the membership is sold, the affiliate will collect 50% until the member cancels (hopefully never!)
http://www.articleunderground.com/affiliate-programs/
While I use Article Underground as an example, there are other products and affiliate programs out there that offer 50% or more and pay you for recurring sales. You may need to dig to find them, but they are out there!
I will use my product Article Underground as an example to show you how as an affiliate or JV partner that by promoting the right products you can grab onto long term hands off profits that continue dropping money in your affiliate commissions account long after the initial sale. “Passive Income”
What to look for in a product to promote:
The Article Underground Content and Traffic System is a monthly subscription product that members happily invest $97. each month and in most cases - they stay for a long time, month after month! I actually have members that have been with me since the launch back in February of 2006! Why? Because the benefits warrant them to continue investing in the benefits they receive, such as monthly articles, article announcement posting privileges in high PageRank blogs and so much more.
As an affiliate marketer you want to promote products that have several qualities:
1) Solve a need
2) Offer Value
3) Have Features/Benefits that can be easily explained
4) Offer a substantial commission (I personally will not promote a product with less than 50% commission)
5) When possible will offer a subscription and/or up sells that you will get credit for
When possible you want to try the product yourself so you can write a review or more easily point out the features/benefits. If you do a good job of explaining YOU will make the sales!
In the future I’ll spend some time showing some other product examples as well as show you how to find products to promote. In the meantime I would appreciate if you would consider promoting The Article Underground Content and Traffic System. It performs well across a number of different niches - everything from SEO, webmaster, Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Business, Make Money, Work at Home etc.
Article Underground Affiliate Program Details
http://www.articleunderground.com/affiliate-programs/
If you need help with a custom campaign, let me know and I’ll work with you to create something special.
http://www.articleunderground.com/affiliate-programs/
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Very nice post Mike! I can see a move from the traditional, one hit 1 sale to the more popular 1 hit, many sales model which is the residual and recurring commission income you were talking about.
Comment by dylanloh.com — March 17, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
Mike,
This is indeed an excellent post. Promoting affiliate programs that pay out recurring commissions are an excellent way to build a passive income.
The key is to find services that people will use for long periods of time. If they sign up and then quit a short time later you only collect a small commission. But a service such as Article Underground is one in which you can collect commissions for years to come (web hosting and autoresponders are other great examples).
Comment by MikeCollins — November 5, 2007 @ 11:56 am