How Does Affiliate Marketing Work
February 13th 2009
Our Internet School > Website Marketing > Affiliate Payments
Passive income strategy 5 – Promoting recurring commission affiliate products.
Some people suggest that you can generate a passive income by promoting affiliate products, but, in general, I would disagree, because the kind of digital products that most affiliates promote are popular for a limited period of time. These are products that pay commission only on the initial sale and because of the competitive nature of the market for products like these, what is popular today is unlikely to be as popular tomorrow.
You need to change the product that you are promoting on a regular basis, which means that you have to create a whole new tranche of promotional materials. It is for this reason that I would argue that this is not a passive income generation strategy.
There is, however, one clear exception to this rule.
This exception is where you promote a product that has an element of recurring commission attached to it. In other words, you are working with a product where you will earn an initial commission for the primary product sale. However, the product owner will also be promoting another product ‘on the back end’ and this will be something for which you will receive a regular monthly commission payment.
In order to illustrate how this works, let us look at the #1 digital product affiliate network site, Clickbank.com. This is a site that lists over 10,000 products which you can promote immediately after your free account application is accepted.
The majority of products on the site pay you an initial commission for the primary product sale, and that is it from the affiliate point of view. These are the products that the majority of the 100,000 affiliates who use Clickbank promote, because when they search the site for a product to push, they do so looking only for the most popular ones.
Thus, they will search the ‘Marketplace’ page using the default settings like this:
However, if you change the ‘Sort by’ setting from the drop-down menu to show all products with ‘Future $’, what you are presented with is all of the products on which you can earn a recurring commission.
By way of illustration, let us look at the ‘Payment button’ on the sales page for the first product shown in the screenshot above:
You will note that there is no suggestion that there is any element of paying on a regular basis here. There is no recurring element here - the customer pays only once for this particular product. However, once they have completed their initial purchase (for which you are paid an initial commission) the customer is then presented with another highly attractive, complimentary offer for what will commonly be a closely related membership site.
Assuming that they take advantage of this additional offer, then you will be paid a monthly commission every time they pay their subscription.
You will not receive a recurring commission for every customer who buys the initial product, because not every one of them will buy the additional product that will generate your ongoing passive income. Having said that, as long as the ‘back end offer’ is sufficiently well targeted and attractive enough, the percentage of customers who decide to include that offer in their order ‘as they have their card out anyway’ should be significant, and the passive, residual income you would build up over time could be impressive.
You promote such a product in exactly the same way as you would promote any other product for which you are an affiliate.
Create another page on your site and write what reads like an objective review of the product. Highlight what you like about it but also mention a couple of things that you were not quite so impressed with.
Give the product a score for individual characteristics such as ‘Ease of use’, ‘Value for money’ etc, and try to arrive at a final total product evaluation score of something like 8.5/10. In other words, give it high score but not so high that your desire to make a sale becomes too obvious.
Finally, give the product a not too over-the-top recommendation and suggest that your visitor should buy it.
However, it is most important that you then offer them a valuable and preferably unique bonus if they buy the product through your link at the bottom of the review page. For instance, if it was the dog training product in the previous example, create your own unique ‘Top ten tips’ dog training video and offer that as the bonus. Alternatively, in the earlier fly fishing example, create a similar kind of video for keen fly fisherman.
Doing this has two very important advantages.
Firstly, if your visitor has already decided to buy the product, then it makes sense for them to do so through your link if your bonus offer is something that they recognize the value of and understand they cannot obtain it anywhere else. For this reason, the first benefit is increased sales and the possibility of increased recurring commissions on the back end product offer.
Secondly, to allow you to send this bonus to your new customer, they have to send you proof of purchase through your link by e-mail. You have just added them to your customer mailing list and we have already examined the true value of building mailing lists.
You have managed to kill two birds with one stone. You have generated a recurring, passive income by promoting the correct type of affiliate product, and you have added someone to your mailing list.
Their name is added to your autoresponder system, placing them into another of your passive income business models.
Here’s A Couple Of Videos To get You Going With Clickbank
Part2
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