You have a great website.  Traffic is steadily increasing.  Your viewers are happy with your content.

But are you making money off that traffic?

If you’re like most of us, you are probably doing the normal things like using Adsense, the odd banner ad and hopefully promoting products within your articles as well.  Maybe you have even created a kickass eBook that you are promoting on your site and making some good money off of it.

But there is another way to make great, easy and most importantly – residual income.  The key is: recurring affiliate income

What is recurring affiliate income?

You are likely already promoting various affiliate offers on your website from networks like Shareasale, etc.  These are no different except that the product or service is typically a subscription based service.

Chances are you are already using or paying for services or products that have a monthly or annual fee.  And often times, these companies also pay affiliate commissions every time they receive a payment from their customer.  There are even some companies that pay commissions on two or more tiers.  For instance, you refer someone to company ‘X’ and they then refer paying customers to that company.  You can make a small commission off of the person that you referred.  Now that is easy money.

Promote a service you know or use

Ideally you should try to promote a product or service that you use so that you have first hand knowledge of it and it’s clearly something you are willing to pay for.

A good example of a service that most all bloggers or website owners use is a mailing list service, sometimes known as an autoresponder.  Here is a list of a few of these popular companies:

MadMimi – Pays 25% of monthly fees for everyone you refer

Getresponse – Pays 33% of monthly fees for everyone you refer

Aweber – Pays 30% recurring commissions

These are just a few examples, ones that we are familiar with and use now or have used in the past.  Feel free to let us know if we’ve missed an important one.

Some personal examples

One one of our niche sites we had written an article about using a VPN for a bunch of different uses.  The article was super popular and we ended up making a lot of referral sales, particularly from one VPN company: Torguard.  We have used Torguard personally for a few years now and were really happy with it and shared our experience with our readers.  This was back in January 2015. FYI: Torguard pays a 30% recurring commission and has plans that go from monthly to annually or even longer.

We hadn’t really done much promotion of Torguard since January 2015 so naturally our referrals had started to fall off.  But January 2016 was interesting since it was one of our highest commission months.

In January 2015 since the article was new, we had 43 sales for total commission of $322.93.  Referrals slowed down throughout the year as we mentioned so in January 2016 we only had 22 sales, roughly one half from the year earlier.  BUT our commissions were $346.18 that month!  So even though we had half the referrals compared to the year earlier we were able to increase our income because of people renewing their subscription.  And the great thing is, the longer we are making referrals, chances are our revenue will keep increasing as some people will keep renewing for years like we do.

even though we had half the referrals compared to the year earlier we were able to increase our income because of people renewing their subscription

Another example of recurring affiliate income we had was with Getresponse.  We’ve used them in the past and are generally pretty happy with their service.  We hadn’t promoted them in an article really, just included them in a list like we have done here.  We made a total of ONE referral off of that article.  But that one referral has kept their account for well over a year now and as of April 2016, we have made $84.15 in commissions.  Not bad for one referral.

Summary

What offers you can promote is obviously going to depend on the niche of your blog.  Maybe you write book reviews.  Is there a book of the month club that pays recurring commissions for every month people you refer are a member?

Over time, recurring commissions can add up to big and easy money for you and your blog as you build up your referral base.  The better the product or service you promote, the greater the chance that people will keep on with the service and you will keep receiving commissions.  So promote something you use or believe in and sit back and watch your income grow.

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