Webupon

Are you thinking of starting an internet business, and wondering where your income will come from? Wondering what on earth you are going to sell? If this is you, affiliate marketing may be the best option for your questions. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products to sell. All you need to have is a website with sufficient content that is related to the products of an online company offering affiliate programs. By becoming an affiliate member to the merchant and selling “their” products, you can start earning money right away!

Affiliate marketing is a business relationship, established between a merchant and an affiliate – someone having signed up to the program, and agreeing to direct some traffic to a merchant’s website.  If that traffic is converted by a visitor purchasing a product on the merchant’s website, or a visitor becoming a lead for the company, by signing up for a newsletter, ezine, or similar – that affiliate having sent the traffic, will be compensated. This compensation may take the form of either a percentage sales commission for the sales generated, or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the affiliate with the merchant’s affiliate program.

This being a win-win situation, for both for the merchants and the affiliates, not surprisingly affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular online marketing methods today. These days the majority of online merchants or retailer sites offer an affiliate program that anyone is welcome to join. Most online retailers or merchants, lure people in to become affiliates or members of their programs, by promising great benefits, like large commissions, lifetime commissions, click through incomes and a lot of other benefits, such as downloadable software and similar products – either for their own use in assisting them to gain sales, or as products that the affiliate can sell themselves.

Many affiliate programs pay you, as an affiliate, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you brought to the merchant’s website. Commissions for this kind of affiliate programs are usually large, ranging from 15% to a high of about 60%.  There are other affiliate programs that pay you a fixed fee for every click through or visitor you send to the merchant’s site. Programs like this often pay a smaller fee for every visitor, usually not much more than half a dollar. The benefit of this kind of program, however, is that the visitor doesn’t have to actually buy anything, in order for the affiliate to get compensated. The affiliate is getting paid just to send traffic, or visitors to the site.

Another type of affiliate program is the residual income affiliate program.  Residual affiliate programs usually pay only a small percentage of sales commission for every sale directed by the affiliate to the merchant’s site. This commission often comes only in the range of 10% to 20% sales commission. Because of this, many people ignore residual affiliate program and would rather opt for the high paying one-time commission affiliate program. Are these people making a mistake, or are they making a prudent decision?

It can definitely be stated that they are making a large mistake if they ignore residual affiliate programs. These types of  affiliate programs do pay at a lower rate, but merchants offering these programs pay the affiliate regular and ongoing commissions, for a single affiliate initiated sale! That means, for the same effort you made in promoting a particular affiliate program that you only get paid for once, in a one-time commission program, residual affiliate programs payout regular and ongoing commissions!

Still not clear about residual affiliate programs? Let us have a look from a different angle.

There are two online retailers, both offering web hosting services on their sites.
 
The first merchant offers a one-time commission affiliate program, that pays $80 for every affiliate initiated sale.

The second merchant offers a residual affiliate program, that pays only $10 for every affiliate initiated sale.

You have directed traffic to the first merchant and it converted into a sale, you’ll get paid once for the sale you have initiated.
But with the second merchant, you’ll get paid monthly for as long as the customer you have referred continues with the web hosting service.
That means that for the same effort of getting one customer to purchase the merchant’s service, you get paid monthly in residual affiliate programs while you only get paid once in a one-time commission type of affiliate programs.

Ultimately, I think you are far better off signing up with residual affiliate programs.