5 experts share their best recurring affiliate programs

Make money online with affiliate programs

Digital affiliate programs are some of the best ways to  make money online   and to monetize your website, would it be a Wordpress blog, an e-commerce website, or any other online presence, as they allow to recommend digital products to website visitors, with a chance to convert them into buyers and get a rewarding commission, thus building a passive income stream.

Our own favorite ones are:

• the Ezoic mediation system to monetize website with display ads and increase ads revenue 250% that we use on several websites: International Business Consulting, New Simple As Possible ERP, Where Can I FLY?, and Help Smartphone,
• the RusVPN service that offers an sub affiliate program that we use on  International Business Consulting   to promote business VPN,  New Simple As Possible ERP   to promote  SAP system   VPN, Where Can I FLY? by using VPN to get cheaper flights, and  Help Smartphone   with  VPN on a cell phone   to secure connections,
• the  TravelPayouts affiliate   program to sell flights and hotels bookings among other travel related products, that we use on Where Can I FLY? and on  Travel Comparator   websites,
• the  PropellerAds native ads   program that allows to monetize any kind of website with display ads,  push notifications   and other solutions, regardless of website content.

What is one of the main benefits of display ads?

One of the main benefits of display ads is to earn recurring income simply by having an external system selecting ads to display on your website on your behalf – you don’t have much to do except register your website. For example, the Ezoic platform is great at that and will even increase your earnings compared to other recurring income affiliate programs.

What are sales funnels, should I register to one?

Beware of the Facebook ads! Most of the sales funnel consulting offers that you see on Internet are actually pyramid schemes – any recurring affiliate program that asks you to pay first, for example like sales funnel courses, means that you first give money to feed the system.

Any good affiliate program is free to join and to use: they are made to give you money, not to take money away from you!

For example, ClickFunnels and ConvertKit both ask you to pay in order to use their services.

If ClickFunnels really worked in making millions of dollars from sales, why would you need to pay to use it? There isn’t any reason to pay for sales funnel course, sales funnel use, or sales funnel consulting if it is made to make money and it really is easy, as anybody that helped you make money would earn money.

Therefore, we recommend you not to pay for any recurring income affiliate program, but instead to use the free use we recommend you.

Attention! Never pay to use a recurring income affiliate program – the good ones are free!

The best affiliate programs

Of course, there are plenty of other digital affiliate programs that will allow you to monetize any type of webpage by promoting the right type of content that will resonate with your visitors: office solution  G Suite solution   and Microsoft Office, hosting services EX2 hosting, the  GoDaddy hosting   or the hosting  A2hosting,   payment systems and credit cards like the  TransferWise virtual bank account   or the PayOneer card, and many more!

To help you select some of them, we asked other experts their tips to build digital recurring income.

Are you using recurring affiliate programs to generate passive income? Are they offline or fully digital? Which type of products are sold? Do you use them personally, simply promote the products or even only the program? How do you find affiliates? What is the average return on investment, how long did it take to be beneficial?

See their answers below.

Lisa Parmley, Coursemethod.com: create online courses

I use recurring affiliate programs to generate a passive income through coursemethod.com. All the affiliate programs on my site are for online products. The majority is for software-as-a-service or SaaS including email marketing solutions, learning management systems (LMS), and related software.

I've been running an online business since 2001, so I have used or at least tried everything I recommend. Most of the tools I promote are linked to from within interviews I publish on the site. It took me about 4 months to make my first sale which wasn't very much (like $30), but it was recurring. That means as long as the customer continues using the service, I'll keep earning that $30/month.

The first recurring commission came from  Thinkific,   an LMS. It's a great SaaS to promote as it allows people to create and sell their own online course quite easily. They have always paid me on time and run some really awesome promotions.

I have not made back my investment with this business yet. The cost of content, managing the interviews, marketing my site, my domain name, hosting, and additional costs is still more than my profits. I do hope to earn enough in the future to offset the costs as I know it can be done (I have successfully built out this model before).

It requires a lot of work and patience. Also the ability to keep going even when it's not yet profitable :)

Lisa Parmley launched her first online course business in 2001 and has successfully run it for the last 19 years. She writes about how tostart and scale an online course business and interviews other course creatorsat coursemethod.com.

Marc Andre, VitalDollar: email marketing and ecommerce referral programs

My favorite recurring affiliate programs come from two different industries: email marketing and ecommerce. Email marketing platforms like ConvertKit and Aweber charge clients a monthly fee, and affiliates earn a commission each month as long as the customers that they refer continue to use the service.

Customers typically stick with these providers for a long time, so you can make a nice recurring income by promoting them.

Some e-commerce platforms have affiliate programs that function the same way. SendOwl's referral program will pay you a commission as long as your referral remains a paying customer.

DPD's program is similar, but you'll only earn a commission for the first 12 months.

These affiliate programs are ideal if you have a website or blog with a target audience of small business owners, entrepreneurs, or bloggers. Most businesses use these types of services (especially email marketing) so there is high demand and a lot of people are looking for information on the leading service providers. In the past, I owned a blog that targeted web designers (I sold that blog a few years ago) and I promoted the services that I used myself, as well as some that I used through client projects.

Ryan Cleckner, GunUniversity: in-house affiliate program

Although making use of the larger affiliate companies makes finding and managing affiliates easier, we at GunUniversity.com find that the one-off in-house affiliate programs convert better and are generally more fruitful for us.

This is often because a company that runs its own affiliate program is more invested in its success and we are likely to have better alignment over adding sources from a list. If the topic or product is ripe for searches, we see results immediately at about the $200/month range.

Dylan Gordon, FunnelWays: test and promote products

Recurring affiliate programs are great for many reasons. They provide some consistency and help you prepare for the future! Every recurring offer I promote is 100% digital, and they are typically SaaS products (Software as a Service). When I find a product I want to promote, this is usually where I look.

I'll test a product out, see it it's a GREAT product, and then I promote it to my audience! My favorite way of promoting recurring affiliate products is targeting long-tail keywords and optimizing for search, since those are the warmest leads. It has a high payoff with time but takes a little while to get started!

My favorite program is ClickFunnels, since they have passive up-sells along the way.

Dylan Gordon is a content marketer and founder of FunnelWays https://funnelways.com: the ultimate sales funnel resource.

James Canzanella, Isolated Marketing Nights: build sales funnels

As an affiliate marketer, the majority of my income comes from recommending software to other online business owners, and the best part about software is that it usually comes along with a recurring/passive income. One of my favorite tools to recommend would be ClickFunnels, which is a tool that I currently use to build sales funnels and landing pages.

Not only has the software made me money, but it's become fairly simple to recommend based upon its popularity and just how simple of a platform it is to use. I first started promoting it a few years back, and quickly became profitable thanks to many low-cost traffic strategies that I used to. Since then, I've generated well over 6 figures in sales revenue for the company.

James Canzanella is the owner of Isolated Marketing Nights, a website dedicated to helping you build and grow your online business by utilizing software.