When you are earning an income via an affiliate marketing program, why allow the commissions to stop after one sale? How about a program that provides commissions over the lifetime of an active customer?

A passive and recurring affiliate commission from a single referral is one of the easiest ways to earn money for months, and even years, to come.

Finding Recurring Affiliate Commission Programs

There are many merchants that offer a compensation system based on subsequent sales, subscriptions, and upgrades that allow you to keep making money after the first commission.

Of course, the type of vendor you are publishing links for will determine the type of commission plan in place. For instance, an online dating service is a good example of a merchant who might offer a recurring affiliate commission program. Your referral initially signs up for a limited time subscription but if they keep renewing, you should be able to earn subsequent commissions.

There are many other service vendors who may provide the same such as ongoing training providers, membership sites, clubs, advertising agencies, software developers, and some website hosting companies.

Others Forms of Recurring Affiliate Commissions

Not only service providers offer a recurring affiliate commission scheme. There are other ways of creating passive income through online marketing.

One way to keep the money coming in is to write articles for an online aggregation site, such as Associated Content or Helium. You write one article, promote it heavily, and receive a commission based on number of hits over the lifetime of its online availability. Write on a popular topic and keep it fresh by submitting to social bookmarking sites over time. Remember to post links to the article on your website or blog and through your social media accounts, too.

Joint ventures, outside of affiliate marketing programs, are another way to augment recurring income. Create a partnership with a non-competing niche company and negotiate a deal that allows you to share a percentage of all current and future sales that result from your promotional efforts.

Review sites often offer recurring affiliate commissions, too. You are paid for writing product reviews about a particular product or service on your site. Sometimes you are required to write the review; at other times you merely have post the review with a link to the merchant site.

Don’t let your affiliate marketing efforts go to waste. Do some research and find companies that allow you to keep making passive income for an unlimited period of time through a recurring affiliate commission structure. With enough of these programs in place, you might never have to work at trading your time for dollars again!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012