affiliate_website_earningsOne of the most common questions beginner affiliate marketers ask centers around what expectations they should have about their affiliate website earnings. In short:

Is affiliate income residual?

The short answer: Yes.

Affiliate marketing is a valid type of passive income that will pay you residual earnings for months and years after you’ve published your site.

In this post I’ll talk a little bit more about what to expect from those earnings.

How Affiliate Website Earnings Work

The basics of affiliate revenue are quite simple: companies pay you sales commissions when you refer them customers.

What isn’t always obvious is why that affiliate income is residual. It sounds like a one to one relationship: referral = commission.

While that half of the formula isn’t always recurring – though it can be if you’re selling a subscription product – the truly passive element comes into play with how your website delivers those referrals.

Affiliate marketing is essentially a “hands off” sales process.

You produce content once, and it has the possibility of ranking in the search engines for years. That means that a single article can keep referring new sales every month for as long as you have the site.

That means that regardless of whether the actual commission per sale is residual, your affiliate website earning will be.

The Devil Is In The Details

If this sounds too good to be true, trust me, it isn’t. There’s a lot more to affiliate marketing than simply throwing up a website with a handful of articles and hoping you’ll earn some affiliate commissions.

There is a clear and proven process centered around why affiliate marketing works and how to set your site up so that it has a realistic chance of earning you a solid income.

If you’re still new to affiliate marketing and aren’t yet sure how, exactly, to do that, your best bet is to pick a training course and stick with that method all the way to the end.

My recommendation is that you take advantage of these free classes, which will get you started and show you the ropes.

Affiliate marketing is a real and viable way to earn stable income in your spare time. You just have to take action in order to succeed!