One of my biggest problems with affiliate marketing is that all too often I feel like I expend a ton of effort to drive users to a new company online, only to receive a one time commission, even if the customer becomes a repeat customer.
This is extremely common with e-commerce and online retail businesses, which will offer anywhere from 24-hour to 60 or 90 day tracking.
Unfortunately, tracking that is less than 30 days is the most common. Since the lifetime value of a customer has the potential to be significantly greater than the value of their first purchase, wouldn’t be nice to be able to tap into all of their future sales?
Well guess what: you can.
How It Works
Lifetime affiliate commissions are just what they sound like. When you refer a new customer through your affiliate link, you’ll be able to receive commissions on their purchases at any time into the future!
This means that a lifetime affiliate program can, in effect, function like a recurring subscription, in the sense that a single sale will produce dividends for years to come, though unlike a subscription program, the future earnings will be largely unpredictable.
Think of it as “pleasant surprise” earnings to increase your bottom line.
Where To Find These Programs
The problem with lifetime affiliate commissions is that programs supporting them can be hard to find. Most of the larger networks, like CJ.com or Rakuten Linkshare, are notoriously deficient in this area.
That means the best way to find these programs is to dig them up yourself for your own niche. You’ll have a better chance of finding them if you focus on online stores that have creating an account as a primary call to action (by which I mean that the store thinks the user creating an account is just as, if not more important than closing the first sale), AND those that don’t offer CPA-style fees for taking that action.
In other words, you have to be willing to defer your payout.
To give a few examples in the online marketing niche, some ones I use, and that you might want to think about are:
- AWeber
- SourceMarket
- INeedArticles
Unfortunately it’s very niche-dependent, so there’s no single resource I could send you to, but trust me that if you dig, you will find!
Access the complete list of affiliate marketing tricks here.