Residual Income Opportunites ~ Internet Income Business Opportunities

Are looking for a long term residual income opportunity? If so, affiliate marketing may be the the fastest way for you to start making money online. With affiliate marketing, you won't need to worry about producing a product to sell. All you need to have is a website with enough complimentary content to the products of the merchants offering commissions for sales. By becoming an associate of the program, you can start generating an online income less than 24 hours!

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 08: Paul Costiglio, a mar...

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Associate marketing is some sort of business relationship established between a merchant and his affiliates. In associate marketing, an associate agrees to promote a merchant's products. If that traffic that is sent to the merchant's website is converted into some kind of action, like a visitor purchasing a product on the merchant's website or a visitor becoming a lead for the company, the associate who generated the sale will be compensated. Commission may take the form of either a percentage sales commission for the sales produced or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the associate on the company's affiliate program.

Promising a lot of benefits both for the merchants and the affiliates, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular online marketing methods today. In fact, almost every online business or retailer site today offers an associate program. Most retailers recruit marketers to become affiliates or members of their program by offering great benefits like large commissions, lifetime commissions, get paid per click incomes and a lot of other rewards. But do all these affiliate programs bring off the same income opportunities?

A great deal of affiliate programs pay you, as an associate, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you bring to the company's website. Payments for this kind of associate program are usually large, ranging from 25% to about 50%. Other affiliate programs pay you a set fee for customer or traffic you send to the company's site. Associate programs like this often pay a smaller income for every click through, usually not getting any larger than half a dollar. The good thing about this kind of partnership, however, is that the visitor won't have to purchase anything in order for the affiliate to make a commission.

An alternative type of referral program offers a residual income opportunities. Residual affiliate programs usually pay only a small amount of sales commission for every sale directed by the associate to the company's site. This often comes only in the range of 5% to 33% sales commission. Because of this, many people don't join residual affiliate programs and would rather join the high yielding one-time commission affiliate program. Are these people leaving money on the table, or are they making the right decision?

We can't tell, for sure, if people are making the right decision by opting for a high paying one-time commission affiliate program. But we can honestly say that they are making a large mistake if they don't join residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs pay less per sale, but merchants offering such kind of partnerships would generally pay you regular and ongoing commissions for a single affiliate initiated sale! That means, for the same effort you made in promoting a particular referral program, you make money only once in a one-time commission program, and a regular and ongoing income for a residual program!

So, are residual associate programs worth promoting? Definitely yes, because you can earn more commission from these types of associate programs in the long run! So what type of affiliate program should you join? It is not really for me to tell. But with the recurring income that residual affiliate programs can provide, it would a mistake to stay away from these type of residual income opportunities.