The basic principle of affiliate marketing
When talking about earning money with your own website, the topic of affiliate marketing always comes up quite quickly. In this caseWebmaster (known as "publishers") refer customers (or potential customers) to commercial providers of goods or services (known as "merchants" in technical jargon). For each successful referral, there is a commission on the initial order, which usually ranges from 3 to 10% for physical products to 75% for digital products.
One-time commission is the rule - example Amazon
At the mother of all affiliate providers "Amazon", the commission ranges between 5% (less than 20 delivered items) and 9% (over 30,000 delivered items). Amazon also caps the maximum commission per delivered product at 10 euros. Amazon enjoys unbroken popularity among millions of website operators worldwide. This is not least due to the high level of trust that end customers place in Amazon. But this is not the topic here. One fact is important in this context:
Commission is only paid for the first Purchasing - Subsequent purchases remain uncommissioned!
Most companies that use affiliate marketing as a sales concept work according to this single commission principle. There is nothing wrong with this at all. Many operators of niche sites earn really good money with the Amazon affiliate program, for example. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with this, as long as the sites are run authentically.
But how much nicer would it be if I could also earn money from follow-up sales? How much nicer would it be if I could also participate in the future purchases of the customers I have acquired? Especially when we think of the much-vaunted passive income, the advantage becomes obvious. Which brings me to the supreme discipline in affiliate marketing: lifetime commissions.
The supreme discipline of lifetime commissions
As is so often the case in online marketing, the term "lifetime commission" comes from the English language and means nothing other than "commission for life". If you acquire a customer for your partner company, you will receive a commission on every euro of turnover for as long as this customer remains with the acquired company.
Lifetime commissions are rarely found in conventional retail companies. This is certainly also due to the fact that the margins in online retail are so low that many companies could not afford such a remuneration system if they wanted to remain competitive.
Lifetime commissions are therefore more common in areas where customers have to make regular monthly payments. For example, email marketing providers and providers of online billing services, SEO Toolssubscription systems, etc. Providers of sports betting, casino, poker, etc. also offer lifetime commissions, but with the special feature that it is not the turnover that is commisioned, but the so-called "earnings". More on this in later articles.
Another special form would be the commission of so-called referrals, which some companies offer as a bonus. Here you not only earn from the sales of the customers you refer yourself, but also from the sales of the customers referred by the affiliates you recruit. This exciting network component can provide even more exciting sales, provided you have contacts to interested webmasters. However, in order not to make things too complicated, I would like to leave referrals out of the equation here.
Examples of lifetime commissions
I would like to give a few examples of companies that operate on the principle of lifetime commission:
Email marketing provider Cleverreach
Cleverreach is one of the leading providers of email services in Germany. Here you can get 20% Provision Lifetime, month after month. The prices here are between 0 and 350 euros per month, depending on the tariff.
Email provider KlickTipp
Mario Wolosz goes one better with his competitor service KlickTipp. There you get a friendly 25% commission, also lifetime. At Klicktipp, a customer is worth between 27 and 67 euros (monthly). If you serve the right target group, you'll certainly have good chances of earning money here, too.
SEO Tool Xovi
The SEO tool provider Xovi gives a monthly commission of 20%. If you consider that the monthly fee starts at just under 100 euros, it is just as easy to see how high the potential is here. Xovi also offers 5% on the referrals briefly outlined in the text.
A small selection of other providers
- Sistrix (10%)
- Fastbill (20% for the first year or, for 10 or more referrals, either 40% for the first year or 10% Lifetime)
- Tipico (25% on earnings plus other attractive bonuses )
- ... and, and, and ... (just do a little googling )
Earning opportunities with lifetime remuneration compared to single commissions
To start with, I'm about to do a little "milkmaid's calculation", which is simply to show the potential that Lifetime offers compared to "Onetime". For the sake of simplicity, I'm not taking into account the fact that customers will drop out again at some point. As is so often the case, it's not about concrete figures but rather about potential. Let's take 2 niche site operators. Both operators refer 10 customers per month who generate 50 euros. I take 10% as the commission, which is easy to calculate. I'll start with Webmaster A indicates which commission for the first Purchasing gets.
Earnings of Niche Operator A (One Time Provision)
Niche site operator A turns over 500 euros every month, receives 10% commission on this, making income of 50 euros per month. Calculated over a year, that's 600 euros. Nothing special, but a real value for a small niche site. Many Webmaster have dozens of such sites and are certainly not doing badly with them. The disadvantages are of course obvious. New prospective customers are constantly required in order to earn money. If a website falls in the Google Ranking the annoyance is often very high. Nothing is earned from existing customers and new customers no longer come.
Earnings of niche site operator B (lifetime commission)
Niche operator B actually does nothing much different than his colleague A. Every month he gets 50 euros commission on the new customers plus the commissions on the existing customers. In our example it looks like this:
- 1. month 50 euro
- 2nd month 50 euros + 50 euros
- 3rd month 50 euro + 100 euro
- 4th month 50 euro + 150 euro
- ...
- 12th month 50 euro +550 euro
The difference quickly becomes clear. Model B is much more dynamic. The advantage for the affiliate is that revenue does not drop even if the niche site has no or only a few visitors for whatever reason.
Conclusion
Of course, there is not always a choice between lifetime or one-time commissions. Often only one or the other is possible. However, if you are looking for promising niches, you should, in my opinion, look for interesting lifetime options
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