In my experience, many affiliates take an extremely narrow view of their business, and focus all their efforts on selling a very limited number of products into an equally limited number of markets. For example, the vast majority of people who decide to sell digital products as affiliates will only utilize the services of sites like Clickbank and PayDotCom, without looking any further for other opportunities. This is not only narrow-minded, but it also inevitably limits the earning power of such affiliates, whilst ensuring that they are always working at 110% of capacity! For example, if you are selling a standard Clickbank product, then every sale is a great boost but, nevertheless, in order to remain profitable you must keep finding brand new customers every day. Thus it is inevitable in this situation that there will be times when sales figures are good, but there will also be down times, when the income you will be generating will be significantly reduced. For most people, this would not be an ideal situation and yet this is exactly what the overwhelming majority of affiliate marketers do on a week to week and month to month basis.
Wouldn’t it be much more comfortable and far simpler if you knew that there was income coming in from your affiliate sales every month, irrespective of how many new sales you generated? This is exactly will happen if you promote membership style affiliate programs, as well as ‘one-time sales’ programs. You simply promote affiliate programs where the member has to pay a monthly fee to the site which they have joined. You then receive a percentage of the membership fee for each and every month that they remain a member of the site. For example, this is a fairly common arrangement used by web hosting companies to promote their services. You affiliate with a particular web host, promote their services, and for anybody who joins through your promotional link, you will receive a monthly commission share whilst they still remain a member. So, imagine that you promoted an affiliate product which carried a monthly membership fee of $49 and that you were entitled to the commission of 50%.
Each and every month you will receive $24.50 for every member you have referred to the site, so 100 members would mean that you would earn $2450 per month even before you get out of your bed! Now this is not meant to encourage you to be lazy, but it does ensure that every month your business has some cash flow from which you can pay your necessary outgoings, such as web hosting and autoresponder fees, staff salaries and the like. I would therefore strongly urge you to look at residual income affiliate programs as well as those available through Clickbank and PayDotCom. Here is a short list of directories where you can find a broad cross-section of residual income affiliate programs:
http://www.lifetimecommissions.com/
http://www.affiliateguide.com/residual.html
http://www.nowsell.com/affiliate-marketing/residual-income-affiliate-programs.html
http://www.residualincomefinder.com/
You can also find some residual income affiliate programs that are now promoted through Clickbank itself as well… Hope this helped you figure out what to sell and motivate you to get to work!