Should My Recurring Membership Site Have An Affiliate Program?

In case you don’t know, an affiliate program is a system where somebody can refer new buyers to you. The reason they would do this is because you give them a percentage, a commission of the total sale. So if you are selling a $20 e-book and you give 50% commission then when somebody refers a new customer to you, you keep $10 and give the remaining $10 to that affiliate who referred the new customer. That sounds great but should your monthly membership site offer a commission and should it offer commission one time or throughout the life of that subscriber?

We need to have affiliate program for many reasons and the big one is that it’s tough to get extra members after your initial launch. You’re probably working very hard diligently adding new content, rearranging the membership site, reminding people to come back and participate who has time to get new members, to get fresh blood into that membership site?

Instead of trying to market the membership site yourself, give affiliates all the tools they need to market it like banners, ads [01:25 inaudible] an email and set them loose to send to their list to make blog post, to make forum post, to refer traffic and new buyers your way so that they can collect some commission.

A way to get affiliates really excited about promoting you is offering recurring commissions. You can set this up anyway you want but the old way of doing an affiliate program for membership sites is only paying for the first month. So if you had a $20 per month membership site and an affiliate send traffic the old way would be to give that affiliate $10 upfront for the new sale and that was it.

But a slightly newer concept is recurring commissions. What you can do is offer 50% commissions throughout the lifetime of that customer. So if an affiliate refers a new buyer for $20 a month then every single month that member stays in your site, you’re going to mail off $10 to that affiliate each and every month.

It’s very attractive as long as the percentage is high enough. I’ve promoted membership sites as an affiliate where the person offered say 60% for the first month but only 20% for recurring payments. I’d have a nice payday upfront but then every month I only get about $2 per subscriber I purchase so it was almost not even worth reading the email that told me the money had come in.

But if I had been given the 60% commission for that same program, I might have promoted it more than once or I might have promoted it over a longer period of time and with all affiliate programs, just remember that even if you give away most of the commission that is an extra sale you would not have had otherwise. That is a new lead in your opt-in list that you can now upsell or market to other offers that you would not have had before.

Now that you have this affiliate sites set up, where do you get people to promote it? Other than going out, getting joint ventures, making new connections look towards your existing members. People who like your membership site make it easy for them to recommend your site to others and collect affiliate commission for doing so.

Should your membership site have an affiliate program? Yes, because you don’t always have the time to market your membership site after you initially launch. Offer recurring commissions if possible and get your existing members to recommend you to others.