Their thinking is simple. One time sale merchants could provide a commission of 20 -75% instead of residual sale merchants who provide a percentage of 10-25. That happened in the past. Today many Residual affiliate programs have commissions up to 50% whether they are membership sites or monthly services. So, the profits are extremely good and ongoing, as long as the client remains active and don't cancel.

Monthly commissions provide more safety for the affiliate marketer even if the one time sale product is hot. That happens because the one time hot products will come to the saturation point. Therefore the commissions will be decreased. On the other hand residual commissions will still provide income to the affiliate.

The critical step for residual income success is the selecting of the appropriate residual affiliate program. Since it has monthly cost for the client it must provide extremely valuable content or services, otherwise the client's cancellations will increase and a serious amount of income will be lost. The best solution is the affiliate to use the service or subscribe to the membership website because it will be easier for the affiliate to promote the residual affiliate program since he or she will be more convincing and consequently succeed more sales.

Another important step is the promotion. Joining affiliate programs of any kind will not create income. Targeted and massive online promotion will. The process must be daily following a specific marketing plan. Extremely effective online promotions are: Google Adwords, solo and top sponsor ads to ezines, submitting articles to directories, forum posts, and ethical search engine optimization. Many of the above techniques require some advertising budget- others are free but require time and more effort. Whatever the affiliate choose all these internet marketing strategies are ethical and effective if done correctly.

Finally the promotion the affiliate should avoid are the ?too good to be true? online promotion strategies. These are: guaranteed hits, fake email lists, FFA, traffic exchange programs, auto hits programs and similar ones. These website promotion techniques have very low success rate and most of them are useless.