Affiliate programs are a great way to create residual income. For those that aren't familiar with them, they are a commission based sales system where the affiliate gets a commission for every sale that they make. For Instance if you are promoting an ebook that sells for $50 and the publisher is offering a 50% commission, then for every sale you make you will get $25.

The commission rates tend to be quite high for digital products, as there is very little cost to the publisher after the book is written. The delivery is by either a direct digital download or through an email attachment. This means that they can afford to offer a higher commission as a way of getting more affiliates to promote their products. If you promote a paper book, say from Amazon, then the commissions are much lower as they have to pay for it to be made and delivered, as well as all of the ancillary costs that are associated with with real products.

One of the best places to find digital products to sell and thus get the high commission is through Clickbank.com. They have around 11,000 products all of which are digital. This means that you have all the simplicity of selling a digital product, i.e. no physical delivery or stock to worry about, combined with a built-in affiliate program that is operated by a third party where all have to do is sign up with your Click bank name and you are automatically paid every time you sell the product, on a biweekly basis.

One of the disadvantages with being an affiliate for a single sale product such as an ebook, is that there is often no residual income associated with the sale. A residual income is one where you keep on being paid for the same sale. A good example of this is if you make a sale as an affiliate, not for an ebook, but for a subscription type of product such as a newsletter or e-zine, or for something that people pay for on a regular basis, such as a hosting service for web sites. If you have a residual income then it means that you can concentrate on finding new customers, while still being paid by the old ones. This can increase your income greatly, as with each new set of customers your monthly residual income will build ever higher.