One of the smartest ways of starting an online business is to promote affiliate programs that pay you recurring commissions. Even though many new online entrepreneurs have heard of internet marketing and affiliate marketing, they do not fully understand what the term Recurring or Residual Income means.

Residual Income, also called Recurring Income, refers to income that you receive over and over again...month after month, year after year.

With regard to Affiliate Marketing, choosing to promote affiliate programs that offer to pay you commissions on a recurring or residual basis is a very clever thing to do. Why? Because you work only once to secure a recruit or referral to the program, and yet you get paid repeatedly (usually every month) for as long as the person you recruited stays in the program.

Joining affiliate programs and promoting the products or services of online merchants is one of the easiest and cheapest ways of earning an income online. All you have to do is to build a simple, good, search engine-friendly website that can bring in a lot of traffic to your site.

You provide information for visitors to your website to have the opportunity to learn about the affiliate programs promoted by you. When they click on the links you have provided and visit the vendors' websites and, hopefully, make a purchase or join the program, then you earn a commission. In most instances this will be a one time payment to you.

Usually, this will be a one-time payment to you for there are thousands of affiliate programs on the internet that do not provide an opportunity to earn a residual or recurring income. They pay you once only, and that would be all the money you get for your efforts. You MUST avoid such affiliate programs whenever possible.

You MUST always, whenever possible, go for affiliate programs that offer recurring or residual commissions. You have to do some research on the internet to find good affiliate programs that pay residual or recurring commissions, then join as many of them as possible.

Try to work smart and choose a good residual income affiliate programs that can pay you good money for several months and years to come. You can add other similar programs as time passes, in order to have multiple streams of income. This will bring you a lot more money that you would have earned if you had promoted a program that pays a one-time commission only.

Residual or Recurring Income is an income that keeps coming in around the clock, month after month, and year after year. It is a never-ending income that keeps on coming in regularly. It can be compared with the royalties that writers or authors of books and musicians get paid forever after they write a book or record a song.

The reason why you should choose affiliate programs that pay residual or recurring commissions is that once you have put in your initial efforts and done the work only once to create that income, such as enrolling a member who pays a monthly subscription or purchases products, then your work is done for good. On top of this, your total residual income will keep growing steadily each month as you concentrate on recruiting more people into the program.