When you are spending time driving traffic to a website, how much do you earn from each visitor over time?

Are you concentrating on a one time sale or are you looking to build residual income streams?

Smart marketers have residual income in their sights so they can earn time and time again from the same website visitors.

One of the best ways to earn residual income is through the use of membership sites.

There are two different ways to use membership sites for residual income ? your own membership site or promoting a membership site with an affiliate program.

Owning your own membership site means that you earn from each and every member that becomes part of your site. You can grow your site as big as you want to and drive more traffic each and every month.

If you choose an autoresponder based membership site, you can be almost completely hands off with your members. They?ll receive new lessons each month or each week and you?ll be able to collect their monthly membership fees.

If you have a lot of knowledge in a particular niche and are experienced with developing content, this can be a great model for you to follow.

You?ll be able to become an authority in your niche. Your presence with a membership site can actually open doors in the future for joint venture partnerships and other opportunities.

On the other hand, developing your own membership site is a lot of work compared to promoting someone else?s site. When you become an affiliate of a membership site, you still get to earn residual income from the people who become part of the site.

However, you don?t have to deal with all the hassles associated with establishing your own site.

You won?t have to worry about finding a niche and making sure that it is profitable, because the membership site creator will have taken care of all of that for you.

You won?t have to find outlets for new content each month or deal with customer support issues.

You won?t have to arrange all of the technical details of working on a membership site, like making sure there is a password protected area for members only and preventing content theft. All you are in charge of is driving traffic to the sales page and using your affiliate link.

In addition to promoting the membership site, you can also promote other products within the niche. Not all of your prospects will be interested in buying into a membership site, but they may have use for other products that you are promoting. No matter what the needs of the people in your niche are, you can be sure to make affiliate income off of their purchases by presenting several different affiliate offers.

The residual income from a membership site can be just one small piece of the puzzle when it comes to your online income. Clearly, there are many benefits to being an affiliate of a membership site, rather than starting one yourself.