Sell Other People’s Stuff

Affiliate Marketing

If you sell other people’s stuff on the internet without any purchase of the physical product or service, no order fulfilment, no liability and no stock holding then you are both considered an affiliate. They are an affiliate to you (a merchant affiliate) and you are an affiliate to them (an advertiser affiliate). This is one of the most effective ways of making money on the internet and was the real trigger for me to see how easy it could be to make a lot of money very easily. There is very little for you to do other than market your affiliates hence the naming of this emerging industry of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you, the website owner, sell products and services of companies you have decided to affiliate with (partner up in other words) in return for a commission.

The reason why this industry has exploded over the last five years is because the whole process can be automated. To become a reseller of someone’s goods or services in the past required an initial phone call, a few meetings, a draft contract and then a final contract agreeing the terms and conditions. This cost a lot of time and money in lost productivity and professional fees. Today you can affiliate with some of the big high street names like Comet, John Lewis, Woolworths, Lloyds TSB, etc with just a few clicks - honest!

How It Works

These are the basics.

To try to think of this visually: think of your website as a market stall. You have approached the Vodafone shop at the other side of the town to introduce potential customers for them and they said they will pay you £20 for every new customer who buys a phone. To identify your introductions they give you this pen which makes an invisible mark on people’s clothing but can be seen by a Vodafone’s special lighting. Your pen colour is unique so that if a person comes in their shop with your ink on their clothing and buys then Vodafone will send you a cheque for £20 because the sale is traceable back to you.

Now this is occurring like mad all over the internet. Your internet persona is probably covered all over in this invisible ink and you have no idea! There are affiliate marketers out there that have enticed you onto their site because they promise independent reviews of products (such as Which), promised to tell you where to get the best price (such as Kelkoo) or simply because you log in to your email on this page and something caught your eye and you clicked through (such as MSN). All these companies employ affiliate marketing tactics and are making a nice little income off your back!

So it’s down to you to get some income yourself. I know exactly where to go to get affiliated with the biggest and widest choice of affiliates and only require one sign up. These websites are like middlemen to the people who wish to market the goods and services and the companies looking for people who they want to market their goods and services.

Visually it looks like this:

It’s a big market place hosted by these middlemen where you can pick and choose who to be affiliated with.

The Three Commission Types Offered By These Middlemen Websites

The three types of commission you can earn from being an affiliate marketer are:

1. Pay Per Click

Once you have obtained your unique link from these middlemen websites they will record how many clicks you receive on a daily basis. They will check that they are valid clicks to prevent click fraud (i.e. someone repeatedly clicking on your link) and will pay over whatever the agreed amount is per click.

So if you have this link on your website, and the agreed amount is 50p per click and you get ten visitors a day clicking on this link you will earn 10 × 50p = £5 per day. I will teach you how to get your affiliate links clicked further in the chapter, but I hope you can see that simply having a website with affiliate links can really deliver you a nice passive income. I mean, just imagine if you had 1,000 visitors a day clicking that link. That’s £500 a day and trust me there are website owners out there who are making that and more from just one pay per click affiliate link.