This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com
It is based on what I learned from a chat session about the book Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web with the authors, Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier. You can read the edited transcript of that session at www.samizdat.com/chat130.html
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Do you have a Web site? It doesn't matter whether it's a business site or a personal one, whether you run it on your own server or hosted somewhere else, whether you have your own domain name or you run it on free Web space. If you get any kind of traffic to your site, even as low as 500 page views a month, chances are good that you are leaving money on the table without realizing it -- not big money -- but money is money.
By signing up for affiliate programs and adding special affiliate links from your pages to sites you know and respect and to which you might already have plain ordinary links, you could generate a steady trickle of cash.
Amazon was the first to set up a large, successful, affiliate program on the Web. You link to their site or to particular items for sale at their site. And when people who click to there from your site buy, you earn referral fees that range from 5% to 15% of the sale price (up to a maximum of $10 per item).
I've been an Amazon affiliate for about four years now. I'm also an obsessive reader and have lots of content at my site related to books and lots of links to Amazon. I get about 80,000 page views per month, and last month 1101 unique visitors clicked through from my site to Amazon. That amounted to 1755 total click throughs, 39 items ordered, and 49 items shipped that month, amounting to over $1400 in revenue for Amazon. But for all that, I only wound up with $55.51 in referral fees, and it will be another three to four months before I receive a check for that. So we are definitely not talking big bucks.
But while I have been focusing exclusively on Amazon, thousands of other affiliate programs have sprung up, as well as companies that act as intermediaries, making it easy to signup for dozens of programs at a time and to keep track of many programs from a single site, rather than having to go to each and every one of them to see reports.
The terms differ widely and whether you get paid a percent of sales, or a flat rate per click through. And yes, it takes some time to sort out the details and add the appropriate links to your site. But once you create those links, there's nothing more for you to do. If people come and click, you make money.
So where do you go to learn more and sign up? First try free intermediaries like Reporting.Net,Linkshare.com, BeFree.com, and Commission Junction which is at www.cj.com.
Meanwhile, other related and possibly more lucrative kinds of business relationships are coming along. For instance, Cross Commerce is putting into place a way by which customers will be able to buy goods referenced from your site, without leaving your site. Purportedly, they'll provide a private labeled shopping carte and take care of order fulfillment and after-sale customer support, and you'll wind up with a much higher commission than with affiliate programs. The program is in closed beta now, but according to the book authors, it is due to be publicly launched this summer. Another company, Vitessa, has a similar offering.
Also consider virtual storefront providers like Affinia and Vstore. According to the book authors, such services let you choose products and arrange them in a storefront environment. They provide templates, and those pages of yours end up looking like Affinia and Vstore sites. But it's another way to generate revenue, with a minimum of hassle, and far greater revenue than you are likely to get from traditional affiliate programs.
For more information of this kind, check the chat transcript at www.samizdat.com/chat.html, or check the Web site of the book's authors at www.affiliateselling.com, or buy the book, Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web by Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier.
Please send your comments and related suggestions to seltzer@samizdat.com
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