Affilate marketing. (with a note on Christmas)

Greetings from the aftermath of the worlds most commercial holiday. I hope everyone had a good one with lots of hoarding and gluttony. But seriously Christmas is nice, I like the camaraderie between friends and family, and seeing people I haven't seen since last Christmas, but the blatant commercialism obscures any sort of religious under tones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, replacing sentimentality with greed, but I prefer to keep things a little more simple. I like the feeling I get from the day, and the long weekend, and the chance to be a bit more hedonistic, and spending time with people on one of the few days of the year when they are truly relaxed and pleased to be with me, even if only for a few hours. Its nice, I like it, and I would only wish it gone for the fact that it teaches kids how to be greedy and materialistic. If we could find a nice balance between the selflessness of giving and the pure pleasure of the whole holiday everything would be hunky dory. I propose that kids work for the entire month of December so that they can give gifts either from their own pocket or from their own ingenuity. That way they'd get the chance to feel true selflessness and get great gifts. Unfortunately the only way this would work would be if we forced them to work for December, and that would make their gift giving considerably less selfless. Oh well, whatcha gonna do?

I said a couple days ago that I would be dealing with making money from affiliate programs and even though its a couple days late I am a man of my word.
So the first thing we need is to find a good affiliate program to join. They're all free because essentially you are doing them a favour. You are literally advertising their products for them. You do the selling, they get more money, and you get commission. Its a nice, mutually beneficial relationship (something I think is absolutely necessary for any sort of business relationship).

You can find literally thousands of decent affiliate programs out there. Some are obviously better than others. Some have really shitty commission rates, some have fantastic commission. Some even have affiliate tiers (I think they call them tiers) where you can get other people to become affiliates and you get a percentage of all of their sales too (they don't make less, the merchant just ends up paying a bit more). Those are never that bad of an idea because of the residual income phenomena (I'll go into residual income streams in another post). But most programs are pretty straight forward. I'll go over a few more programmes in a later post but for now you should join clickbank and commission junction. These are the two best and most popular programmes right now.

Clickbank is one of the best because of the fact that it deals exclusively with digital products (stuff you can download immediately). A lot of people are looking on the net for instant gratification in one form or another, and if you're not into peddling porn or gambling then digital information products are the best way to go. By the way porn and gambling are very profitable if you have no moral objections. They are, however, very competitive for that very reason. So if you're clever with your marketing and don't have any objections I say go for it, try it out, then come back here and tell me what works for you.

Anyways, just go to ClickBank and get yourself signed up. It only takes a couple minutes and its absolutely free then you can start making money almost immediately. You'll be given a couple of links after you've settled on a good product (I'll go over choosing a product in another post). The top one is just the straight forward link, the bottom one is written in HTML so that you can embed it into your articles or whatnot (I'll go over this too eventually). You just copy and paste the whole thing into your text then replace the "Click Here!" with whatever you want to show up in the text. Make sure HTML is enabled or else your link will appear as is, instead of just the couple of words that you wanted. If this is at all confusing for you just go to clickbank and check it out, it should all become very clear very soon, but if not just come back here and ask your questions in the comment section. I'll answer any questions I can and if I don't know the answer I'll dig around until I find it.

Commission Junction is similar to clickbank but it serves more than just information products. Sign up is free and easy and you can literally choose just about any product you want to promote. Maybe start with stuff that you already have experiences with because it might be a little easier to sell your testimonial than a bunch of dry facts about the products.

I think I'll leave it here for now. I'll be returning, possibly later today, to talk more about the programs, how to sell, Google AdWords, writing articles, opt-in lists, link cloaking, how to choose good products, a few "secrets" that the gurus don't want you to know (at least not for free) and any old stray bit of info that comes to me as I'm writing.

I'll leave you with this thought: affiliate marketing is the only thing that I have come across that can make anyone a heap of money with little or no monetary investment, and that can be profitable the very first day you start. I think that if you are doing things without having any sort of monetary investment, like I'm doing, then it might take a bit longer, but it will still work, and probably faster than 90% of your other options.

If you want to be free of the burdens and worries of money this is a great place to start.