Public Speaker Marketing - Selling With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs allow you to make money by recommending other people’s products. You get a commission if someone buys something. These programs also allow you to have an army of commissioned salespeople selling your stuff around the world and you don’t pay them anything unless they sell something.



There are basically two ways to make money with associate / affiliate programs:

1. You put other people's links on your site, or in your ezine. When someone clicks from your site or ezine to the other site and buys something, you get a commission. You can even tell someone about the link, or put the link in printed material. When they visit the link and buy something you still get a commission. It costs nothing to participate in such a program.



2. You purchase tracking software and have other people putting your links on their sites. When someone clicks from their site to yours and purchases something, you owe them a commission, which the software tracks for you. This software goes from free to many thousands of dollars. If you have the http://www.KickStartCart.com integrated shopping cart system, it includes top-notch affiliate software.



The most famous associate program is Amazon.com. You put a link on your site and then you make money when people click through to buy things. If you go looking around websites, you’ll see a lot of people who are selling books for Amazon.com, the big online bookseller, by putting a banner on their website. You could put a banner on your website and if someone bought a book by clicking through that link to Amazon, you’d get a commission on it.



Amazon is getting a whole bunch of people selling books for them. But we don’t recommend using Amazons’ or any of the many lesser known programs because they give you such a lousy commission. You’re getting somebody to click out of your site for maybe a buck or a buck and a half and the affiliate won’t even pay you until your commission reaches a certain level. It could be six months later. So hold out for the ones that pay good money.



You can also get your own software that will allow you to recruit associates to sell your products. If anyone wants to put your links on their site, there’s a sophisticated tracking program to monitor when someone clicks through from their site, and to notify you of such an occurrence.



Affiliate Fraud Tip: If you have your own associate program you may want to consider paying your affiliates using the online payment program http://www.PayPal.com.