The power of the Internet made it possible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to be able to generate some income. There are many ways to make money online, and they all vary in terms of the level of complexity, the grace periods you have to wait before you see any money, and the cost. In this article you’ll learn about one method that costs nothing and can make you money for free as an affiliate. There are several ways to make money as an affiliate, and this method explained herein is the simplest and at the same time it costs nothing to begin.
The whole idea is that you need to drag people to your affiliate link and convince them to buy this product. So first you need to sign up as an affiliate to this product and get that affiliate link of yours. There are many affiliate networks where you can sign up and get access to thousands of products that you can promote as an affiliate. The most famous of them are Amazon.com and ClickBank.com.
After you sign up to a network it’s time to pick a product to promote. If you are going to stick to Amazon because it’s a well known and is highly reputable then follow these steps.
Please note: Amazon.com requires that you have a website in order to get approved. You can use a free blogger or wordpress blog on which you have some serious and valuable content. It’s better of course if you own the website, but I want this method to be totally free.
– Go to amazon.com and from the side navigation menu pick a department that interests you. This will help you with the “selling” process.
– In that department and from the same navigation menu choose to show only products with 4 stars and up under the customer review title. This will help you choose a product for your promotion that has a better chance to be sold and a lower chance to be refunded if the customer is not happy. Also it will help you build a reputation as a person who is genuine in your recommendations.
– Make sure “include out of stock” is unchecked. You don’t want to waste your time on something that doesn’t exist any more.
– This step is not necessary, but if you are living out side of the US you’d better check the “amazonglobal eligible” under “international shipping”. This will maximize your chances of making a sale no matter where your customers come from. And no this is not going to limit your choices much. I just did that while writing this article in the appliances department and got 13,595 items.
– To filter your results even further click on one of the “discount” options. You’ll need this to do your promotion.
– Pick a product that you’d buy for yourself, or even better, that you already bought and have experience with. An example from life is a wii game that we got for our daughter and her friends’ parents were interested in. I went to my amazon associate account, picked my affiliate link, wrote a review of the product and posted it on my blog together with my affiliate link and emailed a link to the blog post to them and made sales.
– Now do as I did in the step above. You have a product that you know a friend of yours is interested in, grab your affiliate link, write a review and post it on that free blog of yours that you used to sign up as an amazon associate, and email a link to your blog post to that friend and tell them in the email that you found it discounted on amazon.
So you’ll do your friends a favour by saving them some money, you’ll do yourself a favour by making some money, and you’ll do Amazon a favour by generating that sale for them.
Now relying totally on your friends to make those affiliate commissions is not really a good idea. At some point you’ll have to move on and get other people from the huge Internet community to see your blog posts and start leveraging the power of search engines. But for now you have an audience that can give you feed back about your blog posts or squidoo lenses that you generated around those products. Use this feedback to improve your “display” of your affiliate products so that when you open your “store” to the public you’ll be ready to convert your visitors into buyers.
It’s time to take it to the next level. Use Erica Stone‘s strategy for holidays shopping season affiliate commission.