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Affiliate Selling

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

eCommerce for beginners

Affiliate selling programs have been described as ‘making money whilst you’re asleep’. You join a scheme – free of charge – run by a major e-Commerce retailer. Then you put links on your website to their products – and when visitors to your site click through to theirs, you get a commission. It’s as simple as that. This might seem too good to be true – but the logic is quite simple. You are being paid a bonus for sending customers to somebody else’s site. Some pay a small commission [$0.01] just for passing on the visitor, others pay more [15% of the price] if the visitor actually makes a purchase.

Affiliate SellingSome people make a living from this new type of enterprise, but the majority are happy to make modest commissions which pay for their online overheads. Helmstetter and Vetivier start with a very upbeat account of web developments in the last few years, the amazing rate of change, and the fairly safe prediction that these rates will continue increasing. One of their most powerful apercues, it seemed to me, was that the rate of interconnectivity is likely to increase – and this is good news for subscribers to affiliate programs. For instance, did you know that some search engines now rate your site’s value by how many others have links to it?

Helmstetter (who seems to be lead author) outlines the different types of affiliate programs, and helpfully lists both the advantages and disadvantages of each. This will be very useful for beginners who are in the process of setting up in this new form of business.

The system works best if your site and the parent company are well matched – though it’s true that some people have constructed successful sites that are nothing more than a collection of links to various paymasters – and you can have more than one.

The good thing about the advice given here is that it explains all the options – from low-commission links, through auctions, to multi-level portals. You should have no difficulty working out which is the best one for you.

They explain very carefully how to make the best choice, point out the hidden problems, and list a huge range of resources and web sites dealing with affiliate programs. They even show you how to start up an affiliates program even if you don’t have a web site.

How can this be done? Well, you either use email, ready-made web page templates, or assemble collections of clips (recommended URLs, containing your code) which you offer for others to use. You can also establish a ‘virtual storefront’. These are ready-made web sites which will set you up in e-Commerce within a few minutes. Basically, you customise the pages with products and advertising of your own choosing – though the companies which promote these services will even provide you with sample products.

What makes this book so good is that the sort of people it is aimed at will surely welcome this hands-on, step-by-step approach, with a minimum of technicalities and jargon. There is even a chapter on how and where to position items on a page in order to maximise click-through rate, and like the rest it is offered in a non-dogmatic manner. In fact they repeatedly encourage affiliates to ‘stop fretting, and give things a try’ – on the basis that you should experiment and test before committing to a major strategy.

This is certainly the most thorough and comprehensive book on the subject of affiliate programmes I have seen to date. Read it, spend no more than a couple of hours at the keyboard following their advice – and you could launch yourself into successful e-commerce.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Affiliate Selling   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Affiliate Selling   Buy the book at Amazon US


Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier, Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web, New York/London: John Wiley, 2000, pp.346, ISBN: 0471381861


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Business, e-Commerce

Amazon Hacks

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

This book tells you how to get information from Amazon; how to contribute reviews, recommendation lists, and product advice; how to sell stuff; how to make money as an affiliate; and how to harness the power of Amazon’s enormous database using tools they will provide – all for free! There are now lots of opportunities to sell, auction, and broker goods at Amazon. It’s like being in eCommerce with all the headaches taken out.

Amazon Hacks Paul Bausch tells you how to do it – using Amazon’s marketplace and Zshops systems. The first part is about how to use and make contributions to the ‘Amazon community’ – how to submit book reviews, make reading suggestion lists, and send gifts to your friends. All of this can be done straight away, with no waiting or steep learning curves. The second part is how to sell through Amazon – which you can do by marketing what you have, or finding out what other people want. And this is either by straight sales or by auctions.

Next comes the affiliates programme, whereby you get a commission for every customer you send to Amazon – so long as they make a purchase. Some people have established full time jobs on the strength of this scheme. It’s fairly simple, and all the steps are explained.

The last part of the book is an account of Amazon Web Services. These are free advanced tools and programs they offer for data recovery – XML, PHP, XSLT, databases, and SOAP. All the coding necessary for embracing these hacks is included.

Because Amazon lists everything about you – the books, CDs, or whatever you have bought or wish to sell – and because they allow you access to this information – you can even call up listings of products onto your own web site. This includes both what you want to sell, but it can also include lists of what other people want to buy.

Amazon are exploring innovations in eCommerce, even making their databases available to potential competitors. I suspect that anyone who follows all the opportunities offered here could make profits from these new departures.

If there is one small drawback, it’s that he doesn’t discuss the criticisms which many affiliates level against Amazon. They seem to offer more and more opportunities, yet squeeze the bonuses tighter and tighter. It’s a cat and mouse world where clever entrepreneurs have to stay one step ahead of the game. But at least you can try it all out for free!

This is a book which will appeal to Amazon users, anyone who deals in books, music, and all the other products which Amazon retails – and in particular those who would like to join Amazon affiliates and need help in getting set up.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Amazon Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Amazon Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon US


Paul Bausch, Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, Sebastapol CA: O’Reilly, 2003, pp.280, ISBN: 0596005423


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Technology Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Amazon, Business, e-Commerce, Technology

Associate and Affiliate Programs

June 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guide to ‘making money whilst you’re asleep’

Associate and affiliate programs are a new form of e-commerce in which you don’t have to sell anything. How does it work then? Well, you put links on your website which send visitors to the site of a major player such as Amazon, Fatbrain, or CD-NOW. If the visitor buys something, you get a small percentage – between five and twenty percent. As Daniel Gray puts it in this cheap and cheerful guide to the subject – ‘Affiliate marketing is a way to be paid for wearing a T-shirt with a logo’.

Associate and Affiliate ProgramsBut although most affiliate programs pay only a small percentage, it’s a quick and easy way to put some hard cash in your pocket with a little effort and no risk at all. Dan Gray even makes money from a site which specialises in DIY garden sheds! This quirkiness is reflected in the way he writes – jumping from one metaphor to another. But he knows his stuff on how the schemes work.

He offers sound advice on the technicalities of submitting to search engines and interpreting log files. I expected him to say a little more on the issue of how much comes in each month, but he does reveal that books are the best sellers; conversion rates of one percent are normal; and he offers an analysis of sites which have blossomed using affiliate programs – CD-NOW, Amazon, BarnesandNoble, and the BabyCenter.

The latter part of the book is devoted to what he calls the Top100 Directory. This is a very useful listing all those companies operating an affiliates program, with full details of how to contact them, what conditions apply, and how much they pay out. On some programs you can even buy through your own links. If you are going to buy that CD anyway, why not get another 20% off the discounted price? But beware! Amazon for instance don’t allow this and might kick you off its list for infringements.

This isn’t an in-depth view of associate programs, but there’s enough information here to get you started. Click through to Amazon now and order this book – then you can see how the system works 🙂

© Roy Johnson 2001

Associate and Affiliate Programs   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Associate and Affiliate Programs   Buy the book at Amazon US


Daniel Gray, Associate and Affiliate Programs on the Net: turning clicks into cash, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, pp.227, ISBN: 0071353100


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Amazon, Associate and Affiliate Programs, Business, e-Commerce

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