You know how I told you that you could sell other people’s stuff in Chapter 8? Well this is the other way round. You get others to sell your stuff. This means becoming a merchant and finding affiliates to perform affiliate marketing of your product.

Remember I told you about middlemen websites that let you browse merchants, sign up with the ones you like and pay out in one go? You can’t use these if you want to be a merchant. The reasons why are:

• They have too high quality control procedures.
• They require your site to have:
  • no adverts
  • no direct contact information
  • no affiliate links to any other site
  • no links that take you anywhere other than your site.

This is in breach of what I tell you to do all the way through this book. The reason for the disparity is because these middlemen want sites that are attractive to affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketers do not want to send visitors to a site, where the visitor can easily click away from the site, but the site gets paid by pay per click or affiliate links. Nor do they want the visitor to go direct to the contacts page and make a sale direct, thus cutting the affiliate out of the sale. Nor do they want it to be easy for the visitor to leave the site because they want you to stay on the site for as long as possible as you will be more likely to buy.

This is why the sites I recommend you create are affiliate unfriendly for these middlemen. However creating an affiliate program that cuts out the middlemen is attractive as you will get the smaller, less fussy websites marketing your site because it’s very relevant to theirs. Only once you get to a certain level (say turnover £5m) should you consider grooming your site for these middlemen sites or creating an ‘affiliate friendly’ site alongside your own site for the middlemen websites to market.

Setting up an affiliate program

In the website creator I’ve told you to use there is a section called ‘e-commerce’. Click on that and then go to ‘your affiliates’, then ‘configuration’ and then ‘edit configuration now’.

You will be prompted for level 1 commission, level 2 commission and the affiliate home page. Let me tell you about these.

Level 1 commission

This is the commission you pay someone if they make a direct sale from promoting your product. So if you sell something for £100 and you set level 1 commission at 80% then the affiliate will earn £80 for every sale you make that has been referred by them. I like to pay out highly on level 1 as it encourages affiliates to market your product. I mean think about it - would you prefer to market a product that returns you £80 per sale or £8? So try to tempt them in this way and this will get you more visitors to your site and possibly more subscribers to your newsletter.

Level 2 commission

This is the commission you pay someone who has referred you someone who is going to sell your products. In other words you have referred a referrer! Then level 2 commission is the percentage of the referrer’s commission payable to you. I set this at 10%. So for example if Joe had a site with my affiliate link and I was paying 80% on level 1 and 10% on level 2, and Rob clicked through Joe’s link, signed up as an affiliate to my site and Rob made some sales resulting in £800 commission then Joe would be entitled to £80. This is because Joe is entitled to 10% of whatever Rob earns in commission.

The beauty of this is that you may recruit an affiliate who is good at recruiting affiliates only and is just happy to receive the level 2 commission rather than rely on level 1 commission. Then you can have affiliates recruiting armies of affiliates with these level 2 affiliates sitting back while their sub affiliates do all the hard work. This is another way some people have made serious money.

Affiliates home page

This is a page that you need to create. It is where the affiliate goes to once they have signed up (I will tell you how to set up an affiliate sign up further down). This page should be focused only on how to help the affiliate market your product or service. The way to create this page is best shown by way of example. Here’s how I help my affiliates promote my products and services.

Text links

I give my affiliates suggested text links to include on their website and then tell them to embed their affiliate link into the text link. So the text links I suggest are:

So think of some punchy text links that are eye catching and explain your product or service in very few words. Then tell them to embed their affiliate link into the text link.

Adverts

Some affiliates may want to include a whole load of text about your site so they would want a mini advert/article to put on their site. So give it to them on a plate! The adverts I offer my affiliates look like this:

This advert lets them know that:

• I’m credible because I’ve written ten books on property investment.
• You can start with as little as £500.
• The information is free.
• You get a tenancy agreement for free.
• They have made some money out of what I had taught.

This advert informs the reader that my site has a high number of subscribers and there are plenty of like-minded investors’ opinions on my site for them to browse. I also highlight the live chat facility which almost all property websites do not have.

Again this advert reinforces my credibility because I have written some books on the subject of property investment and that they have followed my advice and profited from this.

This advert tried to identify with the reader’s pain of going to work with the hope of triggering with the reader some kind of empathy. It also hinted that you could find your true dream job from joining up to this email series.

So write something that’s like an advert or an article which highlights the benefits and features of your products or services.

Banner advertising

I give them graphical banners I create in MS Paint. If you have a bit of graphical know how then consider creating a banner that is eye-catching. I have to admit the internet is becoming immune to banner advertising, but some affiliates still swear by them so try to give them a banner or banners to download. I use this one:

and link it to my www.powerseries.org website.

Article advertising

Some affiliates like articles to put on their site. So write a punchy, attractive article that gives the reader a lot of information and tips rather than writing it as a sales pitch. The article I offer my affiliates reads like this.

Further marketing ideas for your affiliates

Apart from the ideas above you could suggest some other ideas on promotion depending on your product or service. Some of these below may or may not be applicable.

Type	Description
Newspapers	Place ads in free newspapers and magazines, local papers, tabloids and broadsheets. Classified sections would be a good place to put them as it will be cheap.
Email	Send an email to your friends list, work group list, your subscriber database or any other list you have. You could also tag it on to the end of every email message you send. Use the newspaper advert examples above. Please note: Do not spam. If you do not know the person and you’ve just got the email from a website then do not send as the email will get reported as spam and will not get through.
Website	Create a website and use your number and affiliate link as the only contact.
In person	Tell your friends, family, business contacts, work collegues, people on the street and whoever you come in contact with! You could get flyers made and hand them out or post them through people’s letterboxes. If you’re a member of a club you could give out these flyers to all the members or place a well positioned poster on the notice board.
Split your commission	You could offer to split this with another introducer. This could be anyone you know, a shopkeeper or simply someone you know who knows a lot of people. As long as you track the people they introduce there should be no problem in paying out commissions.
Post message on online forums	You can mention my services on money making or property forums and informally tell them about my services. You could also add at the bottom of your messages the newspaper adverts mentioned above to generate interest.

So use all of the above information from text links, adverts, banner advertising, article advertising and further ideas form the affiliate home page to which you make the landing page after an affiliate signs up. This way they can get straight in to promoting your products and services because you’ve given them the tools to do so.

Adding an affiliate sign up page to your site

When in the website creator go to:

• 1.‘Website’, then ‘edit page’ then add a new normal page and call it ‘affiliates’.
• 2.Then write a sales pitch about becoming an affiliate. If you want ideas then look at my page at http://www.phfinance.co.uk/makelb10k-per-month.html.
• 3.Then write ‘sign up now’ or something like that on the page, highlight it and then click on the link logo that looks like °°.
• 4.Then click on the link that says ‘link to new affiliate form’.
• 5.Then the ‘sign up now’ text will be a hyper link to a sign up form which potential affiliates can click on to and sign up.
• 6.Then click on ‘save page>>>’.
• 7.Then create another page of ‘affiliate panel’ type and call it ‘affiliate login’.
• 8.Then click on ‘save page>>>’.

You now have an affiliate sales page which convinces potential affiliates to sign up, a sign up page hyperlinked to the phrase ‘sign up now’ and a log in page where affiliates can check their stats and performance of how well they are selling your goods.

That’s all you need to do to create a system where visitors can come to your site and start selling your stuff automatically.

My final thoughts

What I have talked about in this book has taken me two years to learn. If I were to split the time between researching and actual learning time I would say I have spent half my time finding out what to do and the other half teaching myself how to do it. If you are truly determined to make money on the internet and you are starting as a complete novice then you can start making serious money by year one. If you’ve got a bit of experience with using online software then I reckon you cut that time down to one month if you work at it and are not afraid of trying out new things and changing the model when it’s not working.

The internet is moving and growing at such a fast pace that there is new technology coming out that is making routine tasks easier and easier. It’s applying these technologies that benefit others that makes money. I wish you every success with your projects. I know that if you’ve bought this book you’re ahead of 95% of people. One day we will all be on the net and we will all have our own websites, just like mobile phones, but at the minute the market is wide open for some of us…to make a whole load of cash!

                                                                                      Good luck.