Affiliate Programs Earn Cash

In a Nutshell

Affiliation programs get you commissions for products sold on your site. Commissions can be a few cents to hundreds of dollars per item, and can be offered as a fixed sum per sale or per item, or as a percentage of a sale. You usually need your own site, but turnkey sites are often available from the merchants.

The Longer Version

Affiliation programs provide you with an easy way to join the ecommerce revolution. The business plan is simply –merchants provide you with links to their products which you place on your website. Every time a user clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase, your account is accredited with a certain sum of money.

Some affiliation programs offer you other incentives such as payment for an action other than a sale made by a user who arrived from your site. For example, a user fills in a contact form on the merchant's site, asking for more details, could be defined as a "lead" for which you the affiliate get your commission.

Some affiliation programs offer two-tier payment system, where you get paid a commission for every other affiliate that signs under you.

Fees vary greatly from one affiliation program to another. They can be per-sale or per-lead and they can be fixed sum per transaction or a percentage of a sale.

Most affiliation programs track sales back to you up to several weeks past the initial visit from your site. It's an important feature as many visitors don't make a purchase on the initial visit but could come back at a later date to do it.

There are several large affiliation networks where you can join literally thousands of affiliate programs and get paid in one check from the network as you accumulate enough money. Those include Commission Junction, Shareasale.com and LinkShare.com.

What Do You Need?

Depending on your skills at web design and web development, you may need to buy a turnkey website to launch your affiliation site from. These are often sold for under $100 at eBay and on webmasters forums.

So... How Much will I Make?

A successful affiliate site that has been promoted well is likely to bring in a few hundreds of dollars a month.