The third main route to internet cash is intimately tied in with the last. Affiliate marketing flips the idea of product selling on its head.
Rather than creating your own product and making it available through Clickbank with all the perceived difficulty of making your own material, you could take the products already created by someone else and sell them for a cut of the profit.
Now, Clickbank is not the only game in town here. Amazon is a company that most are familiar with and they run an affiliate program of their own. Interestingly, they will credit you with a share of any sale made whenever you send someone in their direction. So, for example, your link may target a very specific product on Amazon but if the customer then browses the shop and buys other items, you share in the commission for those products as well.
At this point you can also get involved with other affiliate programs that “drop-ship” real, physical items to customers. The main marketplace for finding this kind of program is Commission Junction, where you will find campaigns run by end vendors for hundreds of different kinds of product. Commisssion Junction have a rating system, so be careful to stick with those with a good reputation here. In fact, the products here are so varied, that you may find exactly what you need to become a full-time online vendor of one particular kind of goods – effectively creating a standard e-commerce website. If that is your passion, CJ may be just what you need.
The biggest complaint about affiliate marketing is not that you can’t make any money, many affiliates prove that wrong every day. No, it is the idea that you do all the hard work of generating traffic and then you give your potential customers names and email addresses straight to the final vendor. For some people this is acceptable, but for others, the idea of building a list of real buyers is the main reason for generating traffic. In this case, going back to having your own products is really the way forwards.
