24 July 2009
Affiliate Marketing
Disclaimer: Friends and family may feel free to disregard this entire post. I am going to be discussing a program that I joined that involves affiliate marketing. This involves signing up to get your own People Search site, that you then advertise in hopes of getting people to use the site and purchase other items that you receive a commision from. I only say to disregard this because I don’t want you to feel that I am expecting you to sign up. This post is mainly for those others out there who have experience with this type of thing and are looking for another income stream. If you are interested, I can help get you started and understanding the program, but that’s not what I’m looking for.
Now onto the real information…
I recently signed up for a free people search website that can be found at http://www.findusfree.com/. I chose to purchase a domain name as well, but this is not a requirement of the program. This program gives you many different potential income streams depending on what you choose to take advantage of. We have all seen various websites on the internet that pay you to click links, get referrals, etc. Although this is somewhat similar, I think that the variety of ways that you can make money makes this system unique. Plus, this can be directly plugged into your current site with very little work. This is a turnkey system, but of course you are expected to do most of the work after they set you up. Work = Advertising your site and educating your referrals like crazy.
By the way, when you complete all three steps, they will automatically deposit $125 in your account. As soon as you earn $75 more, they will send you the entire $200 payment.
The first opportunities come as you complete step 1.
Step 1.
Sign up for several affiliate programs. Basically an affiliate system allows you to refer a customer to an existing online retailer. That retailer then pays you a portion of the sale. On your free search site, people can search for a person and then see the results for absolutely free. If they’d like to order a background check, look up the person’s e-mail, etc. then they would purchase that service and you would receive a portion of that purchase price.
The only catch here is that since this is absolutely free, when people visit your site, the system will only use your affiliate links 35% of the time, the rest will kept by them. So if you’re fine with that, then just use other free sites to advertise your search engine and you should see a return on your investment of nothing.
Step 2.
Sign up for a domain name and hosting. If you choose to purchase a domain name like I have (It cost me $10 for a year) and sign up for hosting service, then you will have completed step 2. This makes it much easier to advertise your site and submit it to various search engines. Since you have your own domain name, they see it as a new and different site. Since you now have a financial investment in the system, they will boost your affiliate link display to 65% of the time.
Step 3.
This step is a little more difficult to explain until you have signed up and started to get an understanding of how the system works. Basically to complete this step, you must sign up for a service for a montly fee of $29.95. This fee will ensure that your affiliate links are displayed 100% of the time that your page is viewed. Also, you will receive access to a “Secret Sauce” that is proven to increase your earnings and a few other benefits that you’ll have to review yourself once signed up.
There are even more options once you are at step 3, but I don’t want to confuse you. It takes some time to absorb all the possibilities.
It really is a bit confusing and overwhelming at first, but they have an excellent user base who regularly helps people in their forums and I will always be willing to answer questions as well. The founder of the site even holds regular conference calls where you can speak with him directly. That is a rare find in this industry.
A portion of your income will also come from a completely different area than the affiliate sales. While it’s hard to get people to buy stuff, it’s a lot easier to get people to sign up for free things. Every time that you get someone to sign up for their own free search engine site and sign up for the affiliate accounts (step 1), you will get $5 paid to you. Not bad for something that doesn’t cost you or them. When they purchase a domain name/hosting, you receive $10 more. When they maintain step 3, you receive $15 more, for a total of $30 per referral. That is money that you can plow back into your business by advertising and getting even more referrals.
I’ll be open and honest up front about this system. I just signed up recently and went all in (completed all 3 steps). I started advertising and currently have 4 referrals. I plan to hit this hard for a few weeks and see what happens. Another great benefit is that you can become a super sponser. If you help out people on the forums regularly, they will pay all of your costs of membership including a membership in another education site (up to $80 a month paid for you). I hope to come back with another post next month and let you know how it went for me.
If you are interested in at least finding out a little bit more and maybe setting up your own free site, then check out the following links:
My Free Search Site:
http://www.findusfree.com/
I plan to jazz up the design a little bit in the near future. This is basically the default template that they provide. Notice all of the extra links on the page. These are the affiliate links that I would earn a commission from. Feel free to search for yourself and see what kind of information is available online.
An Overview of the System:
https://acme-people-search.com/signup.php?ref=1248270545UIMO
Testimonial of the Founder:
http://findusfree.com/tissa.htm
Once you have signed up, there is a page that you can view that shows all of the payments made to users. You can see that dozens of people are paid hundreds of dollars each and every month.
If you sign up at one of the links above, you should receive a welcome e-mail from me. I’d be happy to welcome you into my family on this site and coach you along the way.
Matthew
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