Imagine if you could go wherever you want and spend as much time as you want — whenever you wanted?

Affiliate Programs, the third method of online income from my original post “Online Income - Overview“, are a good start to achieving that personal freedom through passive income.

Even if you’re not interested in having more personal freedom, passive income is a great sustainer — helping your business survive through lean times.

As I mentioned previously, true passive income is setting up a revenue generator once, and receiving money without continuing effort.

This is an exciting topic to me, because it’s one of the most efficient ways to setup a passive income stream (and I’m all about spending as much time as possible having fun with family & friends).

Okay, what is an Affiliate Program?

An Affiliate Program is a web-based marketing practice in which a person or business rewards you for each visitor you bring to their site.

Basically, you get a small referral fee for sending people to other sites.

The goal, which should not be underestimated, is to get a lot of visitors to click.

Let’s do an exercise to demonstrate what this means:

1. Take a look on the right panel of this blog under “My Favorites”.
2. You should see five books listed there - click on one of them.
3. What happened? You were taken to Amazon.com to review, learn, and even purchase the book.
4. If you purchase the book - I get a small referral bonus.

In this example, you, the visitor must purchase, and then I get the small reward.

How does it work?

When I was building my blog, I took literally 3 minutes to create an Amazon.com Associate Account.

Amazon gave me a “tag” (in this case, a tag is a unique id that let’s Amazon know the click from my web site should be credited to me) which is: thbipibl-20.

When I created the links to Amazon.com for those books, I assured my Amazon tag was in the web address for each book (labeled according to the guidelines in the Amazon Associate Account program).

The moment you click and purchase, my Amazon Associate account is credited a small amount.

Once that amount reaches $10, I can either have:

• that money automatically wired into a bank account, or
• have an Amazon Gift Certificate generated for that amount.

That’s all there is to it!

A few thoughts about what we’ve just reviewed:

• Affiliate Programs are a great way to increase revenue for your existing web site - I recommend using this with the other methods of Online Income for maximum results.
• It takes a lot of visitors to generate a lot of income.
• This concept applies to almost everything on the web. It’s hard to imagine all of the possibilities, if you are new to this topic — take a look at:
  • AffiliatePrograms.com, and
  • the search results for “Affiliate Programs” in Google for a small glimpse at the ‘tip of the Affiliate Program iceberg’.

Other ways Affiliate Programs are used:

Take a look at this web site, one of my favorites for spotting deals on Computers, Technology and even Finance:

www.GotApex.com

Notice that every link you click on has a ‘tag’ that lets the site you are going to know you came from GotApex.com.

The moment you purchase (and in some instances, just visit) - the owners at GotApex.com receive a reward.

If this method of online income intrigues you — and you have something to say — please comment below.

If you have an idea, or have a question you’d like to discuss with me — Contact Me and we’ll set up a phone call, or meeting, at a time and day that works for you.

Let me know if you want a free lunch — yep, it’s my treat — and we’ll discuss your idea, or questions, at one of the tastiest places in SW Florida - Something Special Cafe, in with Publix at Summerlin & Colonial.

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