Introducing a Passive Income for You for Life

Today I want to reveal a simple way for you to make a passive income online – ‘passive’ meaning you perform tasks that could generate income for years to come, even if you give up working or retire or work just a few hours at the weekend. But the more time and effort you put into the business the more money you’re likely to make.

We’re talking about affiliate marketing and it simply means selling someone else’s product and earning a commission on every sale. The process has a lot in common with dropshipping and selling as a trading assistant and the three models are easily confused.

So before we look at making money from affiliate marketing we’ll determine what the three models are and how they differ because we will be talking about them again in future eletters.

Affiliate Marketing – typically you promote another firm’s goods but you don’t take orders or payment and you don’t get involved in delivery.

All you do is recommend another firm’s product and you will be given an exclusive affiliate code linking your recommendation to the product on the affiliate parent company’s website.

Once a potential buyer clicks on a product recommendation at your site or from some other marketing piece, that person goes direct to the product owner’s website. The product owner takes payment and delivers the product. Your affiliate code will be stored and you’ll be paid your commission in due course.

In theory, you are not allowed to list affiliate products on eBay but there is a way to do so without upsetting eBay and risk being suspended or banned from selling. I’ll tell you about it later.

Dropshipping – this is where you market a product and take payment from buyers.

When payment clears you send a portion of the money to the dropshipping company who fulfils orders to your buyers.

You can list dropshipped products on eBay but I’ve heard from good authority the model is not welcome on the UK site, even though I can find nothing concrete to back that claim.

Regardless, I do not recommend dropshipping, other than for deals arranged exclusively between seller and product supplier, primarily because dropshipping frequently leads to hundreds or thousands of people selling the same product and no one making any money. In a couple of weeks I’ll tell you how to arrange exclusive deals and send you a free report showing the profitable way to do dropshipping.

Trading assistant selling – sometimes called commission selling – as a trading assistant you market and sell other people’s products as if they were your own and you handle everything from listing to taking payment, fulfilling orders and dealing with after sales enquiries.

When the goods reach buyers and the refund period passes you send an appropriate share of the takings to the previous owner. Still sending freebies your way, I am currently updating my trading assistant report and will send it to you in the near future.

Now back to affiliate marketing and how you can use it to increase your earnings on and outside of eBay.

For almost every affiliate programme you’ll be given banners and images, product reviews and text links with your affiliate ID already embedded. Your job is to place those materials in front of prospective buyers and wait for some to click on your affiliate links and buy.

There are many different ways to promote your chosen products, with blogging about specific items and adding your banners or product images somewhere prominent within your blog being one of the most effective.

Blogging aspects to consider:

– A free blog is all you need to get started. Google’s Blogger is an excellent blogging platform and extremely easy to use.

– Give your blog a product specific name to help it rank high in search returns. This is called ‘search engine optimisation’ and helps the likes of Google or Yahoo match words used in your blog’s title and posts with terms looked up by potential customers seeking products similar to those you are promoting.

Using Google’s blogging platform will provide you with a URL ending .blogspot.com and .co.uk with a prefix of your choice, subject to availability. So if you’re promoting a product called ‘XYZ Games’ – hopefully no such brand name exists – then your internet address might be xyzgames.blogspot.com

– Another way to give your blog an SEO overhaul is to include your product’s main search term in each post title and two or three times in an average 300 word post.

– Write articles about your chosen product and tell readers to follow a link at the end of the article which takes them direct to your blog to read more about your recommended product and click on a link to buy. Upload your articles to article directories, some of which allow links direct to the product on an affiliate company’s website. The biggest article directory from which the majority of your traffic might come – Ezine Articles – does not allow links direct to an affiliate product.

Find a useful list of major article directories here.

– Print your blog address on a compliments slip thanking people for buying your products on eBay and elsewhere. You can have compliments slips printed in bulk leading buyers to your blog recommending several different products. Or you could customise and print compliment slips on your desktop computer and choose products to suit individual buyers.

Now onto selling affiliate products directly through eBay which according to the rules is a big no-no. That’s because third party payments are not allowed on eBay and all payments must be between eBay members.

There is a way round the problem, being where you contact an affiliate product owner and ask if you can sell their product on eBay and instead of them paying you a share of the takings, you take payment and send the appropriate share to them to fulfil your orders.

I did this over several years, promoting high price cufflinks, custom made dog kennels, and numerous other high commission items.

The idea won’t work with major affiliate portals like Amazon but it works incredibly well with small companies organising their own affiliate programs.

Look up ‘affiliate programme’ in any major search engine and you’ll find hundreds of options, large and small, to choose from.

Go on and give it a go and let me know how you get on. And ask me any questions to help you get started creating a passive income for the indefinite future.