Imagine If...

This little money making scheme was in some e-book I bought on the

internet. It involves writing articles, so I had to try it out. One man claimed

he made $1700 with his first article using this plan. I rewrote five of my

articles and gave it a try. I'll tell you how it worked out, but first I will explain the basic idea.

You probably know how easy it is now to sign up as an affiliate for various

products. With services like ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) it has become

even easier. There is no approval process for each individual product or

company. Once you have your ClickBank "nickname" you can send traffic

to any one of their thousands of vendors and get a commission. Some pay as

high as 70%, and 50% is probably the average. It's simple, but some people want it to be even simpler. 

Building a website is a bit of work, after all. What if you just wrote an article and had a link in the resource box go directly to the affiliate (with your affiliate code in it), so you could earn commissions without any website? You then submit the article to a dozen free article directories, where people can read it, or web site owners can use it on their sites.

This has worked for some, but most article directories won't allow affiliate

links in an article, and they do check. A better way follows. 

1. Find a product you would like to promote as an affiliate. It should be related to a topic you can easily write about. It should pay a commission of at least $20 (my opinion). Sign up and get your affiliate URL. This is the address you send people to in order to get credit (and your commission) for the sale.

2. Register a domain. This will be your only expense (assuming you already

have internet access), and should cost less than $10 per year. Register a

name that has something to do with your topic or product. Most good names

are taken, but you can use numbers in the name in order to find an available

one with the word(s) you want. 

3. Set the domain to redirect or forward to your affiliate URL. All good

registries have free forwarding for your domain. Now any time that

someone clicks through to your domain (or enters it in their browser) they

will be forwarded to the affiliate URL, where they will hopefully buy something.

4. Write relevant articles, linking to your domain in the resource box. When

your article is read, and the reader wants to learn more, he will click through to your domain and be redirected to your affiliate URL. Be sure your article is relevant to what he finds there, or he isn't likely to buy anything.

5. Submit your article to twenty or more article directories. Most article

directories don't allow affiliate links, but they usually allow links to a

domain as long as you own it - even if it redirects to an affiliate link. Read

the agreement to be sure this is the case.

How well does this money making scheme work? Others claim they do

great with this plan, but my own success was limited. I spent an afternoon

on my first attempt. I figured it was worth 4 or 5 hours to give it a try.

Using a domain I owned but which I hadn't developed into a website, I set it

up to redirect to an affiliate product that I liked - which paid a nice $42

commission. I rewrote five of my previous articles that I had written about making money online, and I linked to my domain in each resource box. I submitted each to about a dozen article directories.

Total time invested? 

Less than 5 hours. 

The results?

Over the next two months, I made exactly $84 - two $42

commissions.

It has been many more months now without a sale. There are

certainly ways to "tweak" this system, and do better than the $17 per hour I

made for my effort, but I have enough other things in the works. 

Let me know if you try this and have more success with it.

Helpful Hints

1. You can't take back those articles once they're out there, but you can

redirect your domain to a different affiliate to experiment, or if the original

one cancels its program. Just be sure that the affiliate product or service is

relevant to the content in your articles.

2. Look for high-priced, high-commission products. "Conversion rates" don't usually drop proportionately with higher prices. In other words, if 10 out of 1000 visitors buys a $17 product, that number may only drop to 4 for a $100 product. Making 50% on either, you would make an average of $85 for each 1000 readers who clicked on that link in the first case, or $200 in the second case.

3. Don't try to "sell" anything in your article. Write good informational

articles and let the affiliate sales page do the selling when your reader

arrives there. However, do try to "sell" them on clicking that link in the

resource box.

To make money online with no cost at all (you can even do this from a

computer at your local library, try using a free blog. Blogger.com, for

example, lets you set up free blogs (short for ""web logs"). Write about a

topic that you have an interest in, and find some affiliate products to

promote. You can promote the blog in the same way you do a website

(articles, reciprocal links, etc.).

This is a zero-investment business. One blogger I read about had built his

numerous blogs up to an income of $10,000 per month. From my experience, I can tell you that you should be happy if you are making any

money at all in the first few months, but it if you are diligent you should be

making some regular income eventually, and it comes in day and night.

The only downside I see is that you are not paying for the blog. This is a

plus for those who need to start on a low budget, but free services are more

likely to close your account if they feel like it for some reason someday.

Blogger.com (and others) have been around for years, but I feel that a

company which is being paid is less likely to cause you any trouble. They

want to keep their customers happy.