- Part 4: Affilliate Websites
Affiliate Websites
Another great way to develop your domain is by becoming an affiliate website. This option takes a bit more time and effort, but can be extremely lucrative if your site draws lots of traffic. Some great places to get started finding affiliate programs are www.Clickbank.com and www.AffiliateMatch.com.
What an affiliate program really does is create an opportunity for you to sell things and earn a commission with no strings attached. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. We talked about redirection a bit earlier in this section. When you redirect to someone else’s site instead of your own, you are an affiliate. Sign up for an affiliate program, and you’ll make money for each paying customer you bring to the site.
You can also work independently with a number of affiliate programs. To do this, you find products that fit your domain name and copy links onto your site. For example, if you own www.Movies4Watching.com, you might sell DVDs with one site, memorabilia with another, and so on. You create a virtual store on your site, and when viewers click on the items they want to buy, it redirects them appropriately.
Becoming an affiliate is great because you can sell items and earn a commission, but you don’t have to do any of the grunt work. That is, you don’t have to ship items, deal with unhappy customers, or even calculate how much you’ll charge for items. All you have to do is put a link on your web page. Your parent company will take care of the rest and send you a check every month for the customers driven to their site through your site. It’s a pretty sweet deal.
Of course, the added benefit is again the look of your site to buyers. Not only are you making some extra money on the side, but you also give potential buyers a pretty developed website at which to look instead of a blank error page. It shows that your site is getting traffic and that you mean business. Buyers who have been around the business for a few years want a great deal on a domain name, but they also want to work with professionals, which you seem to be, since you know how to develop your site. Remember, you can also negotiate a slightly higher price if you’re willing to give them the website you’ve created as well, so if your affiliate program is earn a significant amount of money, you can throw this developed site into the mix during negotiation with your buyers for a higher selling price.
