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by John San Filippo Most Web-site businesses fall into one of two categories: sites designed to sell some sort of product or service on-line and sites designed mostly to provide information. Information sites are vital, but how can they generate income? If not a fortune, then at least enough to sustain (or help pay for) the site itself?
But, no matter what type of business you're engaged in, it's doubtful you'd complain about an opportunity to turn your informational Web site into an income stream. Unfortunately, the barriers to selling on-line can be high. If
you only have a few items, then you can easily set up a secure site using NetObjects Fusion and its e-commerce components. To read more about e-commerce click here. Setting up a comprehensive retail site—say an Amazon Books or CDNow—requires substantial resources, both financial and
otherwise. But now, a growing number of companies are tackling the issue of making Web commerce easier from a number of directions. Selling someone else's products The ideal commerce solution for the informational-site operator is one that requires little or no time to maintain and
transfers all of the responsibility of order-taking and fulfillment to someone else. Sound too good to be true? It's not. It's what has become known on-line as an affiliate program. Under the typical affiliate program, you simply provide a link from your site to someone else's retail site. While some affiliate programs only allow for site-to-site linking, others let you link to specific products on the retail site, allowing you to highlight your favorite products on your own site.
Here are some examples: Let's say you have a florist shop, and your Web site tells people about your goods and services. Using an affiliate program, you can point people to books about flower arranging, party and wedding planning, and other activities that could benefit from using the flowers they buy from you. You could even point people to travel services that can help plan a honeymoon. Or, perhaps you run a travel agency. You can point your site
visitors to the best travel books, or books about exotic locales, or a screen saver with beautiful pictures from around the world, or clothing or luggage they would find useful. The important point is to send people to personally selected, focused items. If someone comes to your site looking for information about gardens, don't try to sell them books about auto racing. The HTML code that makes up each link includes a unique
identifier that lets the retail site know that a customer "came in" through your site. The retail site then keeps track of the purchases generated from your site and pays you a percentage of those purchases. Typical percentages range from 5 to 10 percent. The best part of all of this is that it costs nothing to become an affiliate. All of the "paperwork" at the retailer end is handled by a computer, so it costs almost nothing to get you set up.
And since your site may generate business the retailer might have never seen otherwise, they're more than happy to cut you a small piece of the pie. The answer to this question is: just about anything you can imagine. Below is a baker's dozen list of Web retailers that
offer some sort of affiliate relationship to other Web sites. I've included the name, URL, and nature of each e-business. While I'm certain there are many more affiliate programs out there, this is a good place to start. One way to find more affiliate programs is to visit your favorite search engine and type in "become an affiliate." Or visit In its simplest form, an affiliate program has you create a simple link from your site to the retail site. The retailer will typically give you some sort of artwork or logo, along with a special URL to use for the link. Keep in mind, the URL doesn't
usually lead to a special page just for your visitors. Instead, the URL contains an extra identifying code that lets the retailer's Web server keep track of where people are coming from. In this situation, creating the link is a simple process. Each site has a slightly different way to sign up, but once you do, they all provide instructions you can follow. Most affiliate links look like this: They contain the site's main address, the item, then your affiliate code. On some sites, such as Amazon, you find the item you want to resell, copy that URL, remove the 17-digit shopping session ID that appears at the end of the URL, and add your affiliate ID.
Many affiliate programs allow you to feature specific products on your Web site and then link directly to those products on the retail site. In that way, you can create an electronic storefront that features only the products you want showcased on your site. These are the best affiliate programs, because they allow you to be "choosy" about what you present
to your site visitors. Unless you recommend everythingon an affiliate site, it's good to point people to specific items. That way, people who trust you because of the information on your site will have more focused items to consider. In an effort to make your life a little easier, many affiliate programs use what are commonly called tag generators. A tag generator is simply an on-line form that, as the name implies, generates the code you need to add to your Web page
to feature a specific item. The tag generator takes into account who you are and what item you want to feature. Thus, it creates HTML code that includes your identifier and a link to the correct item. For example, the Barnes & Noble tag generator came up with this for a book called Net Income: Cut Costs, Boost Profits & Enhance Operations Online. The title of the book serves as the hypertext link. <AHREF="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click? sourceid=340765&ISBN=047128839X"><IMG SRC="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/serve?sou rceid=340765&ISBN=047128839X" BORDER="0" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" >Net Income: Cut Costs, Boost Profits & Enhance Operations Online</A> With most HTML editors, you copy and paste this into your
HTML code. In NetObjects Fusion (since you don't need to see or know HTML code), it works a bit differently. You can add these tags in one of two ways: Copy only the part of the code you need for the link. This will always be the part between "<A HREF=HTTP://" and ">" —that's the link that goes to the right page and identifies you as the affiliate seller. The area you'd copy in the HTML below is highlighted in <AHREF="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click? sourceid=340765&ISBN=047128839X"><IMG SRC="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/serve?sou rceid=340765&ISBN=047128839X" BORDER="0" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" >Net Income: Cut Costs, Boost Profits & Enhance Operations Online</A> You'd then type the text you want to link (or click on the graphic you want to link from), create an external link in NetObjects Fusion, then paste this in as described above. If you want to take advantage of both the link and link text generated by these links, here's another way:
The biggest down side to this approach is that you can't see the hyperlinked text when you're working on your page; it only becomes visible when you either preview or publish the site. Affiliate programs allow even the most modest Web site to become a moneymaker. Granted, depending on the nature of your site and the nature of the products you want to feature, you may not get rich. However, considering the amount of
work this entails (maybe an extra half an hour working on your site), it's almost like getting free money. And thanks to the growing number of cyber retailers who are offering affiliate programs, you can find products to match the content of just about any Web site you can imagine. So what are you waiting for? For a complete list of sites with affiliate programs, check out About the author
Illustration: Working plans, by Jonathan Evans for www.artville.com |
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