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How To Be The ONLY Affiliate and Get Paid Whether You Refer The Sale or Not

One day I was looking at a massive paypal account balance that belonged to a client of mine. I was doing freelance web design at the time and I had to set up a few “Order Now” buttons for the books and CDs that this guy sold. They were all hard goods that had to be shipped. Nothing downloadable.

He was a fairly well known conference speaker and he sold alot of product and I mean he sold it steady. When I looked at his stats I saw order after order that had come in daily for the last year. His account was so large that I actually called him on the phone to suggest that he shift most of that money into a safer account. The guy was bumping up against six figures and it was just wasting away in a no-interest, paypal account!

I remember sitting there thinking, “I sure would like to be getting a cut every time somebody orders from this guy”. I mean how cool would it be to get paid every single time that someone ordered directly from the merchants own website without even having to make a referral?

It was a daydream, and anyhow it could never be done. At least not legally……….. or could it?

That’s when the Digfield school of thought kicked in and I hatched a plan. Today I am so very glad that I hatched that plan and I’m going to tell you exactly what I did.

Before I do though let me just say a couple of important things:

First off, you do not have to be a web designer to use the method that I am about to disclose. However, you will need to deal with people about their websites and you need to understand something that all web designers know.

What you need to understand is that even some of the most intelligent and wealthy clients have no concept of how websites work. Alot of them are terrified of hiring a web designer in the first place because they don’t know how to tell if they are getting a good deal or getting ripped off. It’s like hiring a mechanic when you know nothing about cars. It can be daunting for people to say the least.

This is why a really popular folk singer who gets an enormous amount of traffic may have a crappy “Front Page” designed website that he did himself. Even some very well known corporations have their front desk secretary learn a little bit about Dreamweaver so she can put up some little poopy squat site online. They don’t know who to trust and they don’t want to sound stupid so they avoid “techie” people like us. We make them very nervous.

If you are smart you can use this to your advantage. Be kind to these people. Understand that they are on edge about this stuff and show some respect to them for being the great entrepreneurs that they are in their field of expertise. Odds are, you don’t know a damn thing about whatever it is that they do so well either. They are not stupid. They are just great at something else.

If you can lock on to this understanding then you are way ahead of the game. It will ease their fears and they will get comfortable with you. Then, like finding a good mechanic, they will never go to anyone else.

I have never cheated any of my clients and I have a great rep with all of them. I do not advocate nor do I do anything fraudulent for my scratch. Having said that, I did figure out a way to help existing website owners make more money and become their only affiliate. Not only that, I get paid every time they make a sale even if I have nothing to do with referring the buyer.

Here’s What I Did:

First… I realized that this guy had been selling his materials for years before he ever had a website. He was still only selling hard copy versions of things that could easily be converted to mp3s and pdfs. It made me wonder how many other popular people were online not cashing in on their abilities.

I started doing a little searching. I searched for local speakers and musicians. People that might have local celebrity status. I tried to concentrate my searches on older speakers and artists since they would be more likely to have a poor web presence. (Younger groups grew up on computers). I started book-marking every site that could possibly sell something, but wasn’t.

Then I started trying other searches. I would search the words “to order” along with “send payment to” or “mail check to” and that helped me dig out some sites that had great products but were only set up to take checks or money orders.

I was book-marking my ass off.

Second… came the slow dance of emails. (And you better make it a very slow dance if you really want this to work) I wrote up what I call an “approach letter” to about 50 of these sites. It’s not a sales letter in any way. I did not want to go into the category of “spammer” at all. I wanted to start a conversation and nothing more at this point.

Most of the letters were very unique and well thought out. For example if I wanted to email a 49 year old indy jazz saxophonist who gets local radio play I would look at his whole website site first. I would try to find info about him on other sites. Then I would write to him and use that info through out the letter making sure to leave a question at the end. For a bogus example:

—————————————————————————–

Mr. Fitzpatrick,

Man, I was so happy for you when I read that you were given the Independent Jazz Musician of the year award earlier this year. Now that is really a serious accomplishment. I’ve book-marked your website and I wish you the best on your new CD.

Is that coming out in June?

- Danny

—————————————————————————-

I wasn’t sure what to expect and, of course, the majority never replied but I could not believe how many of these people did write me back. And not only wrote me back but also asked me questions like where I was from and how I found out about their work.

This opened a garage sized window for me to say… “Actually, I found you on-line. I work on-line. Have you ever considered selling your music/training courses/chicken feed/whatever through your website? I help people do that all the time. I’d be glad to help you.

(Even at that point you win some and you lose some. There can be several email exchanges after that. Some act interested but never follow through. But if you have chosen your contacts wisely and you even get 2 or 3 to say, “yes, help me”, you just cashed in one big ass check that will pay you for years.)

Third… Once I had a few clients wanting my help I met with them personally if they were local (Major trust builder. Meeting relieves 99.9% of their jitters.) Although, some of them didn’t mind doing the whole thing via email or telephone.

I explained to them that they would need to set up a paypal account for themselves and that I would set up a “shopping cart” on their site and prep their files for sale. (Basically just ripping the CD into mp3s or converting docs into pdfs… some of them had video but not many.)

I also explained to them that my only fee for setting it all up would be a $2.00 - $5.00 (depending on total cost of product) fee per sale and that we could easily roll that into the on-line price of the item. I.E. The 4 CD workshop that sells at the seminars for $70.00 would sell on-line for $75.00 so the buyer eats my fee. It is a system that pleased us all for the most part.

Fourth… With the clients full blessing I set up a new ejunkie account in their name and connected it to their paypal account. I uploaded the converted files to ejunkie and set them up with an affiliate payout of our agreed upon amounts.

Fifth… I log into my own ejunkie account and grab my affiliate hoplink for the clients products.

Sixth… Again, with the clients full blessing I add a link to their website menu called “store” and you guessed it, it’s my ejunkie affiliate hoplink to their products right on their own home page menu!

The “store” page itself is just a matter of copying and pasting code from ejunkie so that’s why I say you don’t have to be a designer to pull it off.

So now, every single time anybody comes to these websites from anywhere and buys something I get paid, which means… I am the ONLY affiliate and I get my cut of every sale even if I never refer a single person for the rest of my life.

And it’s a beautiful thing when you can tell that “Mr. Fitzpatrick” must have done a show or won another award just by looking at your own paypal stats.

Class Dismissed.

(*Note: I have used other affiliate setups as well and if it is domain sensitive on referral then you would just do it like this: Set up a simple php page redirect on the clients website called store.php have it kick over to the domain that the referral needs to come from. The page it kicks to should be another php redirect that kicks through your affiliate link to the actual store page. So it is like a real fast double php forward but it goes so fast the visitor is none the wiser. It works like a charm.)

(*Note 2: Yes, I eat the small ejunkie fee, if you can call it eating. It gets covered a hundred times over.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Make Money, Out Of The Box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “How To Be The ONLY Affiliate and Get Paid Whether You Refer The Sale or Not”

Wallet Rehab - Ways to save money says:
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:34 pm |
What a great business idea! This works especially well in large cities, I’ll bet.
chatmasta says:
May 6th, 2007 at 3:20 pm |
ingenious.
Linda Buquet says:
May 7th, 2007 at 4:21 pm |
BRILLIANT! Very often at my affiliate forum and others I have affiliates tell me they’ve found the perfect niche product but either the merchant is not selling online or the merchant has no affiliate program set up. They ask how they can get the merchant to set up a quick easy program at low cost, just for them.

Heck I’ve even seen sites where I thought wow I could sell a ton of products for that company, but could not think of an easy way to set it up.

I know this blog is new, but I have already gotten the best ideas here! I read 200 blogs a day scanning good ideas to add to my #1 ranked affiliate blog, so to impress me isn’t easy. I’ll be blogging your ideas! Great job and WONDERFUL out of the box thinking!
5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blogs, Google and SEO Blog says:
May 7th, 2007 at 5:47 pm |
Become the Merchants ONLY Affiliate - Get Paid for EVERY Sale they Make…

Imagine being the ONLY affiliate for a hot selling niche product. Now imagine making commission on EVERY SINGLE SALE the merchant makes - even if you didn’t refer the customer. If you are an out-of-the-box thinker and a PRO affiliate, web desig…
5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blogs, Google and SEO Blog » Be the Merchants ONLY Affiliate - Make $$ on EVERY Sale they Make says:
May 7th, 2007 at 5:48 pm |
[…] Now to “GET” this article you really do need to think outside of the box! Danny is a web designer who had access to the clients site to be able to set everything up, with the merchant’s permission of course. But I can see a variety of ways this could work in other situations you just need to wear your thinking cap when you read it. after you read the blog below, come back for my comments about a couple of important issues. Read 1st or what I say below won’t make any sense. How To Be The ONLY Affiliate and Get Paid Whether You Refer The Sale or Not […]
Bo Bang says:
May 8th, 2007 at 5:03 am |
How refreshing!
Thanks for sharing your idea. Fresh idea on generating a passive income. I think you should’ve written a mini report on this

Thanks again.
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May 16th, 2008 at 10:01 pm |
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How To Be The ONLY Affiliate and Get Paid Whether You Refer The Sale or Not

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