One of the ways that I’ve been using to earn additional income over the years is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is referring or recommending a product or service to people. If those people make a purchase, you get paid a commission.
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Hi, this is Arthur Cundy from ArthurCundy.com. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about what affiliate marketing is, how does it work, and how you can use it to earn additional income in your household.
Okay, so before I get started, let me tell you a story. So back when I got my start in entrepreneurship, back in 2000, I started with building websites. So I was a web designer, and I created websites for small businesses and large companies and you know, everything in between. And so over the course of building websites, one of the natural things is, you know, after I build a website, you need to get it online, right and so that means I need to get the client set up with a web hosting company.
For those of you that don’t know, web hosting companies, you know, they have a whole bunch of servers, and they charge, you know, anywhere from $5 a month to $19 / $20 a month, depending on what you need. And they have a whole bunch of web servers, and they put your website files on the webserver. And that’s how you get your website, live on the internet for anyone to find it.
And so I wasn’t a web host company. And so what I did was I would look for a web hosting company that I can refer to my clients, based on the type of website that they had, whether it’s ecommerce or maybe a regular basic, you know, brochure website with only a few webpages. And I would refer that client to that web host.
I was doing research and I found a web hosting company that I can refer my clients to. I was like, “Oh, this looks cool.” And when I was looking at their website, I realized that when I refer someone to that company, they would pay me, a one time fee of $60. So I refer someone over there, you know, one of my clients over there, and the web hosting company would pay me $60 for referring them a customer. And I thought, Oh, you know, this is cool, you know, I could get paid for doing something that I was already going to do anyway. And so that kind of piqued my interest. And I got more curious, so I started doing more research. And I found that a lot of the web hosting companies that were out there, they had some sort of referral program where I could refer someone to them and you know, I’m making a little bit of money. And I thought, Oh, this, this must be a thing. And, you know, I got more and more interested in it.
And then I found one particular one that would not only pay me One time, but they would pay me ongoing for as long as that client remains a customer of that web hosting company. And I thought, wow, I could get paid months and years into the future for just referring a client one time. And so I got really excited.
It became so simple to me because I would build a website and refer a customer there. And we just it was just a natural transition, I would say, Okay, great. Your website is done; here’s a great web hosting company that you can get your web hosting account set up with. And they would just go ahead and set up their account and I would get paid ongoing, and I’ve made thousands of dollars this way using just this one technique.
That’s essentially what affiliate marketing is. It’s referring or recommending a product or service to a customer. And when they sign up, you get paid.
Some programs, you get paid one time for just doing that one transaction. And a lot of other ones, you get paid ongoing consistently. So you do the work once, setting up an account for someone, and you get paid month after month,