OK here’s an easy way to make bags of cash by giving away a free product: Create some kind of website-based solution, like an autoblog or mashup script, and give it away (or offer to install it) free on the condition that your customer signs up for webhosting with the company of your choice.
This way your customer gets a useful product for the low cost of a monthly hosting fee (typically as low as $4.95 a month) and you get a hefty commission from your affiliated webhost.
Two things to be aware of:
1) You’ll need to be able to track individual purchases of your webhosting offer. You can do this either by giving each customer a unique code to use for their SID or by creating a form getting them to enter their own unique SID which you then automatically incorporate into your affiliate link.
2) You’ll need to consider refunds. Some people might sign up for their webhosting to get your free product and then cancel their subscription. You can either write this off as the cost of doing business, or require them to wait a month or two before delivering on your promise. This is unlikely to work very well for a free product, but might be tolerable if you’re offering a rebate on a product you’re actually selling.
I’m considering using this technique for my Affiliate Mashup Store product. If I sell it for, say, $200 I can offer a rebate of up to 50% if my customers sign up with Hostgator, since they pay a massive $100 commission for new contracts. Since it’s a product which requires webhosting, and the monthly cost of Hostgator packages is very low, it should encourage people to sign up. They save money, I earn the same per sale, and Hostgator gets a new customer. Everybody wins!
February 17th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
On the Affiliate Mash up script, Where do you install this at?
February 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
You just upload all the files in the archive (after customising ‘variables.php’) to a new folder on your webserver.