Making Money With WhyPark - Part 2

Making Money With WhyPark - Part 2

As I mentioned in a previous article, you can easily churn a profit using domains from 1&1, hosting from WhyPark, and the link building tools from DigiXMAS. But what if you want to do more than just churn a profit? What if you really want to earn rent money instead of just beer money? One can easily do just that using affiliate links on your sites hosted with WhyPark.

If you're like me, you start cringing when you here about affiliate programs. The first time I heard anyone talking about an affiliate program, I immediately thought it was some kind of pyramid scheme or something. Turns out that affiliate programs (decent ones anyway) are nothing like that at all. It turns out that an affiliate program is really like being a commission-only sales person for that company. For example, you'll notice that the URL I provide to purchase a WhyPark account is timmyth.whypark.hop.clickbank.net. That link specifies that I, Tim_Myth, have referred you, the customer, to WhyPark, and should you decide to buy a WhyPark account, I will get paid a commission. Now, I would still recommend WhyPark even without getting paid for referrals, but if I can recommend a great product AND get paid isn't that all the better? I mean, suppose a friend comes over to play on your new Wii and likes it so much he decides to go buy one. He asks where you bought yours, you tell him Wal-Mart, and he drives over and buys one. A couple days later, you get a check from Wal-Mart for $5. Wouldn't that be pretty cool?

That's exactly what happens with affiliate programs.

How does this relate to WhyPark? Simple, you can easily create domains to promote specific niches and then find affiliate programs for those niches. For example, Amazon.com has an affiliate program. You could make a website where you talked about your favorite bands, and then create some widgets and embed them in your template. Here's a widget showing some of my recent music purchases:

Songs are cheap and my commission rate is only 4%, but if you click on that widget and buy a song at Amazon, I get 4 cents. Not a huge amount, but it only took me 2 minutes to create that widget, and it will continue working forever (or at least for as long as Amazon.com is around).

What about the economics of this?

Well, that gets tricky. Commissions vary greatly. Some pay more than others. For example, NewEgg.com's affiliate program only pays 1-2%, so even though the average sale is ~$400, you still only earn between $4 and $8 per referral. Other programs offer much higher payouts. Your earnings are also highly dependent on how much you promote the product. One tiny affiliate link at the bottom of your page will not earn as much as a large interactive widget at the top of the page. In general, you could reasonably expect to earn approximately the same amount as you would from a Google Adsense unit in the same spot, but because you only get paid when a click-through results in an actual sale, you'll probably won't see money coming in daily like you will with Adsense. On the other hand, when a sale IS generated, you'll see a nice chunk of change suddenly land in your affiliate account. There are hundreds of stories on the web of some affiliates earning thousands of dollars a month, but I'm sure there are thousands of affiliates who make only pennies a month as well. It really is up to you.

Combining an affiliate program with Adsense is acceptable so long as the widget you end up using does not conflict with the Adsense Terms of Service which generally means that so long as your affiliate code doesn't base its ads on the page's content like Adsense ads do you'll be ok. This is your best option for generating money from a WhyPark site since WhyPark provides a bunch of content which creates opportunities for Adsense income while you can optomize the rest of your site towards your affiliate niche.

Should you decide to go this route, here are two affiliate networks I use:

• LinkShare.com
• LinkConnector.com

• GoldenCan.com