An alternative to beginning your own eCommerce site is to
participate in affiliate programs from other web sites.
When you participate in an affiliate program, you provide a
link to another web site, and when you send a visitor to that web site, they
will pay you a commission.
The terms and conditions of the affiliate program, depend on
the specific merchant web site in which you are becoming an affiliate of.
By becoming an affiliate for another web site, you can begin
to offer links to merchants who offer products, and services which are related
to your web site's content, and receive a commission from the merchants.
This will allow you to focus on creating content for your web site, and not
working on the back-end fulfillment of orders.
The majority of affiliate programs are managed by three
companies, beFree, LinkShare, and Commission Junction.
All three programs allow you to sign up for hundreds of
affiliate programs at one time, however beFree, and LinkShare do not pool
commissions across al of the programs, so depending on how high each of the
merchants payment thresholds is configured, you could have a wait before you
receive a payment from a particular merchant. Commission Junction pools
all commissions received into one account, this allows you to receive a payment
as soon as you have earned the payment threshold across all merchants which you
have affiliate relationships with, which will allow you to receive a check
faster.
