The message started out like many others by simply asking me to take a look at this eHow member's latest article.
I'm surprisingly compliant with these requests.
While at first these random messages seemed annoying I now take them in stride as the price for having so many eHow friends (see Day 16 post). If you have eHow friends that are constantly bombarding you with spam you can discretely delete them from your list of friends at any time.
Getting back on topic I have to say that this message was particularly interesting because the person identified their article as containing an affiliate link.
I admittedly know very little about affiliate links and affiliate marketing, but the one thing that I do know is that it's a subject that I want to know a lot more about.
For those of you not at all familiar with the term affiliate link or more broadly affiliate marketing here's the Wikipedia definition.
The Wikipedia definition begins:
"Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts."
I suggest reading the complete Wikipedia definition (linked above) but in the mean time understanding the basic concept will suffice for this conversation. Just remember that affiliate marketing is in part popular because it's a pay for performance model. It's relevant to our discussion because it ties in extremely well with eHow.
If you're still not clear about how this works then maybe this example will help:
If I apply to become an affiliate of Amazon.com
to sell copies of Tim Ferris' book The 4-Hour work Week (a book I genuinely recommend) - I can post links and ads for Amazon around my website and when someone clicks through one of these links and makes a purchase I get a small percentage of that sale.The percentage depends on the affiliate and there are literally tens of thousands (if not more) affiliates out there. I just used Amazon because it's a popular example.
The implications for using this with eHow are HUGE.
I don't understand how I've been on eHow for 25 days and this is the first I'm hearing about this. This should be the second thing that everyone learns about eHow on their first day (my Day 23 post should be the first thing everyone learns).
If you haven't already realized it, you can now add affiliate links in the resources section of your eHow articles. In order to make any money from this someone will have to go through your affiliate link on eHow and actually purchase something, but when they do you can make at least a few dollars (unlike the cents you have been making simply publishing articles on eHow). Concepts like this one are truly the key for me (or you) to someday be able to generate enough passive income that I can simply slip into my University of Texas golf shoes (my favorite college) in the morning on a weekday and never have to worry about going into an office and spending my day in a cubicle again.
Because this is such a huge innovation (an additional passive income stream) I'd love to go on about it ad nauseam, but as I stated earlier I'm admittedly no expert (yet) when it comes to affiliate marketing so I will defer to the experts.
Check out this extremely helpful eHow article titled: How to Earn Extra Money By Adding An Affiliate Link. This article was written by a woman who has close to 50,000 eHow points (a legitimate authority).
Although this subject may be a little technical for some readers I strongly encourage you to spend some time familiarizing yourself with this topic. Financially speaking this could be the most important thing you learn from eHow.
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