Make Money Through Referral with OO.com.au
People make purchases because of recommendations. How likely are you going to buy something because some dodgy website (like this one) recommends it? Hmm. Maybe. How likely are you going to buy something because your neighbours, your friends or your family members recommend it, all at the same time? Very likely!! And I can see OO.com.au is making its way to market itself this way.
What’s Affiliation Sales?
First of all, BIG DISCLAIMER — there exists such a thing called “affiliation sales”, where retails pay a small percentage of the sale made by your friend, the “customer”, to you, the “affiliate” or the “referrer”. And Bargain Blog is actually utilising this evil scheme to make money!! If someone clicked on any of the OO.com.au link on this website, and then subsequently made some purchases there… OO.com.au actually gives me some of your money! How bad is that?! Bwawahahah!! I am going to be filthy rich with your money! Not.
The thing is, who is going to base his/her purchase decision on what I said, on a nobody’s website? OO.com.au has realised this, and is now offering affiliation/referral program to the general public! You too can make money off your friends!
Refer Your Friends to OO.com.au!
First, go to OO.com.au: Tell A Friend, put in your personal details, and *very importantly* the email addresses of all your friends? An email will be sent to your friends to lure them into shopping at OO.com.au. And for every $100 they spent there, you’ll get a whooping $4 referral fee!
Just in case your consciousness makes you feel bad about it, OO.com.au won’t disclose all these affiliating activities to your friends. Moreover, OO.com.au will further donate 1% to Mission Australias Christmas Appeal, who provides for thousands homeless families in Australia to have a great Christmas this year. Wonderful isn’t it? No bad feeling any more? Sign it up here.
The next step of getting rich: Go out and find some friends. Now that’s beyond the scope of this blog…
Update
Just in case someone reads it wrongly, I am not attacking OO.com.au! They sell great products at great price, and they provide monetary incentive to web masters to bring them more customers.
However I might have issues with Internet review sites endorsing some products just for the sake of making money off affiliation. The visitors cannot be sure that the reviews are genuine, whether the reviewers are on their side or the advertisers’ side.
So from now on I will try to disclose any affiliation in my posts. Just try to make things clearer.
A great educational post! The next step will be build your own affiliate network…
Take a look at this:
http://www.johnchow.com/google-is-not-my-biggest-income-source/
The guys’s blog is actually VERY popular now so the February statement may not be true anymore
With all the recent AdSense is Dead/Alive debate, it is all about whether to use affiliation program to bring income to a website, as oppose to AdSense.
The problem is that I don’t actually create this website for profit (I designed/developed a major financial planning software in Australia). My mindset is, since I am writing about these bargains, I might “as well” get some affiliation if that specific retailer provides it. The problem with writing for affiliation is, I will not be as free in what I can write, which is not blogging is about.
Well. Maybe one day.
What I ment is building your own network. It worked for the guy since he had a bunch of hardware review web sites that also needed targeted advertising. He could have used an existing affiliate network (like that by linkshare.com or other) but instead he decided to build his own.
The idea he had was to display real-time prices in a context sensitive ad - a novelty at that time. You basically get a list of products (similar to the one you review) from different stores with prices and direct links to buy.
Once you have it in place you keep posting your deals as usual. You don’t even have to know that some readers may choose to click on the ad instead and buy from a different store - in which case you get a commision. Well, ideally it works for a review web site the best since it doesn’t give its readers specific instructions on where to buy the stuff.
But hey, who says you can’t think of a marketing model for an affiliate network to use on a bargain blog/site? There are 43 web sites on this list:
http://probargainhunter.com/links/
And these are just US based companies. That is some market…
Yan,
You are right. Thanks for the tips.
Doing a contextual sensitive affiliation program won’t be that hard, provided that there are enough retailers in the affiliation program to provide enough alternatives so it does not look like you are always selling from the same shop.
However it seems to be bit harder for Australia. It’s a big continent with few people. Not much competition in affiliation sales. Nor many advertisers.