Oldie but Goodie – Offering Free Websites to Earn Affiliate Commissions

In internet marketing you will come across tons of methods, more than you care to come across because you can easily get distracted, lose focus, or forget about a great method because there’s just too many methods out there.  Today we’ll touch on an oldie but a goodie method that has been around for a while… but if you add your own little twist you may be able to bring some life into this old gal.  The method that I am talking about is creating websites for free for people who sign up for hosting under your affiliate link.

The concept is very simple and straightforward… you are going to offer people a free website which will take you maybe 1 hour at most to setup.  You can either buy a pack of website templates for $30 and get 50 different templates or you can use WordPress and use free themes.  In order to get the free website you are going to give them your affiliate link and they are going to buy hosting for the website.  You will earn about $90-$100 for the affiliate commission for your 1 hour (or less) of work.

Setting up the website is the easy part… show them a variety of templates/themes and let them pick  out which one they want you to use.  Ask them to create the text for 5 pages and once they provide that you create the 5 pages and copy/paste their text in there.  Done.

Now comes the hard part, traffic.

Getting traffic to see your free website offer can be challenging because this method has been around a while and people still use it today.  You can try traditional means like Craigslist, Twitter, heck even Ebay or Ebay Classifieds, PPC, PPV, etc…  Here’s something that a lot of people don’t do though.  Go offline to get the traffic.  To do this, you will need a website set up that describes your offer.  Your website should look very professional and draw them in.  Explain how website development can cost anywhere from $500 to $5,000 and because you’re a new company you’re going to give it to them for free (with the affiliate link catch).  Put it on a flyer and get out there (or pay someone to get out there).  You can reach a lot of people at the mall, concerts, beach, colleges, etc…  If you want to get more targeted offline traffic try a job fair, chamber of commerce, or small business owners association.  What can work really well is driving to small businesses and asking for the owner and handing them the flyer.  A lot of small businesses either do not have a website or they made it themselves and it looks like a 5 year old kid made it.  Remember, both in your flyer and your website to really push that you’re only doing this because you are new and need to build up your portfolio and this free offer is limited time only.  You want to get them to jump on it today rather than sit around and wait because it may not be available tomorrow.

And of course, if you combine offline and online traffic methods you will get a great mix of people interested in your offer.  I personally know one guy who does this method as his full time job.  What he does is he leverages the people that he gets that request a website.  He asks them to pass his offer along to their friends, he asks if he can post a flyer in their business (if it is a business owner), he friends them on facebook and posts on their wall, he really takes full advantage of his customers to find more customers.  He asks for their email to keep in touch.  He’ll email his former customers once every 2-3 months and let them know about SEO services, or website upgrades, or anything else he thinks he can upsell them on.  He has become a master at this and he is banking hard as a result.

Getting into the groove of this method could take a little work, but once you find your groove push on it and don’t let up.  You may just be pleasantly surprised with the results!