Making Money Online Selling Posters

We decided to create a new section titled “Money Making Affiliate Programs”, where each week we will be talking about some of our favorite affiliate programs we have used over the years, or new ones that we think have a lot of potential.

Since summer is going to be over before we know it (sorry), I decided to talk about an affiliate program that has brought me in many 1000’s of dollars over the years and does exceptionally well at the end of summer. Not to say it doesn’t do great year-round for making money online, but I just seem to have promoted the products more at the beginning of the each school year.

So what type of product am I talking about? POSTERS! That’s right, just plain old posters… well not just “plain old posters”, as this company has over 500,000 in stock and they are adding more and more all the time. The company is called, All Posters, but that could be a little misleading as they have grown over the years and now they sell; posters, prints, stand-ups, magnets, apparel, and much, much more…

Like any legitimate affiliate program it costs nothing to join and they offer some very advanced linking methods to make promoting any type genre of poster a breeze.

You can actually earn money a couple of different ways, which I really like. You can earn money by selling posters directly to public, which is where I have made most of my money. Plus you can earn money recruiting other affiliates to market their products, which is called a two-tier commission structure.

So here is how the commission structure is broken down:

Tier 1
You earn 20% commission for any purchase someone makes on All Posters via your affiliate link. If they purchase anything on the site for up to 10 days after they clicked on your affiliate link, you will still earn the 20% commission. The one thing I have noticed about selling posters is hardly anyone purchases just one poster. Most people purchase several, plus they offer framing and all sorts of other products, so their total bill can grow pretty quickly.

Tier 2
You can earn up to $8.00 for each new affiliate you recruit, plus lifetime residual income.

• You get $3.00 when they make their first sale
• You earn $5.00 when they make their second sale
• You earn 5% of every sale they make for life (this can be very lucrative if you recruit yourself some super affiliates)

As for marketing posters, there are many ways to go about it. I created a really basic site, PosterDiscounters.com… many years ago (which really needs a major overhaul), and for not getting much traffic it has always done pretty well at converting sales. It does especially well when I spend some time and promote it.

But don’t think you need your own custom site to make money selling posters, as I have had a lot of success over the years using other more direct methods like promoting to my different mailing lists, PPC advertising, adding their dynamic code to niche sites, etc… The only limit to marketing posters is your own imagination. Once you sign-up you will see all the cool different ways you can add posters to your site(s).

So if you are interested in making money online and are looking for another potentially lucrative income stream, sign-up here.

Quick Tip – Simple Affiliate Cloaking Method

The last 3 days have been super hectic around the office, so I have not had much time to write. My business partner Mark has been on a 2 week vacation and will be back to work on Monday, and in his absence I have had to do everything around here, so I am a little behind. Plus, my kids just got out of school Tuesday for summer break. So today is going to be one of the first of what I am calling “Quick Tips”. It will just be a quick tip on how to do something specific. I am thinking about making this a once a week type post, but we will see how it goes over.

Today I am just going to show you a quick way to “Cloak” your affiliate links. There are a many reasons to do this, but probably the best reason is it helps keep people from hijacking your affiliate links and stealing your commissions.

There are lots of different ways and services out there with which you can cloak your URLs. Simply do a Google search for “URL Redirection Services” and you will see lots of different options.

For this post I am just going to show you a really simple PHP script that you can create in seconds and works great for a simple redirection.

Here is what we use on a lot of our sites. Now this only works if your server is running PHP. Again, there are probably lots of ways to do the same thing, but this is what we have always used.

1) Open up a text editor like Notepad and paste the following code onto your page:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com“;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

2) Change http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to whatever your actual affiliate link is.

3) You have 2 different options on how to save it and I prefer the 2^nd method (which takes an extra step or two), but both work fine.

• Give the file a name and end it with .php extension. For example is you were promoting an affiliate program for guitar lessons, you might want to call it “guitar-lessons.php”. Then you just upload the file to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons.php.
• With this one, you are going to need to create a “folder” with whatever title you like. For the guitar lessons example, you will probably want to call the folder something like “guitar-lessons”. Next you want to save the file you created above as “index.php” and save it in the “guitar-lessons” folder. Then you just need to upload the entire folder to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons. Another option you see nowadays using this method is;  create a main folder entitled “recommends” (or whatever you like) and they upload all the affiliate folders into that file, which also helps organize the folders on your server. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/recommends/guitar-lessons.

So let me show you step-by-step real live example. I will create a redirection URL for an affiliate link to Jamorama.com, which is one of Clickbank’s top selling merchants for Guitar Lessons.

Step 1) I pasted the following into a blank Notepad document:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 2) I changed http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to my actual affiliate link:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://mrdomains.jamorama.hop.clickbank.net”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 3) I created a main folder called “recommends” and then a sub-folder called “guitar-lessons” and I saved the file as index.php in that folder.

Step 4) I uploaded the folder “recommends” with everything in it to MakingMoneyOnline.com and I was done.

Step 5) Now, whenever I want to promote Jamorama, I just point people to: http://www.makingmoneyonline.com/recommends/guitar-lessons and it takes them right to Jamorama via my affiliate link. Give it a click and see it works.

After you have done this once, from then on all you need to do is create the file and affiliate folder and upload them into the “recommends” folder and you are done, which literally can be done in less than one minute.

This method also REALLY WORKS GREAT when you create eBooks and eCourses, or even offline affiliate marketing. I have even used this method on business cards.