Financial & Travel Musings

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You might think that because there are thousands of companies running affiliate schemes around the world that there’s a lot of money to be made in it. There is, but not necessarily for you.

The problem with many of these schemes is that there are minimum payment amounts so in many ways it pays the companies running the schemes to have a thousand affiliates each bringing them one sale rather than one affiliate bringing them a thousand sales. In the first case the only cost to running the scheme is the administration as there’s often no sales commission to be paid whilst in the second case they’d end up paying out the commission at the highest band.

In general terms, that problem usually applies to companies running their own schemes therefore it’s usually better to sign up by way of one of the affiliate marketing companies such as TradeDoubler or CommissionJunction. They obviously take a slice of the commission that would otherwise go directly to you but at least you avoid the problem of having a series of small payments due yet none of them above the minimum for a payout.

Clearly there are some affiliates who go all-out in their marketing of the products and they do very well as you’d expect but it’s far from the easy job that many people seem to think. For example, even though I run a series of travel accommodation websites and religiously place affiliate links for car rental on pretty much every appropriate spot, in reality I get under $100/year from the affiliate links from those sites.

In fact, car rental doesn’t pay a massive amount (usually around $10/rental) but there are other affiliate links that pay quite substantial chunks of cash. Of those, probably among the most lucrative are house sales and online casinos.

The link on this page probably isn’t a fair test of the affiliate schemes but, on first sight, you’d think that at least some people would click on it and buy something. Frankly, I’d be very surprised if anyone did, but if they do, I’ll update this post. Go on… ruin my day and sign up for an Amex card (free to you, few dollars to me).

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Let’s face it, many people would love a job where they could sit out on the beach and claim that they were working.

Whilst it’s clearly not an option for everyone, there’s getting to be quite a growth in information jobs which would let you do exactly that. Well, in principle anyway: as always, it’s rarely so simple as it might appear.

If you consider the very popular route of blogging, you’ll find that the vast majority of blogs don’t make any sizeable amount of money. Why? Well, the normal route of using adsense doesn’t work particularly well with sites with dynamic content as it usually takes adsense a couple of days to get the keyword targeting right by which time your blog will have moved on and a different set of keywords would be relevant. Secondly, you need major traffic or very well targeted traffic for affiliate schemes to work.

However, there is the option of doing sponsored posts which can be profitable even with relatively low traffic volumes. Typically you can make around $20 per day on a site with PR2 or above by writing three or four articles each day of, usually, 50 to 200 words each. If your blog gets to PR5 or over you can do really well with this option.

Other potential options are selling e-books or charging for subscriptions which are popular with some making money online blogs. There’s even SubHub which might eventually evolve into a worthwhile venture for the participants although at the moment it’s mainly an article repository for Internet business articles with a sideline in running up and hosting custom blog templates (at a rather exorbitant price).

Naturally, you don’t need to choose one single route to making money online. Personally, I do sponsored posts on blogs (not, so far, on this one) and also have a range of adsense funded sites with subscription options.

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Oh, you thought that you had some personal privacy? Sorry, it seems that you’re wrong and that you ARE being watched.

For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

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