Once you’ve got your website sorted, you need to generate some income through it.

Here are my tips for getting started.

Amazon Associates

The Amazon Associates Program is one of the largest and most successful online affiliate programs, with over 900,000 members joining worldwide.

If you are a website owner, an Amazon seller, or a Web developer, you can start earning money today and earn up to 10 percent in referral fees.

Here’s the Amazon Shop for this Website-Academy.com by way of example.

How the programme works:

* Associates drive Internet traffic to Amazon.co.uk through specially formatted links that allow us to track sales and other activity

* Associates earn up to 10 percent in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links

* Amazon sends monthly payments to Associates

Once you join the program, Amazon will give you access to Associates Central, the area that is exclusive to Associates.

This is the place where you will build your links, view your performance reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities available to you through the program.

More information about Amazon Associates

Paypal

If you’re going to run an ecommerce site and take money, you need to make sure your site is secure, trusted and observes data protection regulations.

That’s a bit of a faff if you’re a small business and it can cost a lot of money to get you own customised e-commerce website up and running.

Start out simple and secure … Paypal’s merchant tools are brilliant if you’ve got a commercial site.

Paypal is a worldwide, trusted brand and it will give you and your customers security.

Even better, Paypal gives you all sorts of customised buttons for your website, so the minute someone starts the process of buying something from you, they’re transferred securely to Paypal.

In addition, Paypal give you transaction information for your accounts, which is really handy when you’ve got to face the taxman!

Google checkout

Google checkout is the ‘new kid on the block’ for e-commerce payments, but it’s caught on quickly, is easy to use and is backed by the giant that is Google.

Like Paypal, they handle all the security issues of an e-commerce site for you … which means your customers can trust you and you know that your customers will pay for your services.

Again, like Paypal, you get to keep your own website as you can copy and paste the code for the buttons into your existing site, rather than having to go through a third party site like ebay.

Find out more about Google checkout

Affiliates

A key part of e-commerce is becoming an affiliate which Wikipedia defines very neatly:

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.

More detail from Wikipedia

I’ve listed my favourite couple of affiliate sites below.

Basically you register, then pick complementary services to your own which may encourage people surfing you site to click away and spend money with one of your affiliate companies.

If they do spend money, you get commission.

Check out the two companies below, Tradedoubler and Webgains …

Tradedoubler

Webgains

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