When starting an online business, what youre ideally aiming for is passive income whether youre an affiliate marketer, or produce your own product so you dont have to physically find all your potential customers. You want them to find you! You want sales to happen even when youre asleep! While simply driving traffic to your website (by articles, advertising etc.) will help to do this, there is something else that you want to do get other people to do some of the work for you!

When you make a direct affiliate sale, you probably will receive anything up to 50 per cent in commission, but you should not underestimate the value of having other people sign up as an affiliate of the same product under your own affiliate link. As a second-tier affiliate, you will earn less commission from any sales they make (approximately 10 per cent or so), but you will not have had to do any work for this commission a very nice passive income indeed!

An additional advantage of second-tier commissions is that those affiliates signed up under you may be experienced affiliates already, and be supremely good at writing a sales letter to convince their visitor to buy a product. They also may have already built up a huge mailing list of subscribers who they can promote to and gain sales from, so already have a head start on your perhaps growing (but still small) list. It is undoubtedly better to earn 10 per cent of something, than 50 per cent of nothing!

One way of getting second-tier affiliates is by doing a joint venture. This requires doing searches on the internet for people with websites (and preferably newsletters or a sign-up form on their sites, so you know they have an existing subscriber list) interested in your subject, or in making money online generally. There are plenty of online business people and budding entrepreneurs out there!

Although collecting names and websites, and then contacting the webmasters to offer a joint venture can be a tedious procedure, and take some time to organise, your future, and ongoing, potential sales from this source make it a worthwhile sacrifice of your time and efforts! Good luck!