I don’t want to drop teasers but starting Monday, I am going to do a series of tutorials on how to build an affiliate site starting with an affiliate t-shirt site.

For those who don’t know, an affiliate site is a website that you build with the sole purpose to drive affiliate sales.  I think some of the most common ones are the Amazon sites around the web but there are many other that you would not evern know are affiliate sites.

Whoselalers:

In the beginning, sales online were done through wholesalers.  Someone buys the product in bulk, then sells it at a markup for profit.  This is how every retail store works.  You get products at wholesale prices but you have to carry inventory and provide all the customer service.

If you have ever worked retail, you know how much fun it is not!

Drop Shipping:

The original affiliate sites were drop ship sites.  With drop shipping, you take orders, the customer pays you, then you send the order and payment to a distributor who ships it out but uses your name as the sender.  The customer thinks they bought the item from you but in reality, you were just the middle man taking the order.  You buy at less than retail and usually get to set your prices.

The upside to wholesale and drop shipping is that the customer is yours.  When they want to buy more, they come to you.  You get another sale.

The downside of this is the customer bought the item from you and you have to do all the customer service.  If they charge back or their check bounces, you are out of luck.

Affiliate Sales:

This is what it is all about.  With affiliate sales, you are paid for bringing in business.  When someone buys something, you get a cut.  The profits are generally less than with wholesale or drop shipping, but you do not have to do anything other than drive traffic.

Affiliate marketing is the business of driving traffic to and sales through you affiliate links.  It is that simple.

In the beginning of affiliate marketing, you had to hand code pages and they were not able to adapt to changes at the merchants.    These days there are extremely simple ways of making affilaite sites that look and feel like actual ecommerce sites.  So stick around, subscribe to the RSS feed and watch how easy we build an affiliate t-shirt site.