The Lazy Man’s Way to Internet Riches

You can make money by selling products or services on the Web. But what if you have no products of your own to offer? One of the most popular methods to do so is affiliate marketing, which lets you earn money by marketing other businesses' products and services. In a previous Hub I explained how easy it is to set up a virtual storefront using Amazon's aStore, but what if you want to go beyond Amazon? How about selling more than 30,000,000 products selected from about 1,000 merchants? Keep on reading...

Affiliate Networks

Some businesses let you sign up directly with them to sell their products and earn commissions, but many have joined affiliate networks, which eases the administrative burden for both the business and the publisher. When you join one of these networks, you gain access to hundreds or even thousands of potential advertisers at one swoop. Each one has its own conditions for accepting publishers and its own methods for how you must add advertiser links to your site. Some of the more notorious are Commission Junction, LinkShare and ShareASale to mention a few.

PopShops

PopShops is a nifty service that lets you sell all sorts of merchandise on your site and make money through affiliate programs. So, if you have a blog about pets and wanted to sell pets stuff, you could hand pick selected products and add a shop to your site. It's an easy way for lazy people to put together an online store that they don't have to maintain. It's incredibly straightforward to create a shop that mixes and matches products from different merchants from several affiliate networks (currently over 1000 merchants including Buy.com, Overstock.com and CafePress offering more than 30 million products and counting).

PopShops lets you make money from its associations with networks including Commission Junction, LinkShare, Performics, Red Galoshes, LinkConnector and ShareASale. If you're already member to one of these networks, use your existing affiliate number to roll together the two accounts. Otherwise you'll have to sign with one or all of them first.

Their basic free service lets you establish up to ten stores, marketing up to 100 products each. You risk nothing by using the freebie service and test the waters. PopShops Pro ($5 per month) allows you to create an unlimited number of shops and lets you add SEO code. PopShops Enterprise ($30 per month) also lets you manage multiple affiliate IDs, useful if you run several Web sites. A 15-day free trial is available for Pro and Enterprise accounts.

One, Two, Three

You can set up a PopShops account in 5 minutes. Once it' is created, follow a simple three step process to build your shop:

1. Pick your items: You can search by keyword across more than 30 million products from your favorite merchants and affiliate networks. Browse products and add them with a single click

2. Click to customize: You have total control over the look of your shops. Use the Style Editor to customize one of the built-in styles, or create your own. Rearrange thumbnails, add text, resize images and so on.

3. Pop the storefront into your website: The last step is publishing your shop. Just copy the code snippet and paste it into the HTML of your site where you want the storefront to appear. All plans support JavaScript, TypePad, or Blogger.

I tried the free plan and quickly set up ten stores for my Blog. You can see some results here and here. They completely and seamlessly integrate into my layout. It is so amazingly simple to use that your Grandma could do it.Two thumbs up for this super cool service. This is a game changer for affiliate marketing for sure.