How To FIND Products and Services You Want, Then EARN FINDER FEES For Recommending Them

TIPS FROM A WORKING WEBMASTER - January 9004

by Michael Star - Publisher of http://www.AstrologyZine.com

Alexa ranks AstrologyZine.com in the top 23,000 sites on the Web!

Here's how you could profit from setting up your own Showcase page - and how to get it set up and hosted for free!

But first, here's a little "bonus" tip:

HOW TO SAVE UP TO 50% ON MOST OF YOUR INTERNET PURCHASES

- even if you don't want to get your own free Showcase.

If you are a new Internet marketer or are trying to set up a home business on the Net, this tip could save you a LOT of money on the books and software and services you are going to invest in to build your business. You're going be buying some anyway, so why not cut your costs if you can?

More than 2000 web businesses are listed in the Showcase, and ALL of them pay commissions to the person who helped them find a new customer who made a purchase. YOU could be that person!

See them at: http://www.finder-fees.com

When you are going to buy ANYTHING you see on the Net, first search the Showcase database for that product or service, or for the name of the company that sells it. If you find it listed there, you can click on the "Join" button to get to their affiliate sign-up page and become an affiliate yourself.

In most (but not all) cases, you can then use your new affiliate link to buy that product you wanted, and you will earn the affiliate commission FOR YOURSELF! When the company sends you the commission check, the money you get back is like a "discount" on your purchase. For e-books, it is usually 50% of the price! For downloaded software, it might be 25% to 50%.

In other words, when you are going to buy that $99 e-book anyway, you might be able to save $49 if you join the affiliate program first and then "sell" it to yourself! They are going to pay that $49 to someone, so it might as well be you!

This is a money-saving method many people don't know about, and even those who do know about affiliate programs may not be able to see that there is an affiliate program when they are on the company's sales page and ready to buy. That's why you need to check the Showcase database first!

See how much you can save by searching the Showcase database for the things you are planning to buy for yourself. Just click on this link to use the search box at the top of my own Showcase...

Click here: http://www.finder-fees.com

When you get there, be sure to save the URL in your bookmark file so you can find it again! (If you're using a Windows browser, just click on "Favorites" in the menu bar, then "Add to Favorites".)

By giving you this tip, I may be losing out on some commissions I might make if you bought something from my own Showcase, but giving my "Tips From a Working Webmaster" readers good money-saving and money-making tips is what will help this newsletter grow.

And now back to our discussion of how a Showcase can benefit you and your site's visitors...

I'm going to be talking about "products" and "services". A product could be something you "buy" or pay for once, such as an e-book; some software; a music CD or a DVD movie; an article of clothing or jewelry; a piece of equipment like a computer or DVD player or a CD burner - or anything that you buy for a one-time payment and the deal is complete.

A "service" is something you "rent" or pay for on an ongoing basis, usually monthly, such as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) which provides your dial-up or DSL or cable connection to the Net; your web hosting service; your cell phone service; your cable TV or satellite service; a magazine subscription; or any of the many business services provided by connecting to the Net - such as a subscription to a members-only web site, or an online credit card transaction service, or an online web stats service.

With "services" we are concerned more with the ongoing nature of the payment, not whether it's something like the professional services of an accountant, because these "services" often pay a recurring commission that continues for as long as the person keeps paying for the service.

How long have you been paying for your cable TV or cell phone? That's how long your commissions might continue coming in if you refer someone who signs up for a service like a cell phone, or wireless Internet, or web hosting.

What Your Showcase Can Do For You

If you had your own Showcase page, then you and your site's visitors (including your friends and family) could find listings, descriptions, and ratings for more than 2000 great products and services recommended by myself and other working webmasters - because we have checked them out and/or have used them ourselves!

We're not "marketing gurus" or the makers of the products - just independent web site owners who found these products and services worth buying, and liked them enough to recommend them to others. When you get your own Showcase, you can recommend some which YOU think are the best. That's how the list grows.

I'd never have time to find and list all these items myself, and even if I knew how to design something like the Showcase page for my site, it would cost me a lot of time and money.

But now anyone can get a Showcase for free! And they can get it set up in minutes, not months, so it can start earning income right away.

You can easily add a Showcase page to your own web site or "home page" for free, and earn money every month by referring your visitors to companies which offer affiliate programs. (I'll explain exactly how affiliate programs work in a following section of this article.)

For starters, you can add YOUR OWN favorite affiliate program right at the top of your Showcase page - where EVERYONE will see it! When they visit the site and buy the product, you earn the finder fee that program offers.

And ALL the items listed in the Showcase have affiliate programs you can join, because it's an "Affiliate Showcase".

You and your visitors will find some great guides, tools, software, services, and solutions dealing with many subjects. These have been recommended by people like you and me - because they tried them and liked them!

It's the best place to quickly find things a webmaster can use to build and promote his web site, since all the good ones are listed in one place - including EzineBlaze! Often you can get a "discount" on things you buy for yourself by joining the affiliate program and earning a commission on your own "sale".

Your Showcase is also a convenient place for ANYONE to search for items to BUY - from Auto accessories to Zodiac jewelry! You can send people to your Showcase and earn commissions on things they buy from the merchants listed there.

To see what your Showcase site would look like, just click here to see my own Showcase (or copy www.finder-fees.com into your web browser address bar):

www.finder-fees.com

You can use the search box at the top to find the category or subject which interests you, then read the various reviews and click to visit a seller's web site.

If you leave the box blank and also select "Recommended Programs Only" you can get a list of ALL the top-ranked programs. There's also a Directory at the bottom of the main page which shows categories of goods and services.

When you've seen the Showcase, read the rest of this article to learn more about how it all works, and how it could create a source of ever-increasing long-term income for you. There is even an ebook for sale there which tells you how to profit from your Showcase in ways you have not realized. You could sell that book on your own Showcase site and earn money from every sale.

I wish I had something like this when I first started my web site in 1996. But nobody had thought of it then, since there were few "affiliate programs" on the Net in 1996. Amazon.com was one of the first, and you can see how well this method of enabling other web site owners to earn finder fee commissions has worked for them! They only paid 5-15% commission on books. Now you can make up to 50% on many of the e-books you sell through your Showcase!

Get Your Own Showcase - It's Easy and It's Free!

All the companies listed in the Showcase pay finder fees for helping them make a sale - and many will also pay you a commission for helping them find another affiliate who helps them make sales. (Look for the "two tier" programs, which can be even more profitable because you can make commissions on what your referred affiliates are selling too.)

Sending your site's visitors to your Showcase page could earn you some finder fees on things they buy (as long as you have signed up as an affiliate for the company they buy from). The merchants are not going to lower the price they charge your visitor just because you didn't claim your finder fee, so you might as well take advantage of their offers to pay you.

You may already be in some of the listed affiliate programs, so you could easily edit your Showcase page to change the code to YOUR affiliate ID. You'll need to pay for a Pro showcase to be able to edit and rank the listings, but you could make much more money by doing this. Try the free version for a while, and then see if you think it's worth it to upgrade to Pro. (I did, and I'll tell you why in a later section of this article.)

Even if you don't have a web site, you can get a Showcase web site like this for free! Just tell people the URL and ask them to visit your personal Affiliate Showcase! (List its URL in your email signature line, or on business cards.)

It's a fast and free way to get started today with a Web business of your own, while you are still learning how to build and promote your own web site.

You'll have a professional-looking, database-driven web site which is ready to earn income for you in at least two ways. And there are tutorials and forums available there to help you learn how to get your web business growing fast!

Just sign up for one affiliate program of your choice. If you already belong to one that makes money for you, use that one. Or you can search in your own Showcase for one you like best, then sign up for it by clicking on the Join Program button. Then place the URL and your affiliate code for that program in the top spot on your Showcase page where ALL your visitors will see it.

You could make money when people sign up for that program, and also when some sign up as Pro members for their own Affiliate Showcase - which is an affiliate program too! In less than an hour after signing up for your free Showcase, you could have two "products" ready to sell on the Web, and you can add many more later.

Remember, you get to list YOUR favorite affiliate program in the BEST spot on the page, where your visitors are most likely to click on it and buy something that will earn you a commission. You get this even with the FREE Showcase membership, so what have you got to lose by trying?

You can sign up here... www.finder-fees.com

How This Can Help You (and your site's visitors)

Even if you prefer not to make money from your referrals, you could easily set up a free Showcase on your site just to help your visitors find the good programs - and avoid the scams and time-wasters. In the Showcase, the best programs are rated from one to five stars by the webmasters themselves. (If you upgrade your membership, you get to rate programs yourself, which can put YOUR favorite programs in top spots in the listings.)

Wouldn't you rather learn about them from another "average guy" who is actually using them, than from the sales pitches of the companies that provide them? At least you will know which products and services other webmasters are actually using and recommending. Your mailbox may already be getting bombarded with dozens of come-ons and con-jobs every day. Now you can check out any that interest you by seeing if they are listed in the Showcase database or not.

Your site's visitors might appreciate a list of recommended products and services, and now you can provide a really BIG list with ratings and short reviews - and without having to do all the work yourself!

You can start with the big list already provided. Later, if you upgrade to a Pro showcase, you can start rating programs yourself and changing the affiliate codes so you earn the finder fees on all the programs you have joined yourself.

The REALLY profitable part has just been hinted at.

You don't get the biggest profits for free - you get them by going "Pro". You can become a professional profit maker with your investment of a little extra money and a little bit of time.

This is the part most people won't see when they first look at the Affiliate Showcase. And those who see it may not "get it" - the great potential for this money tree to grow all by itself once you plant the seed!

When you are a Pro member, those ID codes of yours will also appear automatically in EVERY Showcase set up by free members who signed up from YOUR Showcase (unless they upgrade to Pro and actually get around to changing some of those affiliate ID codes to their own). AND your ID codes will also appear in every new Showcase which is created by people who are in the lines of members referred from THEIR Showcase.

All your ID codes appear in EVERY new Showcase down the line of members you referred, and all those who they may refer - except where a member upgrades and changes some programs to use his own ID. But there are over 2000 programs listed, and he or she might not change all (or any) of the ones with your ID.

No one is going to join 2000+ affiliate programs, so some (or even most) of the links where you joined the programs and re-coded ID's in your own Affiliate Showcase will likely remain unchanged in other people's Showcases - and will spread through their own expanding line of new Showcase owners.

The ones that are not changed get passed down "as-is" to others in their lines - and those could be YOUR codes!

Over time, this could result in a very LARGE number of Showcase pages displaying programs, products, and services coded to YOUR affiliate ID. You may end up making money from the Showcase sites of many people you don't even know! And that could produce a very large income for you, one that keeps growing each month as more and more people in your line of referrals get their own Showcase sites.

When you see the potential, I think you will want to updgrade your membership to the Pro level. Then you can sign up for all the programs you want to, and change the affiliate codes on your Showcase site so you can make commissions on a wider range of products and services.

There is a monthly fee to maintain your Pro membership and its privileges, but keep in mind that you would also have to pay to maintain a web site of your own to be able to present all those affiliate programs you have joined to your own site's visitors. You don't need to pay for the hosting or bandwidth on your Showcase site. You don't even have to design and build the site.

For that monthly fee, you get the advantage of all those links with YOUR affiliate codes being automatically passed on to a potentially large number of other Showcase sites, and thus giving them much greater exposure to the people who might buy the products and generate commissions payable to you. This is where you could earn an even bigger income than the commissions from sales on your own Showcase site. It may take several months to see the results, but they could be better than you imagined.

To get started, click here... www.finder-fees.com

When you get a free Showcase site, you get the chance to see how it works, and you get the opportunity to make finder fees in two ways:
(1) from promoting an affiliate program of your choice which gets featured in the best spot at the top of your Showcase page;
(2) from the Showcase affiliate program itself, when people who visited your Showcase sign up for a free membership and later upgrade to a Pro membership.
It's not a lot, but how much do you expect to make from an investment of zero dollars?

You could profit from the experience itself, even if you didn't earn many commissions from the two affiliate programs. You will see things the savvy webmasters are doing to earn money from their web sites, and learn how to do those things yourself. And you may find some affiliate programs which end up making a lot of money for you in some way.

The free Showcase gives you a chance to "try it before you buy it". Once you see your own Showcase in operation and see all the additional ways you could make money, you can choose to upgrade to a Pro membership and take advantage of all those extra opportunities to earn finder fees on many programs, not just the two programs your free membership allows.

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I should mention that there is also an "Executive" membership which costs a little more than "Pro". It pays you a higher commission rate when someone upgrades from Free to Pro; allows you to add your own HTML text in the center of the main page; and also lets you use your own domain name to point to your Showcase site (I set up http://www.finder-fees.com to do this).

If you ever decide to cancel your membership at some future date, then having promoted your own domain name URL instead of the Showcase URL will still allow anyone who has saved that URL to find you later. The time and effort (and perhaps money) you have invested in advertising your Showcase site can still benefit you, because you have been advertising your own domain URL, not the one which belongs to Affiliate Showcase.

I call this "investment insurance". I want to ensure that what I invested in this venture can still profit me somehow by being sure that people can find me at my domain URL or at the email address for that domain. This is especially important when you have other sites linking to your Showcase site, or have that URL listed in newsletters that are still archived, or in the bookmark files of people who intended to visit again later.

You may not want to spend the extra monthly fee to do this, but I wanted to let you know why this might be a good idea which you can use with any other Internet venture you may end up investing time and money in. Right now that finder-fees.com URL links directly to my Showcase site, but I could later create a separate site with its own "content" and have the Showcase be one of many things I link to from that site. It only cost me $15 to register the domain, and it keeps my options open when I own the domain name. (It's like having your own business telephone number, instead of giving out someone else's phone number to your potential customers.)

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What I like about this showcase concept is that we are sharing the profits, not just taking from someone else. I can't handle being in ALL the affiliate programs offered in the Showcase, and my site's theme may not be compatible with many of them. So if I join the programs that have products that are likely to appeal to my site's visitors, that leaves the codes for the other programs pointing to the people who joined before me.

I don't mind them making some money on those programs I am not interested in promoting. What I don't earn from my own Showcase, I might earn from one owned by someone who signed up after me. With over 2000 affiliate programs being offered, there's enough for everyone to share in the finder fees!

And letting others keep adding their own recommended programs also lets me present a much wider choice of products and programs to my visitors than I could find and list by myself. When my visitor can find what he wants on my site, even if its something I won't directly profit from, he or she is more likely to remember that good experience and come back to my site the next time he needs something I can provide.

Getting Started Faster Means Growing Your Business Faster

All you have to do is set up one Showcase page with your affiliate ID codes, and then send people to see it. Your business can grow in the same way a virus propagates from one person to many - which is why it's called "viral marketing". It worked for Microsoft when they bought Hotmail.com - and it can work for you now!

You can start by putting your Showcase URL at the bottom of all the EMAIL you send out - just as hotmail.com did to spread the word. Plant the seeds now, and just wait for the money tree to grow and drop its fruits into your lap!

Not Ready to Build Your Web Business Yet?

You can just use the Showcase listings to find things you could use yourself - ones which people like you have used, and which they believe are good enough to recommend to others.

Don't forget that you are also a CUSTOMER who BUYS THINGS. You've bought before, and will buy some more.

It would be great if you found things and bought them through MY Showcase, but I would recommend you get YOUR OWN Showcase and buy the stuff you want if it's listed there. If you sign up as affiliate before you buy, in many cases (not all) you can earn back part of the selling price as a commission on the sale (10-50%).

Even though you get the commission instead of me, I may still get something for referring you as the company's new affiliate - and that way we both come out ahead!

And for the few affiliate programs where you simply cannot get a commission on your initial purchase, maybe you could let me earn something for referring you to that product if I am already in the affiliate program? If I am, then my ID code may already be listed with that program in your Showcase. (It might be a kind of "karmic payback" for all the time and effort I put into in writing out these helpful tips for you to use.)

And if not mine, that code may be the ID of the person who turned me onto the Showcase concept. I hope he has been making a little money on the ebooks I have already found and bought through my Showcase. I feel he's entitled to it.

There are some really useful Internet marketing ebooks in the Showcase listings. I bought some myself. Now I can make some money for recommending them, because I joined the affiliate program for those books I liked.

There are also lots of interesting books, courses, and products dealing with a wide variety of subjects - things which your site's visitors might want to BUY, even if they don't know what an affiliate program is, or don't care to join any. The Showcase is designed to showcase affiliate programs and the products they offer, but it can also serve as a useful and profitable SHOPPING CATALOGUE for you to present to your visitors!

Keep that in mind - your Showcase is both an affiliate program referral and ranking service, and also A HUGE WEB STORE with goods from over 2000 suppliers! Each affiliate program listed there is for a product or service, and your visitors might FIND and BUY some of them!

You won't have to worry about shopping carts and credit card processing - since the merchants in the list all take care of that themselves, and just send you a commission check for the sales that are made!

All you have to do is send people to your Showcase page. Your part in the supply-and-demand equation is simply to find where there's a demand, then offer your Showcase as a source of supply. You can start with your own Web friends. They need to buy things from someplace - so why not start looking for them in YOUR Showcase?

In the old days, they used to call that "bird dogging" for a salesman. You don't have to be the salesman, just the "bird dog" who points potential customers to the right place to buy what they are looking for. Your Showcase is that place, and the "salesmen" are the web sites of the merchants whose affiliate programs are listed there.

What's great about the Net is that you can even set up a web site to do all the "bird-dogging" for you automatically, so you don't have to do much else once you have set it up.

How Affiliate Programs Work

(1) If you feel you can recommend a company's product or service, you just sign up as one of their "affiliates" and get a special link (containing their URL). You then use that link with a text ad or banner ad on your web page(s). Or you can send the link in a letter, or print it on a business card or flyer (or put it in a newsletter like this one).

(2) That special link includes your own name, or your ID code number; so when your visitors click on it to view the company's web site, the company knows the referrals came from you!

(3) If your visitors buy something they like, you get paid a commission for those referrals. If they signed up for a service with ongoing monthly fees, often you will receive an ongoing monthly commission!

You helped the customers find what they want, and you helped the company make some sales. What they didn't have to pay for advertising and marketing, they can afford to pay to you. Everybody wins!

Often, when you are using a useful service yourself, you will recommend it to others. Now you can let those honest and helpful recommendations help pay for that same service you are using!

Save More Time, Make More Money

Before I set up my Affiliate Showcase I would spend a lot of time finding companies and putting links into my web pages, but now it's so much easier! I can just add a link on my site so people can come to my Showcase and find lots of companies to choose from (over 2000). Any time I want to join a new affiliate program, I can find it and sign up right from my own Showcase page - and then it can automatically start earning me extra finder fees when people join that program or buy the product.

Or I can add a link in a letter like this, and you'll see my Showcase when you click the link below.

www.finder-fees.com

When you get there, click on the "1-Minute Intro" at the left to see how it works, then click on "The Melissa Project" to see how teenage Melissa set up her own Showcase page. If she can do this, so can you! Most of the work is already done for you.

I invite you to click on the "grab a site now" link at the top left of my Showcase page to get your own FREE Showcase site working for you today! It only takes a few minutes to get your own Showcase site working, and then you can link to its URL from your own web site or from your own email letters.

Then you can tell people about it, as I have just told you about mine. Send some letters to your contacts inviting them to visit your Showcase. Put up some links to it on your site(s), and then sit back and let it keep earning finder fees for you for a long, long time.

Once you see how easily you could make money with this system, you may want to upgrade to the Pro or Executive version to make even more income from more affiliate programs you personally recommend. I wish you every success in your new business venture!

Michael Star
Publisher of www.AstrologyZine.com

P.S. You can get your own free Affiliate Showcase page by clicking here: http://www.Finder-Fees.com

Find more Tips From a Working Webmaster at:
www.AstrologyZine.com/web-wizardry-shop.shtml

Here's an important one about
"Why Free Web Sites Will Cost You Way Too Much"
www.AstrologyZine.com/web-site-hosting.shtml