How to Get Cash Back on Everything You Buy

February 26th, 2007 | Revenue Generation

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As the owner of a website, you are instantly empowered with the ability to get cash back on virtually everything you buy — sometimes very significant cash.

For instance, how about…

  • $55 just for getting a refinance quote from LendingTree
  • $30 for signing up for Vonage
  • 20% off ink cartridges at CarrotInk
  • 35% off a Wall Street Journal subscription
  • 15% off the already great prices at Zappos.com

And the list goes on and on! Literally thousands of companies are virtually begging you to let them pay you for sending them sales.

Where do they do this begging? Commission Junction, LinkShare, and other affiliate program sites.

An “affiliate program” is an organized way for companies to pay you for generating business for them, and they’re available to just about everyone with a website. Heck, lots of them don’t even require you to have a website.

A complete discussion of affiliate programs and making money from them is way outside the scope of this one post, but here’s how to use them to get cash back:

  1. Sign up at Commission Junction. (I recommend CJ, as they’re known, because they’re by far the easiest to use and have a vast number of advertisers.)
  2. Whenever you’re about to buy something, whether it’s a product or a service, check CJ to see if the company, or a possible alternative, has an affiliate program.
  3. If they do, sign up and get an ad link to them.
  4. Figure out how to work the link into your blog, so you can get commission from other people’s purchases, too, and then use the link yourself to make your purchase.

That’s all there is to it!

You can also go directly to the company’s site and look around to see if they have an affiliate program. Usually the link is in the little links at the bottom of the page if they have one.

Need some ideas of how to work the link into your blog? Here are a couple of examples:

  1. Make an announcement that will be helpful to your readers: For all you nurses, Zappos.com has free overnight shipping right now on all Dansko clogs.
  2. Create a Things I Love or The Last 10 Things I Bought section in your sidebar.

Just be creative and see what happens!

Update: I forgot to mention what may be your best bet for this. Amazon has an affiliate program that actually pays out pretty well once you get a handful of orders. If you order through Amazon regularly, might as well do it from a link on your site.

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