A new dimension to my promotion - affiliates

Just as I was getting ready to tell all my friends about the film and ask them to watch it and then send it off to their friends, I started thinking more about what happens when I get asked to do the same thing.

Most of the time, if I know the person, I'll read, watch, or vote on some action once, but like most people, I'm busy and if it isn't really easy, I'm not going to do it.

Why should I expect this to be any different for my friends who lead hectic lives juggling kids, careers, hobbies, relationships, etc?

We live in a society where money talks because money is a tool for us. We are motivated to do all sorts of crazy things for money. We get up before sunrise, battle traffic, hide behind a desk all day, deal with a boss that we don't understand, all for some money.

Why not offer to help the friends that I'm asking to help me?

Affiliates are not a new concept on the internet. We've all seen people promoting Amazon books on various websites. This is an example of how affiliates work. When someone orders one of these books on Amazon.com from an outside website or link, the person who made the referral gets a percentage of the sale.

There are many different affiliate programs and the complexity can be quite overwhelming as to how to implement some of these. Talking about all the affiliate sites in this posting is beyond the scope of this blog. I will link to some of the ones that I've looked into.

Staying true to the philosophy of my journey, I've decided to host my own affiliate program. Basically the way it will work is that when one of my friends refers one of their friends and that friend buys my movie, I'll give them a some cash back.

My goal with this project is to keep my start up expenses as low as possible. In another post I'll talk about each one of these expenses and how little I've spent.

I've managed to create a free script that will make the appropriate link for the affiliate. This is an e-mail to a friend link that will automatically create the appropriate affiliate link so that when the someone clicks on that link and orders a password to see our film, I'll know where the referral came from and then I can give them some money back.

You'll need to have a certain number of referrals before you get paid and I'm going to use paypal to pay my friends back.

I figure as this task becomes more challenging to complete, I'll utilize one of the established affiliate programs however I believe that I can handle quite a bit of the work initially.