Building a passive income stream with affiliate programs is easy if you know where to look! Many affiliates use Clickbank and make money from commissions from a product that is not theirs. What Clickbank is, essentially, is a company that acts as a go between- a moderator between merchants and people who want to sell their product for a piece of the profit.
The way affiliate programs work is, you have someone selling say an eBook on how to lose belly fat and another person who wants to help that person sell his book. This person, the affiliate, would get a 60-90% cut of the sale if they simply tell someone about his book and talk them into going and reading the persons pitch on his "sales site".
The seller of the product gives you the tools you need to be successful at selling his product, so all you have to do is tell someone about the book, explain how cool it is, then give them a link to read the sales page. This is where Clickbank steps in. They moderate your link so the sellers can't renege on the deal after the sale.
So let's say you want to sell that book, you signed up for an account and you searched their archives for products and found this diet book. You click "promote this product" in the sellers Clickbank affiliate page (where they tell you how much you can earn per sale, what the product is and even give you a gander at the website they built to help you close the sale) and start promoting the ebook via your affiliate link. Clickbank steps in and takes over the process from there.
The sellers site is the same for every affiliate seller- but they encode the link with YOUR Clickbank ID (they call it) "Hop-Link ID" or your account name ID you set up when you signed up (nobody else can use your ID it's unique to you and identifies you as the person who sent the customer to his site).
So let's say you sent the link Clickbank created for you complete with encryption and your Clickbank ID to a friend in an Instant message, email message, on your Facebook page, or on a site you built to rev up people's interest in the book (pre-qualifying traffic to the sales page). If they paste that url into their browser or click it- it will take them first to Clickbank.com where they will create a cookie on their computer to give you credit for the sale.
This happens invisibly, all the user sees is that they clicked a link and landed on a sales page. The actual sales page itself exists on Clickbank's servers (so they can moderate the sale). When the customer/your friend lands on the page Clickbank reads the cookie and sees that YOU sent them, and they link the "visit" to your account and wait to see if they buy.
If they do buy the book, they pay Clickbank through a processing page where they collect financial data (credit card info etc...) and when the sale is complete, Clickbank has all the money. Clickbank then gives you the agreed upon cut (the seller agrees to pay you a certain amount and Clickbank makes sure you get it before they get paid even) and pay the seller their cut, and Clickbank gets a small cut as well for expediting the secure transaction (for all parties).
Clickbank literally has tens of thousands of products and new ones every day arrive. They are 100% digital products so there is no shipping, no handling, nothing but a link to download the product being sold!
You can build sites, write articles, and even promote your Clickbank hop link (affiliate link) in your email signature, forum signatures, or anywhere someone could possibly see it and click through it to get to the sales page. Once that happens you get paid if they buy!
