You must be thinking to yourself, “Affiliate links? Aren’t they for casuals that are out for a quick buck.” You’d be right, but as a freelancer, your bread and butter is service to your clients and adding value against stiff competition. This can lead to aggressive downward pricing of your services. So this will be a short series of ways you can get some additional pay without charging your clients extra and loosing competitive pricing. The goal here isn’t to push products, nor is it to annoy your friends and colleagues, instead the idea is to use affiliate links for purchasing materials, equipment and other requirements. When you do this, however, I would strongly recommend you disclose to the customer you are using affiliate links and ensure that the final price does not increase their costs.
When shopping around for programs it is good to try to make sure you use as few as possible, it ensures your payouts are regular and larger as occasionally greater volumes can lead to greater cuts.
Amazon Affiliate
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com
This is the most widely used program, it is free to sign up. There are incentives for electronic components, business and industrial supplies, ebooks, TVs, and all sorts of other equipment. The pay structure is monthly with net-60 terms meaning 60 days from the end of the month you will get that months commissions.
Amazon consultants can also get reseller benefits with AWS, however there needs to be sustained sales. It is something to keep in mind when bidding large projects!
https://aws.amazon.com/partners/consulting/?nc2=h_ql_pa
I used amazon as a case study, there are hundreds of opportunities out there, from domains, SSLs, CPanel and VPS resellers, for smaller operations. I started freelancing with a cPanel reseller package from inMotion hosting quite a few years ago. It helped get me a little extra money per month that I used to mitigate fixed costs, ie domains, server prices, test sites for the clients to see and had a backup if I got into trouble. I progressed to running my own reseller server on a dedicated box. But that’s another post. Don’t follow in my exact footsteps use this as an example and