Here is a different spin on affiliate marketing. Instead of trying to find an offer from an affiliate network, you can create your own affiliate program with your local businesses by negotiating a cut for leads and sales to the business.

ShoeMoney explains how to Make Money Online with Local Affiliate Programs and is a worthy read. Check it out.

What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Nothing!

I have fallen into the trap of doing too much reading and not taking enough action in affiliate marketing. Yesterday, I spent 5 hours reading everything I can on local small-business advertising and the concept seems to have some merit. The business model works as follow:

1. Find a small business niche and setup a web directory to list businesses in that niche. Let’s take “home inspectors” as a niche.
2. Use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to promote the heck of that web directory to get on the first page of Google’s search engine results page.
3. You want to have a page 1 landing for your local keywords such as, “seattle home inspectors”.
   • Perform cold calling or face-to-face selling with small business owners to advertise their business on this niche directory and get a web presence.
   • Demonstrate to the business owners how your directory is better than the non-local ones like yellowpages.com or superpages.
4. Offer a 1 year-lease on that website for $800-1000.

Rinse, repeat, and make money.

I spent some time thinking about this model and whether I wanted to pursue it. Like I said, there is merit in the concept and I can definitely see the potential. But my goal is affiliate marketing and this deviates from that goal. Maybe somebody will give this a shot and let me know how it works for you.