For the past couple of days I’ve been mulling over some ideas. Mostly because I saw how I was doing in the Affiliate Marketing end of things… maybe it’s the time of year or I’m just tired of being nickled and dimed to death by the affiliates I’ve signed up with.

Of course I love my nickles and dimes.

I just want a bigger cut.

Who doesn’t??

Anyway…

I love Amazon. I really do - lots of available merchandise to flog on your sites. Of course they only pay out 4% per sale (when you start out each quarter and then you can move up the ranks… only to have to start over each quarter. Bah!) So anyway… I love the products - not so fond of the payout. Since working with Amazon more and more, I’ve had a little success with them. Actually their my biggest success so far. Which makes me sad about the 4% (yes, I’m really stuck on that 4% aren’t I!). I’ve made almost $2000 for them. Awesome right? So awesome I’ve made just over $100 dollars with them - for the effort. That makes me sad…. mad… *shaking my fist in the air*. I totally get that they need to make their money too - but I just wish the affiliate cut was more than 4% (ok, I’ll stop now!).

So my thought process has been mulling over the whole “different income streams” idea. Which makes sense - why put all your eggs in one basket right? But what different streams could I get into?

ClickBank Products
Affiliate Products
Ebooks
PPC engines
…. sell my own products??
Dropshipping

They all ran through my mind. I’ve been doing a little on the Clickbank stuff, working my butt off for the Affiliate Products, not really gotten into eBooks…. PPC engines - nice to suppliment (but I think having them on some of my affiliate sites takes away a potential sale… but I’ll deal with that later). Dropshipping - scary…. don’t know where to look for reliable/legit dropshippers. Selling my own products - sounds nice, but what do I have to offer?

Well, I thought about the last one a lot.

I think I have something to offer.

I have a website I could offer it on.

I wanted a shopping cart.

I looked around at the free carts available.

Saw that Template Monster was offering a really nice looking template for Zen Cart - for free. So I loaded Zen Cart up, and added the template from Template Monster. Did it work. Not so much. Not at all. The instructions for loading it up were poor - and I will admit that I didn’t ask their support for help (didn’t really think of it… and I’m not sure what they’d offer someone who just took a free template anyway). But it didn’t work. It was very, very frustrating. I’m not sure going by that experience with the free template I’d want to bother buying one from them. Those ZenCart templates are a bit more expensive than their run of the mill templates they have on offer.

I will admit that when I loaded their free Wordpress templates - I didn’t have any problems. It could just be the template I downloaded… maybe I’m not “getting it”. But I’m not that dumb. I just don’t think it works. Anyone else tried the ZenCart Free template from TemplateMonster… and it worked?

Then I tried working on Zen Cart itself. I just got fed up (because of the template debacle). So I uninstalled it and now I’m working with CubeCart. I’ve got one of their basic templates up - and now I’m going to try it out.

… Really after about 1 1/2 hours I realized that I hadn’t really accomplished much and decided to play the Sims 2 before I went to bed.

I hope CubeCart isn’t quite so challenging template-wise.

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