Howdy all,
I've just spent the past week or so getting the Ubercart Affiliate2 module working and modifying it to work in the context of Virtualmin.com and our product lines.
What's that mean? It means that you can now make money by talking about or advertising Virtualmin products on your website.
Check out the terms and directions for signing up on the Virtualmin Affiliate page, and feel free to comment, publicly or via email, on how you'd like us to make this a better program.
Note that this is all an experiment...we have a number of users who are responsible for selling a lot of Virtualmin products, but don't really fit into the reseller model, so I think this will make it a lot easier for them to make a little money and not have to deal with billing and long-term support and dealing with transferring serial numbers and such. With the affiliates program, we do all the hard work (including supporting the products), and you just have to tell people about how cool Virtualmin and Cloudmin are.
Because it is an experiment, things will change over the next few weeks as we figure out how people are using it, and how much it's costing us to support the generated sales. Payment rates (currently 15% for the majority of users) may change. Products other than initial purchase may get different rates. Our low end products are already pretty razor thin on margins because of support costs, but I think the affiliate program will bring in higher knowledge initial purchasers than ads via Google and other networks.
Note that you've gotta have a website we can look at, or we have to know you as a reputable service provider working with Virtualmin products. This is not a program for the "make money fast" crowd...this is a program for our friends to share some of the monetary benefits of this community and this ecosystem we've built together, while helping it grow.
We want to accommodate two types of user with this program:
Give the referral rate of 15%, you can expect to make anywhere from $8 to $149 per new license sold. I suspect that'll work out quite a bit better than CPC ads at a buck or so per click.
One cool thing worth mentioning: You can use your affiliate link to link anywhere in Virtualmin.com, not just the front page. We encourage you to get creative. For example, you could write a blog post about how you use Virtualmin or Cloudmin, and link to the relevant documentation pages. As long as your affiliate tag is in there, a cookie will be set, and you'll get a cut of sales we make to that reader. For example you can build a link like:
https://www.virtualmin.com/affiliate/62/documentation
Which will set the affiliate cookie, and then redirect to /documentation.
One caveat: Your affiliate referrals currently must come from the website you have on file with us (set it in the Affiliate Information field in My Account). This is to prevent spam and astro-turfing and such. We may relax this requirement in the future. To start with, we're erring on the side of caution.
Bonus eye candy, two new banners I made for the program (more will show up ASAP):
