Affiliate Website Circle

I figure I will come out with the first idea although I'm not sure it is a great one.

My idea is having an affiliate website circle. Let me explain.

How many of you ever shop online? If you do, what do you buy? If you're like me, you occasionally buy stuff online, maybe once or twice a month. Most stores and online retailers have affiliate programs where you receive a % back of all purchases made by customers referred to their website from your website or your link. Imagine if you had a friend who owned a website that linked to a sporting goods store where he would receive 5% of any purchase you made from the store if you went through his website. Wouldn't you want to help out your friend in getting that 5%, especially since you are paying the same price either way?

Now imagine if you also had your own website as an affiliate for something else, say, a book store and you received 5% of any purchases made by customers referred through your website. Wouldn't it make perfect sense to have an agreement with your friend that if you buy any sporting goods you would buy through his website and if he buys any books he would buy through your website? Both parties then make 5% of each other's purchases.

With two people, this will not amount to much... Let's call them Joe and Bill.
If Joe buys $200 worth of sporting goods per year, 5% of this is $10. This would go in Bill's pocket, making a whopping 83 cents a month.
If Bill buys only $100 worth of books per year, 5% of this is $5 and Joe would make a life-changing 42 cents a month.

Sound worth it? Of course not. These are two people making very small purchases and only getting 5% of their referred customers' purchases. If you try to do something like this with a friend, it is not even worth your time unless you are both purchasing massive quantities of products from each other's affiliated stores, which is unlikely.

However, imagine if you had 10 friends that each had their own website working as an affiliate for different stores and only purchasing through each other's websites. Imagine if all 10 of your friends bought through your website as long as you did the same for them and their stores.

Then if there 10 people buying $200 worth of sporting goods per year, 5% of this is $100 a year or $8.30 a month. Still not a whole lot, BUT better than $0 a month, right? After all, you are not even working for this money.

What about 50 people? Now we're looking at about $500 a year or about $42 per month. Ok, so it might be hard to get this many friends involved in a project like this huh? That is my idea for this network on this forum.

Not let's look at it from another angle... let's say there are 12 people involved in the project to start and you're each making about $10 a month. Now we turn the tables on this a little bit. Choose one person from the group of 12 and have him advertise 12 websites on his own website, all with affiliate links. For one whole month have all 11 other people shop through his website. Remember, they are paying the same prices as they would if they didn't go through his website. Now that one person is looking at $1,320 a year extra income from doing nothing. As the next month comes around the corner, switch to a different friend's website.

What is the point of this? The point is that for that month, there will be a lot of traffic driven to this one website, owned by someone in the group. For this month while lots of traffic is being driven, this site is growing in Google page ranks and will rise in the ranks among Google searches. Therefore, more people will start shopping through his website that are not even involved in the project.

What else? Once enough sales are being generated for various stores through our websites, we will point out to them and ask if we can get a discount for our customers, even a small one such as 3% off of all their purchases if they purchase through our website. If agreed, now you can offer other people incentives to shop through your website rather than going directly to target.com or sears.com. Otherwise, you can offer other incentives to people who shop through your website to encourage lots of traffic.

Also, many places will offer you higher percentages of purchases when you generate more income for them. So if you help them generate $10,000 in sales per month, for example, they could raise your cut to 7%

Before long, we could have a group of 12 websites getting lots of traffic from everyday shoppers looking for deals and coupons for various stores from Google searches.

Then figure this amount...

Assume then each website has 200 people shopping at it each getting a 3% discount on everything they purchase! (Good deal for them)
So you get the remaining 4% left over (assuming we are now at the 7% level). If they each spend about $400 a year at the store through your website, then your cut would be a grand total of $3,200 a year or $267 per month.

Once word spreads as these people tell their family and friends that they can get 3% of anything they buy at such n such a store, your number of shoppers will increase as well. I don't think it's unrealistic to say that after 12 months you could have 1,000 people getting discounted products just for clicking a link. Now we're looking at over $12,000 a year. Nice little bit of income for just sitting around letting people shop. Not to mention that they are getting cheaper products themselves.

This is just an idea, brainstorming here. Any thoughts/suggestions/questions?

Thanks.