September 2007, and the rugby World up is taking place in France.

As seems to be the thing in global tournaments these days, some games are held in a different country, so rather bizarrely, New Zealand and Scotland are playing in Scotland.
That's odd as it gives an extra advantage to the Scottish, but I'm more interested in the profit potential of another strange thing about this match...

In the run up to the game, the teams toss to see who is designated as the 'home' team.
It doesn't make a huge amount of difference, but it does mean the home team gets to wear their normal choice of kit.

Scotland won the toss, and New Zealand therefore had to wear an 'away' kit.

Instead of their famous all black kit, they came out in what they called 'silver' jerseys.
It looked grey to me, but I'm happy to go with silver.

The thing is, the Scottish team had jerseys which had panels of colour, some dark blue and some in a blue so light that it looked grey.

You might be ahead of me on this one, but with the New Zealand team now wearing top with panels in colours of black and grey, with both teams wearing dark shorts and socks, and you had the ridiculous scenario of both teams looking virtually the same!

It would have been better if the All Blacks had been allowed to stay with, er, all black!

Oh well, the result was decidedly normal, a big win for New Zealand, but I'm always interested in niche marketing, and particularly in sport, so the silver jerseys made me take note...

There are a couple of ways to profit from them.

One way would be to set up your own site.

You'd get to keep all the profits, but you'd have to create and maintain the site, handle all the sales and customer support issues, negotiate a deal with the shirt manufacturers and buy stock upfront.

That's not the way I prefer - I prefer to be an affiliate.

With this method you find a site that already sells the jerseys, and that has an affiliate programme.

Once you sign up, you send traffic to their site, but the traffic is logged as being sent by you.
If anyone buys, you get paid a commission.

Obviously the commissions aren't as much as you'd get if you ran the site, but they can add up quickly, and remember your cost is nothing to do it.

I love the affiliate marketing model, and I love sport, so to combine the two always makes me smile, which is why I enjoyed seeing the potential of silver watching New Zealand play rugby!