Can Affiliate Marketing Supplement Your Retirement Income?

Submitted by: Geoffrey Wells

Affiliate marketing on the Internet is simply the latest application of a normal business practice of earning a commission for a referral. Lawyers, real estate agents and many other professions have sent customers to colleagues and received a piece of any generated business for years. Affiliate marketing is simply the same principle applied on a much larger scale. Every business needs customers to survive but the process of acquiring customers is actually one of the biggest expenses for most businesses.

Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing? Almost anyone with some basic knowledge of computers and the internet can do affiliate marketing. It’s becoming a very popular way for baby boomers to supplement their retirement income. In the online world, there are affiliate programs for practically any product or service you can imagine. The process is straightforward. Send a potential client to the seller’s web page and, if they buy something, then you will receive a commission. If you have a popular, high traffic web site, affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. It’s all a matter of conversion.

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What is Conversion? Conversion is stated as a percentage and is the number of people that complete a purchase compared to the number of people sent to the sales page. It can also be expressed as the number of people that click on your affiliate link as compared to the number that visit your web site. You can get a very rough idea of your potential sales by using a conversion rate of 1%. Your actual conversion rates could be as much as 10% or more but 1% is a good starting point. Let’s assume you have a web site that gets 10,000 visitors per week. If 1% click on your affiliate link, that means you will send 100 visitors on to your seller’s landing page. If they also have a 1% conversion rate, then one of the leads you send will make a purchase and you’ll receive a commission for the sale. If you are selling, for example, a $ 50 ebook with a $ 30 commission, you can expect to make $ 120 a month from this page.

How Do I Make Real Money? It all depends on the numbers. Guide more people to your web site, increase your conversion and you will earn more money. Get started by carefully choosing the product you wish to sell. A lot of people start their affiliate marketing business by promoting Clickbank products. Clickbank.com is a company that acts as the agent for people selling digital products – software, ebooks, etc. – anything that can be downloaded directly to the purchaser’s computer. Every sale goes through them and you can be sure you will be paid your commission. The list of available products will show you the conversion rate of the page you will be sending your leads to. Not it is up to you to presell the customer and get the highest possible conversion rate for your affiliate link and your seller’s landing page. Let’s try out example again but this time with a 10% conversation rate. With a 10% conversion rate 10,000 visitors to your web page will result in 1,000 click-throughs. If the seller’s landing page can also generate a 10% conversion rate, then you’ll make 100 sales for the week or 100 x $ 30 = $ 3000 or $ 12,000 for the month. Now, let’s assume that you have several web pages that are all getting a similar amount of traffic. That’s affiliate marketing.

About the Author: Geoff Wells is the owner of the Geezer Guides blog –

geezerguides.com

– a resource and guide for baby boomers.

Source:

isnare.com

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