Can Affiliate Marketing Supplement Your Retirement Income?
By nichemarketing | December 8th, 2009Affiliate marketing on the Internet is just the latest application of a regular business practice of receiving a commission for a recommendation.
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.
All businesses need customers in order to thrive, however, the process of getting new customers can be one of the largest expenses a company has.
Can Anyone 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.
On the Internet, there are affiliate programs for just about any product or service you can imagine.
The process is very simple. Send a prospective customer to the seller’s web site and, if they purchase, you earn a commission.
If you have a popular web site, affiliate marketing can be very successful. It’s all a matter of conversion.
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 rough idea of your possible sales by employing 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 say you have a web page that gets 10,000 visitors a week. If 1% click on your affiliate link you will send 100 visitors to your seller’s page. If they too have a 1% conversion rate, one of the people you send will purchase the products and you will get the commission for the sale. If you are selling, for instance, a $ 50 software program with a $ 30 commission, you can expect to earn $ 120 a month from this page.
How Do I Make Real Money?
It all hinges on the numbers. Guide more people to your web site, increase your conversion and you will earn more money. Begin by carefully selecting the product you want to sell. A lot of people start their affiliate marketing business by promoting Clickbank products.
Clickbank.com is a company that acts as the go-between for people selling digital products – software, ebooks, videos, etc. – anything that can be downloaded directly to the customer’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.
Tags: additional income, affiliate marketing, extra income, Internet Marketing, retirement income