Can Affiliate Marketing Supplement Your Retirement Income?

Affiliate marketing on the Internet is just the newest application of the normal business practice of receiving 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 just the same principle but applied on a much grander 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.
In the online world, there are affiliate programs for practically any product or service you can imagine.
The process is straightforward. Just send a potential customer to the sellers web page and if they buy, you get a commission.
If you have a popular, high traffic web site, affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. It's all a matter of conversion.

What is Conversion?
Conversion is expressed as a percentage and is the number of people that purchase compared to the number of people you send to the seller's page. It is also the number of people that click your affiliate link compared to the number that visit your site.
You can get a rough idea of your possible sales by employing a conversion rate of 1%. You could achieve conversion rates as high as 10% or more but estimating the rate at 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 you will send 100 visitors to your seller's 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 hinges 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 that exampe again using a 10% conversion rate. With a 10% conversion rate 10,000 visitors to your web page will result in 1,000 click-throughs. If the landing page also has a 10% conversion rate, you will make 100 sales for the week or 100 x $ 30 = $ 3,000 or $ 12,000 for the month.
Now, let's picture having several web sites that are all getting about the same amount of traffic. That's affiliate marketing