How Can Affiliate Marketing Supplement Your 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 simply the same principle applied on a much larger scale.
Every business needs to acquire new customers in order to survive, but the process of getting those customers can be very expensive.
Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing?
Most people that have even a little 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 very simple. Just send a potential customer to the sellers web page and if they buy, you get 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 is also the number of people that click your affiliate link compared to the number that visit your site.
You can get a very rough idea of your potential sales by using a conversion rate of 1%. Some conversion rates can be as high as 10% or more but 1% is a reasonable place to start.
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 have a 1% conversion rate as well, then one of the prospects you send will purchase the product and you will make a commission on 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 depends on the numbers. Bring more people to your web page and increase your conversion and you will make 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 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 imagine you have several web pages all getting a similar amount of traffic. That’s affiliate marketing.
