You are a grandparent. You are either retired or close to retiring. You see the writing on the wall with your retirement savings and what you will get from Social Security. You know that you are going to need supplemental income to get by, let alone do the things you want to do once you are retired. You will want to earn extra money for retirement.
Why not give affiliate marketing a try? You can start right away if you have a laptop and a WiFi signal. You can work at it, even though you might still be employed, to get it earning money by the time you are ready to retire. In this article, I will tell you what Affiliate Marketing is, how it works, and how you can get started earning extra money for retirement!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.” This is per Wikipedia.
As an affiliate marketer, I create posts using the SEO method of marketing, where I write content, using competitive keywords that generate traffic to my website. In the writing, I promote products that I can stand behind, and offer links to affiliate partners, which then in turn, give me a commission for directing sales their way.
Write About What You Love
Perhaps the best thing about being an affiliate marketer, is that you get to express your passion to other like-minded people. I have had so much fun writing about the things that are important to me, and having a community of people write back and say it’s important to them also. We are able to share our experiences and learn from each other. And that makes our passion that much more interesting and engaging.
Also, if you want to learn about a subject you know nothing about, content writing is a great way to do that. You can delve into the vast resources of the internet to research things you are interested in, or intrigued by, and you can write about them. Think about how much fun it would be to learn new things and challenge your mind while you are working!
Work on Your Own Schedule
Are you an early bird or a night owl? With Affiliate Marketing, you can work on whatever schedule you want. You can work wherever you want too, just so long as you have a laptop and a WiFi signal. Do you want to work at the beach? How about the local coffee shop? Or perhaps the library? You can work with whoever you want as well. Do you have grandkids to watch, or do you want to hang out with the spouse or the dog? You can do that with Affiliate Marketing. Also, the uniform doesn’t matter either. Want to work in your pajamas? Your bathing suit? Or your birthday suit? Anything goes.
My favorite is to work in my recliner, with soft music playing over the Google Mini, a fire in the fireplace, and a giant carafe of coffee close by, while wearing my giant hoodie sweatshirt and sweat pants. Or I like to work while watching TV, while laying on my couch and eating ice cream.
How Affiliate Marketing Makes You Money
You make money through Affiliate Marketing by promoting products, then directing your readers to make purchases of those products through your affiliate partner’s website. Your affiliate partner pays you a percentage of any sale that comes through your link from your website. It’s that simple.
As a content writer, you want to promote products that go with your subject matter. You want to help your readers enjoy your common passion by having the right materials and equipment. So, your affiliate partners will be those who provide the tools of your trade.
You write content that is keyword-rich. Keywords allow your content to be indexed on the search engines. So if your passion is tandem bicycles, and a potential reader types “tandem bicycles” into a search engine, your written content about tandem bicycles comes up toward the top of the search.
The reader opens your written article and reads about tandem bicycles, and finds a place to buy tandem bikes, or parts for tandem bikes, or bicycle clothing and shoes, or finds our there are clubs for riders of tandem bikes that hold events, rides, and fund-raisers. You have opened a new tandem bike world for your reader.
Your reader will then click on your affiliate links to buy the things needed for tandem bike riding from your affiliate partner. Your affiliate partner then pays you a percentage of the sale, and there’s your money!
Of course this needs to happen over and over again. But if you set up your website correctly, you will get thousands of people looking at your site, and perhaps hundreds of those will buy items through your site. It’s a numbers game. The better your keyword indexing is, the more traffic you will get, and therefore, you will get more sales.
Build Passive Income
A simple explanation for passive income, is where you don’t have to do work, but the money comes in anyway. This is a bit of a misnomer, because you DO have to work to get the income. Passive income, as associated with Affiliate Marketing, is where you do a bunch of work at the beginning to get your website up and running, so that later, with a bit of maintenance, the site will generate sales without a lot of work from you.
This is a great concept. You have heard of “making money while you sleep?” That’s kind of what passive income is. Think about it: you have set up a great website from good, traffic-generating keywords, and really good affiliate partners. You can sit back while people all over the world search “tandem bicycles” and buy tandem bicycle stuff, and your don’t have to lift a finger once your have done the initial work.
This is great for traveling and visiting your grandkids. You can take time away from the keyboard to visit the kids or see the sites, and your website is sitting there generating money. Then when you’re ready to work again, pick up the laptop and add more to your website, or create a new one with some new passion you have picked up.
The Best Place to Learn Affiliate Marketing
By far the best place to learn Affiliate Marketing is at Wealthy Affiliate. Click here to see a product review of Wealthy Affiliate. They have the best training and the best community for affiliate marketing that I have seen. They give you the whole package: the hosting, the SEO search engine, the tools, the visuals, the live chat, the discussion forums, the works! They take you by the hand and show you exactly how to set up a great website that will bring in your traffic, and they show you how to use your affiliate partners to make the money you need for retirement, medical bills, travel, and grandchildren.
This is right up my alley. I’m retired and looking for supplemental income. In fact, if I had planned earlier, your comments about getting this going before I retired makes a lot of sense. We hear every day about retiree’s who never saved enough and are struggling just to make ends meet.
The definition of affiliate marketing makes it sound very doable and not very intimidating. When you stop to think about it, retirees have a long lifetime where they’ve experienced so much, seems to me they’d have plenty to write about..I know I do!
It does seem that you can work from anywhere which makes it so much more appealing to me, particularly not having to deal with schedules. I’m hooked! Thanks for the online resource to look into.
Hi Tim, thanks for commenting. Yes, so far it has been very doable. You really have to do the work though. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. There are hurdles you need to jump over. But it is very doable and VERY enjoyable. I am proud of the work I have done in Affiliate Marketing so far, learning far more than I ever anticipated. Yes, please look more into Affiliate Marketing by clicking this link or any of the links in my post. Thanks again for reading and commenting! Rhonda
Affiliate marketing has by far proven to be one of the best ways to stay at home and have a business established and incur a stable income with time. It was well written and highlighted within your post and it was quite enjoyable to read. Do keep posting great content and highlights
Thank you for reading, Terone, I am hoping this will pay off like I think it will, and everyone at Wealthy Affiliate has assured me it will. I’m only two months into this, so it’s not paying yet. But based on the success stories I’ve read, if I follow the training, it will happen. I already am getting good traffic to my sites. Thanks again for reading and commenting! Rhonda
I personally think that affiliate marketing fits for anyone who wants to build financial freedom. I love the flexibility of working whenever you want to and you do not have to deal with the 9-5 uniform environment, oh! The commute as well.
Affiliate marketing sounds simple and self explanatory but I think in any kind of work that we are in we need a good fundamental knowledge and also the latest update on affiliate marketing in order for you to stand out and be relevant in the market. The platform like Wealthy Affiliate will walk you through that from the ground up and also the latest update loke Jay’s weekly live training 🙂 Hopefully one day I can make affiliate marketing my main income, one day at a time.
Hi Nuttanee, thank you for reading my blog and commenting. You are exactly right about the Wealthy Affiliate platform, and how it walks you through from beginning to a flourishing website. I am hoping to make affiliate marketing my main income too. Thanks again for your comment! Rhonda
Affiliate Marketing is indeed a great way to earn extra cash for retirement. The reality is, when the average person retires, the pension is not enough to cover living expenses and for those who don’t have an alternative source of income, this can be a little discouraging. It’s awesome that platforms like Wealthy Affiliate exists to gives persons an opportunity to earn extra from anywhere in the world.
The best things about affiliate marketing for me is that I have the option to choose any niche I feel comfortable working with and that for years to come I can keep earning from this. I really enjoy building websites using the Wealthy Affiliate platform and even if I don’t start earning right away there’s always the possibility later on.
I would encourage anyone to become an affiliate marketer. With hard work and dedication, it will be a great source of income
Thanks for sharing!
Brenda, thank you for reading and commenting. Yes, I agree with your comments about retirees and the fact that pensions won’t be enough to cover living expenses. I totally agree that Wealthy Affiliate is a great place for retirees and future retirees can learn this particular skill and can make extra money to be able to live when they retire. Hence the Affiliate Marketing for Grandparents title. I’m a grandparent, wanting to retire, and I have very little retirement saved, so I bet there’s plenty of people out there like me that can use this info. Thanks again for your comments! Rhonda