Five Tips for Seniors to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing:

By: Skip McGrath

Affiliate marketing can be very profitable if you do it right. This is a great online home business for seniors who have some basic computer skills. Once you do the initial work, then it requires little maintenance.

Most people starting out in affiliate marketing start with a blog or a website where they place content that people are searching for. It can be about almost anything just so the content is honest, fresh and original. Here are a couple of examples:

There is a retired policeman in our neighborhood who loves Mac computers. He reads all the magazines, newsletters and blogs related to everything Mac. Last year he started his own blog where he post Mac tips. He does one tip a day. Once the blog was set up he can do his daily post in about 10-15 minutes and then he is done for the day. He has banners on his site from companies that sell Mac computers accessories and software. It took about 4 months for Google to find his blog and start indexing it. Now he is pretty high up in the search results. The last time I spoke with him he was bringing in about $3500 a month in affiliate commissions.

Another fellow I know lives in Alaska where he is retired from a State job. He loves to fish and knows everything there is to fishing in Alaska. He's not a very good writer, so he contacts fishing guides, tour companies, boat operators and fishing lodges and says that if they write an article about fishing he will put the article on his website with a link to their business. So this gives him tons of free content which come up when people search. On those pages he also has Google AdSense ads and affiliate banners from advertisers related to fishing. He started his website about a year ago. Initially he put about 40 hours over a three-week period setting it up, but now he only spends about 2 hours a week on maintenance and uploading new content. He is now clearing over $2500 a month in affiliate revenues.

So once you figure out what area you are going to work in, here are some tips to making more money with affiliate marketing.

Here are five key steps you want to follow to make money with affiliate marketing.

1. Only join affiliate programs that offer products and/or services related to your site. Credit Cards and mortgage applications may pay huge commissions, but if your website or blog is about fishing or quilt making, you won't get many readers clicking on your ads.

2. Only join and recommend affiliate programs to your readers and website visitors for legitimate offers. I like to sleep at nights. I have a mailing list of almost 50,000 regular readers. Because of this I am always being pitched by advertisers to recommend their program. About half of the programs I check out don't pan out. One of them promised me a $500 commission on each sale. When I checked it out (a well-known so called Drop ship company), it was a complete scam that had taken people for as much as $5000 for a worthless website loaded with products that were priced too high to sell and there was no way those websites would ever be found by Google.

3. Build a mailing list. Even a small list of just a few hundred names can be very valuable to affiliate marketers. If you offer a newsletter or coupons or some other incentive for people to join your list you will be creating a valuable marketing tool. But once you develop it -don't abuse it. If you are always sending junk out to your list, people will simply unsubscribe and your list will shrink faster than it grows.

4. Build trust with your readers. If you provide good content and reliable information, then when you personally recommend something your readers will follow your advice and purchase what you are recommending. A text link with a personal recommendation will outperform banners about 10 to 1.

5. Keep your affiliate links and banners fresh. A lot of advertisers offer coupons and special deals. Take advantage of these and rotate them in and out of your site. Most good affiliate programs allow you to track which banners and links are working. Find those that work best and rotate them throughout your website or blog.

Follow these steps and you will see your affiliate income soar.

Skip McGrath
Head Geezer
Official Geezer Guides, Inc.