We have been focusing in on various retirement income streams that you can develop. Last time we looked at setting up systems to sell physical products via drop shipping. This time we are going to look at ways to sell products and services through what is know as the referral process.

Referral Income Streams

Have you ever bought a car at a dealership and the sales person offers you $50 if you send them someone who makes a purchase? This is a good example of referral income. There are many ways to get referral income. The best known one on the Internet is call Affiliate Income. It works in the same way it does with the car sales person. You send someone to a company’s website using the referral code they give you and if that person buys, you get the commission. Depending on the product or service you could get a commission of 5% to as much as 75% of the sale.

How Does Affiliate Income Work?

Let’s go back to the market research you did in our first article on retirement income. In that article, we had you find magazines that were in print and selling. This is a good indication of whether there is a potential market to sell a product or service. If there is a magazine, then there are advertisers and avid readers of that topic.

You can take your market you have verified and do a search on Google for affiliate programs __________. Fill in the blank with the topic or market. You should visit the sites for the products you have an interest in and see what the company offers to pay you for the products you sell for them. To give you an idea, companies like Dell, KMart, Old Navy, Sony, and Staples all have affiliate programs.

What Kind Of Money Can You Earn?

This varies with each individual, but there are many people who are actually earning a full time income on a part time basis through affiliate income. Similar to drop shipping, they are setting up sites and sending people to various products and services that visit their site. If you have a few sites up that are generating $500/month, it could be a great steady income stream which would put your wealth ratio well above one.

Free Video Training

If you would like to see more about how this works, my friend, James Martell, has a free video which will cover the basics. I know I learned a lot about this potential income stream from James years ago. His video is called Getting Started - An Introduction to Making Money with Affiliate Programs.

Hope you learned something today. We will move on to other things you can do to make your retirement an enjoyable one in our next post.

Until Next Time…

Last time we were looking at our own skill set and how to do marketing research. We also talked about marketing information and that you could possibly write you own products. Of course this gets back to you having the enjoyment of writing and being seen as an expert in your fields of interest.

Other Wealth Ratio Options

You might say, I can’t write and if I had to do it to feed me and my family, we would starve. That’s fine. There are other options you can do. One is something you may be involved in on a daily basis. How many times do you go to a store and buy something? Pretty much every week. It is the sale of physical products. You may think selling information is nice, but when it comes to selling physical products, you will have a higher chance of making a sale over information.

Do I Have To Buy A Store?

Actually I know this shows my age again, but in mail order there was a concept which worked quite well called drop shipping. You could find drop shippers who offered products at a discount, and you sold at a higher price. For example, jewelry has a high mark up. You may be able to buy it as low as 25% of retail and sell it for 50% to 75% of retail and give your customer a great deal and make a nice return on investment.

This can also be applied to the Internet. There are virtual stores you can set up and sell drop shipped products. All you have to do is market the site and when sales come in, forward the sale to the drop shipper who ships the product to your customer under your company name. The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to have any inventory and can make a nice mark up for each sale.

Benefits of This Income Stream

The benefits of selling physical products is that you can specialize in areas of interest. Research the best products and offer a wide variety of products from many different vendors. In essence, it is like having your own store inside your computer. You can create a good customer base who see all these products coming from your company. And the best benefit is that once it is running successfully, you can have the income to cover your regular living expenses or you can sell the store.

If you get good at creating these stores, you could make it into an ongoing process where you start up a store and sell it. Many successful sites can be sold for 24 to 36 times the monthly income. So if you had a store which had $4,000/month in sales, you could potentially sell it for $100,000. Do this a couple times a year and then invest the sale into a mutual fund. Rinse and repeat. After four or five times, you would have a very good wealth ratio.

Until Next Time…

Many people are in jobs that they don’t like and cannot wait to leave. They count the days until they can retire and once that day arrives, they have big party to celebrate their new life. After the celebration ends, they now have to face their new life. What are they going to do? Yeah, they have a few fun things planned, but once that is over, many find that they miss the people they used to work with on a daily basis.

Funny Retirement Parody

Retirement doesn’t have to be boring. Maybe you can find a way to get back into the same old groove. Doing the things you used to do when you were fully employed. Retirement Cures discovered a great illustration on some one who was successful in doing that. Check it out…

Life’s Too Short

Life is way too short not to have fun. We hope you find that thing that makes it fun for you. We plan to bring you a joke or two about retirement each week to brighten your day.

We will get back to our regular series on Retirement Wealth Ratio in the next post.

Until Next Time…