Become an Affiliate Marketer
If you’re savvy and you have a keen eye for business, then you’re probably wondering
whether it’s smarter to be selling your own product. After all, we’ve just seen how they
stand to benefit by having legions of marketers selling their products... wouldn’t that be
a better scenario?
In truth, the answer is ‘maybe’ and there are certainly advantages to both situations.
Let’s have a quick look at the key differences and hopefully that will help you to make
the best decision.
Advantages of Creating Your Own Product
On the face of it, you might initially think that creating your own product is the best
option. After all, this means you’ll benefit from 100% profits whenever you make a
direct sale and it means that you’ll be able to get at least 40% and possibly more from a ton of other people all promoting your hard work too.
Additionally, selling a product you created and that you’re proud of is also something t0hat brings a lot of satisfaction and gratification. What’s more, it lets you easily align all your marketing efforts with the product itself and stay ‘on message’ all the way through.
You can write a website promoting a certain way of life and then sell an eBook as a
a natural extension of that. This also means people will stay engaged with your brand instead of pushing people away from your site to buy something else, you’ll be keeping them on your page and the product itself will help to increase awareness, authority, and trust. In other words, having used your product and hopefully enjoyed it once, they’ll be considerably more likely to come back to you to buy again in future. And finally, when you sell products as the owner rather than as an affiliate, you’ll have the full control to change the price, to introduce special offers or even to make changes
to the product based on requests. In other words, you’ll have far more flexibility which can be a huge advantage as a marketer.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
For starters, creating a product takes a lot of time, effort, money, and skill. You can
outsource the process or do it yourself but either way, this means a lot of work and time
before you even get your first product out there to sell. And this is especially true seeing
as your product needs to be very good. Selling sub-par products will only
prevent people from buying from you in the future and make you lose a lot of trust and
authority. At the same time, people will normally be able to tell from the offset that your
product is less than great quality meaning fewer sales.
So if you want to start earning money quickly then you should become an affiliate
marketer. But it goes much further than this...
As a product creator you see, there’s no guarantee that your product will sell and there’s
no verification. So this means essentially that you could spend months or years creating
something and pouring a huge amount of hard work into it... only to find that nobody
buys it. The result will be low or no ROI and a huge disappointment. In fact, this can
often be enough to completely destroy your motivation and your enthusiasm and to put
an end to your business altogether.
To interject briefly with some personal experience, I actually knew someone this
happened to. They had a great idea for a website that would allow researchers to find
people to cite in their studies. They were a researcher themselves and they had a good
understanding of the industry – they knew this was something people needed and that it
was something they would use themselves.
From there, they then went about investing a huge amount of time and money to create
the product. They sought legal advice and trademarked the name, they built a website
(from scratch – not in WordPress) that was responsive enough to work on every sized
display (this was before the days when mobile web browsing was so commonplace) and
they hired testers to use the product.
Two years and several loans later they launched the product. Two months after that,
they filed for bankruptcy when their hosting charges (which were very large) drastically exceeded their ability to pay off the debt.
There was an awful lot wrong with this business model and the lack of cash flow
projections or contingency plans was no small part of that. But what was really wrong here was that he never tested that anyone actually wanted the product and he hadn’t gone about finding a market first. He assumed that people would need his service because he wanted something like it himself. In business though, a ‘hunch’ just isn’t good enough – you need to be certain.
This is the risk that you put yourself in when you create a product of any kind. On the other hand though, when you work as an affiliate marketer, you will actually have the ability to choose products that are already selling. That’s right: you can pick a product that is a proven success. And when you do this, you have no fear that there isn’t a demand for it.
If you fail to sell the number of items you’d hoped, then you know with certainty that the issue is not with the product and you just need to sell harder! Why make things more complicated for yourself when you have a proven money maker you can simply start using?
It gets better than that too, for as we’ll see later on, selling an affiliate product actually means that you can re-use the existing marketing material often. If the seller has found a promotional sales copy that works then they have no reason not to share that with you. You’re literally taking an existing business and repeating it meaning the risk is hugely mitigated.
And if it doesn’t work out? Then you haven’t lost anything. It takes you about a day to set up a sales funnel and to start trying to earn money if that. And it costs nothing there is absolutely zero upfront investment and you will break even as soon as you make your very first sale!
Finally, when you sell something as an affiliate, the business model you’ll be using is still
highly scalable meaning you can increase your revenue and you can increase your
profits.
In fact, it’s an understatement to say your business model is scalable – it’s even better
than that. Affiliate marketing is actually repeatable and what this means is that the
business model can simply be repeated over and over again.
Remember when we said it potentially takes a single day to create a landing page and
start selling an affiliate product? That means that there’s nothing stopping you from
creating 100 landing pages for 100 different products in 100 days. If each one sells only
once a day and you make $30 per sale... well then you’re now making $3,000 a day. And
that business will be incredibly resilient and therefore stable – because it’s highly
unlikely that all the products would stop selling at once.
Affiliate marketing is the perfect business model in many ways then because all you
need to do is to take an existing product with an existing promotional campaign and
then share it. It’s literally a ‘copy and pastes’ business and when you know a few key
things it’s practically fool-proof!
Note: If you do decide you’d rather create and sell your own product then don’t worry –
a lot of the information in this book will still apply and you simply have to use it to
promote your own product instead of someone else’s!
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