Affiliate Marketing Vs Product Creation

Today, almost every Internet marketer who undertakes their business journey online chooses the path of affiliate marketing. In fact, you’ll probably find that the ratio of affiliate marketers to product providers is growing at an alarming rate.

Almost all of the ‘older’ sellers, the types that have been around for a long time, are the ones with their own products. It’s virtually impossible to find an IM newbie with his own product. This could actually result in a huge loss of revenue for newbie IMs, as there are so many good reasons to create your own product rather than promoting someone else’s.NOTE: Remember that both affiliate marketing and building your own product strategies are viable and can easily become sustainable business models. The model you choose will depend to a large extent on our personality and abilities.

Easier to do than say

If you ask most people, they’ll likely tell you right away that affiliate marketing is much, much easier than your own product. Because?

Well duh, because you don’t have to create your own product. However, does that mean it’s really that much easier?

Creating a product in a specific niche that could sell for $20 shouldn’t take you more than a week, spending just a few hours a day. It’s something you can do in your spare time and in the end you’ll have a (relatively) fantastic product that can bring in $20 per sale.

For me, creating a 10-20 page eBook in a niche I’m knowledgeable in (that could sell for a few bucks) doesn’t take more than a couple hours, tops.

Sure, one of the reasons is because I’m a prolific writer and can write 1,000-2,000 words per hour, but if you’re REALLY an authority in your niche, product creation doesn’t take long.

However, creating the product is only one step in the process. You should also write impactful content (I use the word a lot, if you haven’t already noticed) and drive traffic to your product/sales funnel. However, that’s when the job really gets easier.

Driving-Traffic

Comparatively, driving traffic to an affiliate offer is much, much more difficult than driving traffic to your own offer. That’s the truth.

When you’re an affiliate marketer, you have to start from scratch: the ground floor.

You need to regularly update and maintain a blog, do social media marketing, search engine optimization, backlink building, guest posting, etc. In short, you have to work many hours generating traffic. There’s no way to avoid it.

With product creation, all you have to do to get traffic is create your product, write copy (or hire someone to write copy), set up your sales funnel, and send emails to affiliate marketers.

Hey?

Think of places like ClickBank, a marketplace for affiliate marketers and product providers to meet.

Generally, putting your product on ClickBank without doing any additional marketing will still result in some affiliate promotion, especially if it’s a niche where only a few informational products exist.

However, when you personally email well-known affiliate marketers in your niche, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll be more than willing to accept your offer, as long as you give them high commissions.

Yeah, High commissions mean less money for you per sale, but cumulatively, you’ll earn more since you’ll have an army of affiliates backing your product.

When you’re a product seller, basically all your job (in terms of traffic) is to send people emails asking them to promote your product.

Simple – but not always easy.

Returned

Yes, here is the problem. This is the one that will worry most people from the start: Which one will make me earn more money?

As you can probably expect, there’s no really hard and fast answer to that question. You may have a product and you may be able to get affiliates to promote your product, but if your product sucks, no one will buy it.

Alternatively, you may have an amazing product, but affiliates may not be willing to promote it as it violates one of their personal policies.

As an affiliate marketer, you may be able to drive high-quality, targeted shopping traffic from websites, but that doesn’t automatically translate to money, especially if the affiliate product is terrible.

On another note, you can choose the best product, but you may not know how to generate targeted traffic.

Conversely, you can do everything right as a product provider or affiliate and still bring home tons of cash every day.

Pat Flynn makes over $50K per month as an affiliate.

Marc Milburn earns 7 figures a year as a product salesman.

They are both amazing marketers, they both make a lot of money, and they both have chosen different business models but have achieved similar success.

Affiliate Marketer Overview

Advantages:

• Free control over what products you promote.
• If a product doesn’t convert well, you can always choose another.
• One does not have to go through the extensive (cough) process of creating products.
• Customer service is not your headache.
• You don’t have to spend the time (or expense) that it takes to have great sales copy.
• Commissions range from 4% (Amazon – phew) to 50-75% (ClickBank). In some cases, 100% commissions are given.

Cons:

• You do not have control of OTO, upsells, etc.
• You do not have control of the product, period.
• For certain niches, there may be a lack of high-converting products to promote.
• You have to do the ‘conventional’ traffic generation methods, which take time (and in some cases, money).
• Information products have high refund rates. Even if you generated a sale, there is still a chance someone will return it. Therefore, your commission will also be refunded.

Product Vendor Overview

Advantages:

• You don’t have to worry too much about traffic generation strategies.
• Once the product, sales funnel, and copy are created, the only thing left is to contact affiliates.
• It’s easier to build relationships with customers that could become potential repeat customers.
• YOU are in control of the entire process when a visitor lands on your sales page.

Cons:

• You can’t keep all the proceeds from sales if you use affiliates.
• You have to create an impressive product.
• If, in the end, the product doesn’t convert and instead fails miserably, you would have had nothing to show for hundreds of hours of wasted effort.
• Customer support, which can be a PRO at times, is their headache.

Your turn!

What’s your choice? Are you a die-hard affiliate marketer or a passionate product marketer? Are you making money with your business model?