Nowadays, nearly Jeeter farms who strike out on their online business journey choose the affiliate marketing road. In fact, you’ll probably find that the ratio of affiliate marketers to product vendors is growing at an alarming rate.
Nearly all ‘older’ marketers – the guys who’ve been around for a long time – are the ones who have their own products. It’s virtually impossible to find any IM newbie with his own product. This could actually result in a huge loss of revenue for newbie IMs, as there are plenty of good reasons to create your own product instead of promoting someone else’s.NOTE: Remember that both strategies – affiliate marketing and creating your own product – are viable ones that can easily be sustainable business models. The model you choose will be largely dependent on our personality and skills.
Easier Done Than Said
If you ask most people, they’re likely to straightaway tell you that affiliate marketing is much, much easier than your own product? Why?
Well, duh, because you don’t have to create your own product. However, does that mean that it’s really that much easier?
Creating a product in a specific niche that could be sold at $20 shouldn’t take you more than a week, putting in only a few hours a day. It’s something you can do in your spare time, and at the end you would have a (relatively) fantastic product that can generate $20 per sale.
For me, creating a 10-20 page eBook in a niche in which I’m knowledgeable (which could sell for a few bucks) takes no more than a couple hours, max.
True, one reason is because I’m a prolific writer and can knock out 1000-2000 words an hour, but if you REALLY are an authority in your niche, product creation doesn’t take long.
However – creating the product is only one step of the process. You’ve also got to write gob-smacking (I use the word a lot, if you haven’t noticed yet) content and drive traffic to your product/sales funnel. However, that’s when the job actually gets easy.
Driving Traffic
Comparatively, driving traffic to an affiliate offer is much, much harder than driving traffic with your own offer. That’s the truth.
When you’re an affiliate marketer, you’ve got to start from scratch – the ground floor.
You have to regularly update and maintain a blog, do social media marketing, search engine optimization, backlink building, guest posting, etc. In short, you’ve got to work long hours generating traffic. No way around it.
With product creation, the only thing you have to do to gain traffic is create your product, write copy (or hire someone to write copy), set up your sales funnel, and e-mail affiliate marketers.
Huh?
Think about places like ClickBank – a marketplace for affiliate marketers and product vendors to meet.
Usually, putting your product up on ClickBank without doing any additional marketing will anyways result in a few affiliates promoting – particularly if it’s in a niche where only a few informational products exist.
