Affiliate Marketing vs Selling Your Own Product

Many new Internet marketers struggle with the idea of whether to create their own product to sell or to promote other people’s products through affiliate marketing.  We will look at the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

Many new Internet marketers prefer to start out with affiliate marketing because they don’t have to create their own product and they don’t have to provide updates or customer support for those products.  All they have to do is to refer a prospect to the product creator’s website through a specialized affiliate link and earn the commission for that sale.  Thus, the affiliate makes money more quickly and only has to refer prospects to the product creator’s website without any product creation or support.

While affiliate marketing can lead to making profit quicker, the downside to affiliate marketing is that the people you refer to the product creator’s website can become his/her lifetime customers, not yours.  You don’t have the chance to add them to your own email list; thus, you are really building up someone else’s online business, not yours.  Additionally, when you make commissions, you usually make less than 100% of the purchase price, sometimes as low as 50% of the price.  Thus, you will have to make more affiliate sales to earn the amount of money you could make from selling your own product.

This is where selling your own product has its advantages.  When you create your own digital product to sell and get prospects to click your link, you make 100% of the price; you don’t have to share the price with anyone (provided it’s not an affiliate who referred the prospect to your site).  Additionally, when you gain a new customer, he/she is added to your email list to where you can email them with new information and offers in order to build up a relationship with them and have them purchase your future offers, thereby increasing your income.

Of course, the downside to creating your own digital product is that it usually takes longer to get started, since you either have to create the product from scratch or have to use outsourcers and/or private label rights products to create it.  Still, that takes more work than just promoting someone else’s products.  Additionally, you have to provide updates to your product and also customer support if people have questions or issues with your product.  Thus, there is more work involved with having your own product, but there is also more profit and profit potential too as compared to affiliate marketing.

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