What Are the Drawbacks of Affiliate Marketing?
In our previous article, we gave you a pretty good idea of why affiliate marketing is such a popular way to make money online.
After all, it eliminates much of the drudgery that comes with starting an online business and lets you focus on sending traffic to a merchant's website.
With everything that affiliate marketing has going for it, what could possibly be the drawback of building an affiliate marketing business? Well, simply put, focusing exclusively on affiliate sales will keep you from enjoying the benefits of owning your own product.
You see, as an affiliate you are sharing the profits with the product owner.
On a digital information product (like an e-book or audio program), your typical sales commission as an affiliate might be anywhere from 25% to 75%, with somewhere around 50% being a pretty typical commission.
Now, getting half of the revenue on a particular sale is a pretty good deal, but we want to be fair and point out the advantages of being a product owner.
If you have your own product, you can make direct sales in addition to affiliate sales.
In other words, you can send people directly to your website through a variety of traffic sources and make sales without having to share any commission with affiliates.
In this case, the sales you make through your affiliates would sort of be like icing on the cake.
As an affiliate marketer, you miss the benefits of having an entire sales army of affiliates promoting your products on your behalf.
Should you become an affiliate or a product owner? Now, as we mentioned before, one of the advantages of becoming an affiliate is that you can eliminate all of the headaches that a merchant typically faces.
A product owner has to have the expertise to create his own product on a given topic, or he has to have enough money to outsource the entire project to a very good writer.
In addition, the product owner still has to deal with all of the logistical things we talked about earlier like running a website, using a credit card processing service, and dealing with customer complaints.
Given the pros and cons of affiliate businesses, what should you do? Well, we recommend that you start your Internet career as an affiliate to keep things simple.
There are a lot more headaches involved when you try to become a product owner, and if you tried to do this from the very beginning you might get discouraged and give up too early.
At the same time, you should realize that affiliate marketing itself is enough to make people six-figure incomes over time, so you shouldn't underestimate the power of this business model.
After all, it eliminates much of the drudgery that comes with starting an online business and lets you focus on sending traffic to a merchant's website.
With everything that affiliate marketing has going for it, what could possibly be the drawback of building an affiliate marketing business? Well, simply put, focusing exclusively on affiliate sales will keep you from enjoying the benefits of owning your own product.
You see, as an affiliate you are sharing the profits with the product owner.
On a digital information product (like an e-book or audio program), your typical sales commission as an affiliate might be anywhere from 25% to 75%, with somewhere around 50% being a pretty typical commission.
Now, getting half of the revenue on a particular sale is a pretty good deal, but we want to be fair and point out the advantages of being a product owner.
If you have your own product, you can make direct sales in addition to affiliate sales.
In other words, you can send people directly to your website through a variety of traffic sources and make sales without having to share any commission with affiliates.
In this case, the sales you make through your affiliates would sort of be like icing on the cake.
As an affiliate marketer, you miss the benefits of having an entire sales army of affiliates promoting your products on your behalf.
Should you become an affiliate or a product owner? Now, as we mentioned before, one of the advantages of becoming an affiliate is that you can eliminate all of the headaches that a merchant typically faces.
A product owner has to have the expertise to create his own product on a given topic, or he has to have enough money to outsource the entire project to a very good writer.
In addition, the product owner still has to deal with all of the logistical things we talked about earlier like running a website, using a credit card processing service, and dealing with customer complaints.
Given the pros and cons of affiliate businesses, what should you do? Well, we recommend that you start your Internet career as an affiliate to keep things simple.
There are a lot more headaches involved when you try to become a product owner, and if you tried to do this from the very beginning you might get discouraged and give up too early.
At the same time, you should realize that affiliate marketing itself is enough to make people six-figure incomes over time, so you shouldn't underestimate the power of this business model.
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