Is Being an Affiliate or A Product Creator Best for You?

Many online marketers are earning a lot of money strictly selling other people’s products as an affiliate.  They never own their own information product – they just drive targeted traffic to a site and earn a commission for each sale.

So what are the pros and cons of launching an Internet marketing career as an affiliate versus a product owner?  As an affiliate, you don’t have to worry about the product creation phase or the expenses involved in setting up your systems for shopping cart technology, list-building, and other aspects of Internet marketing.

But a major drawback is that you aren’t in control of the product itself.  You have to scour the ‘net to see if there’s a product you feel confident promoting.  You can do this through ClickBank and other third party affiliate networks, but you’re always going head to head with competing affiliates for a piece of the Internet marketing pie.

Worse yet, it can be brutally hard to get approved to promote offers as an new affiliate. Product owners can’t afford to get low quality traffic because it lowers the EPC (Earnings Per Click) making the bigger marketers unwilling to promote the product.

In a product launch, that is death. Prominent affiliates provide the bulk of traffic to launches so if you can’t get them to promote because of low EPCs the game is over before it even starts. While there are ways of overcoming this problem it remains a fact of affiliate marketing. As a new affiliate you have to be alright with being on the bottom of the food chain so to speak.

As an affiliate, you can’t control the sales copy or bonus items. If the product owner fails to provide good customer service, it could damage your reputation as the one who referred the visitor to the site in the first place.

You can however tip the scales in your favor by offering your own unique bonuses as an affiliate. Look over the product and see what may be missing from the offer then either create or find bonuses to fill those holes.

Whatever you do, don’t just throw together a bunch of unrelated resale rights products and call it your “killer bonus”. People see through that easily and realize it’s because you really have little of value to offer them if they purchase.

As a product owner, you’re chained to the entire process from start to finish.  You have to develop a unique idea, create a product or pay to have it created using an outsourcing service, and then get everything up and running if you want your Internet marketing venture to be a success.

You also have to recruit an army of affiliates and provide an ample toolbox filled with strategies they can use to help promote your site.  But you retain control over the details of each site and can test and tweak sales copy for higher conversions and deliver any sort of product or bonus that you feel is worthy to your customers.

Is one particular choice better than the other for the Internet marketer who is considering all of their options?  They each have their attractive qualities and their drawbacks.  

In fact, most marketers do a combination of both.  They’ll create their own information product in the form of an eBook and then hyperlink recommendations back to affiliate products that they promote.  

This increases the profitability of each product they create and generates even more passive income each time the eBook is promoted by an affiliate for the product they own.

Being a product creator also has other perks. You can keep cash flowing into your business between product launches with affiliate marketing. By releasing information products you can build a list of buyers. Since these people have already purchased something from you they are far easier to sell other marketers products to.

You have already gained their trust, so that makes them open minded towards anything you promote.

You do need to use  caution when choosing products to promote as an affiliate. Nothing burns out a good list like endlessly promoting the latest “shiny object” to hit the market.

Concentrate on only presenting your prospects with affiliate offers that you yourself would or have purchased yourself. Respect your buyers list and it will continue to bring you income for many years. Screw this up, and you will always find yourself starting from scratch again.