Which is better?

Affiliate marketing (selling products created by other people) or making your own product?

Or should you do like I do and have maybe the best of both worlds by selling affiliate products and your own products?

Affiliate Products – Pros

• The product is already created. You can be up and running in minutes, promoting the product. Which is an order of magnitude quicker than creating your own product.
• There’s already a sales page in place. It might be a short sales page like most Amazon products or it could be a longer sales page – ones that seem to read a bit like War and Peace if you’re in the internet marketing arena.
• The payment process is already taken care of. The product vendor has a payment processor, whether that’s PayPal or a credit card merchant account or both.
• The choice of affiliate products is almost infinite (it’s certainly infinite in the sense that you’d never be able to promote every single affiliate product available, even if you got accepted for all the different programs)

Affiliate Products – Cons

• You’re not in control. The product may be withdrawn from sale at any time. That’s not normally the case with established products but it can happen. I was promoting a Derren Brown style mind control product a few years ago, making both myself and the product owner a nice amount of money every month and suddenly – with no warning – the product ceased to exist. I was using AdWords to promote it so I lost not just commission but the cost of clicks until I discovered this.
• You’re building the product owner’s list. Sometimes that’s reasonably OK. For instance, on this program I’m cookied in to their follow up sequence and get commission from their various products. But I don’t get commission from the other things they promote.
• Your reputation is at stake. If you don’t choose the products you promote wisely then that choice will reflect on you. Sometimes the product owner messes up – that’s happened to me before, usually when a computer makes the wrong choice and decides not to deliver emails – and it can fall to you to help sort the problem out. Again, I’ve done that and usually saved my commission so it’s worth the effort.

Product Creation – Pros

• You’re in control. Which if you tend towards being a control freak this is probably the only reason you need!
• You can create a product on any topic you like. That’s a double-edged sword. You might have discovered a new best seller. Or you might have chosen a dud. You can research to reduce the risk but it’s there. That said, I’ve created lots of products and almost all of them have made money. In my view, the successes more than outweigh the occasional under performer.
• You’re building your own list. And it’s probably a buyers list – the most powerful list available. You can maybe also get a tyre-kickers list if you go down the route of offering a free product as well. Affiliates vary about how much they like that idea but if it’s on a downsell page and they’re cookied in, most will be happy.

Product Creation – Cons

• It takes time to create a product. You’d have to be superhuman to create a new product in minutes. Although you can “create” a product that you’ll deliver in the future if you sell live case studies or webinars, so that’s fairly similar albeit with a time commitment later in life.
• You need to get a payment processor. That could be PayPal or you could use someone like Amazon to sell your product (such as a Kindle book). Most of the time payment processors are set it and forget it but there are occasions such as refunds where it can get a bit messier.
• You have to deal with customers! Most of the time, customers are great. I’m not just saying that because I’m grovelling to you as a potential customer. It’s true – they send you money and sometimes thank you for the products you’ve sold them. But there are occasional bad apples and you have to deal with them. The trick is to shake off any negativity that creates as fast as possible and move on, rather than letting it ruin your day.

So which should it be?

I hope that you’ve got enough idea from the pros and cons above to decide which you prefer. Affiliate products or your own products. Or both.

If the idea of selling other people’s products as an affiliate excites you (and I think it should, but maybe I’m biased) then I’ve created a complete program to help you do just that whilst avoiding as many of the pitfalls as possible.

You can find out more about selling affiliate products profitably here.