Which Choice Makes More Sense...Product Ownership or Affiliate Marketing?

By: Thomas Spratt | Posted: 08th June 2007

Biggest Choice You Must Often Make...Affiliate or Full Product Ownership?

There are many IM'ers today that are making large dollars serving as affilates only for many products and services you see everywhere on the web. They never own their own info product at all. What they do is direct targeted traffic to a site and thereby collect a nice fee or commission by so doing. We will explore each option here and evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of each choice.

What are the pluses and minuses of launching an Internet marketing career as an affiliate versus a product owner? Being just an affiliate, you need not be involved in the long creation process, or the many other costs involved in product ownship such as list- buliding, merchant services,etc.

However, a major disadvantage is that you aren't in control of the product itself. You have to search the web to see if there's a product you feel sure of 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 share of the Internet Marketing treasure.

Serving as an affiliate, you may not control the sales copy or added bonus items. If the product owner fails to provide good customer service, it may well damage your reputation as the one whooriginally referred the visitor to the site.

As a product owner, you're locked into the entire process from start to the end. You have to develop a unique concept, create a product or pay to have it created using an outsourcing service, and then get everything up and running smoothly, if you want your cyber marketing venture to be a success.

You also have to recruit a larger group 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 individual choice better than the other for the cyber marketer who is considering all of their options? They each have their positive qualities and their negatives. Of course, the really big one is the higher profit percentage the owner may enjoy over the affiliate marketer working on only a commission basis

Actually in practice, most marketers do a combination of actions of here. 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 can work extremely well in many cases. There are several ways to have the best of both worlds and experienced IM people can often point you in the right direction to accomplish just this in your own marketing endeavors.

This usually hikes the proft percentage of the created product and makes more passive money each time the product is advertised by the affiliate invloved. So many are now finding, the magic is in the proper mix of these two important cyber options.


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Thomas Spratt, University of Iowa Business School Grad, Former Fortune 50 Executive Big Oil Corp, US Military Officer, Vietnam Veteran, CEO CyberMoneyMap... Your Cyber GPS Virtual Roadmap In The Confusing World ofInternet Marketing. .. to learn "How To" make the right 'mix' choices described above and start your own 'packaged profits' for niche sectors, please simply visit: http://cybermoneymap.com/frop About the Author
Occupation: Webmaster
University of Iowa Marketing School Grad, Former Fortune 50 Executive Energy Corp, US Military Officer, Vietnam Vet, Owner Cyber Money Map....Your Cyber GPS For Honest Riches In The No Hype Zone
http://cybermoneymap.com
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Tags: third party, targeted traffic, conversions, internet marketing, affiliate networks, reputation, bonus, good customer service, pluses, toolbox, individual choice, merchant services, outsourcing service