Are you one of those marketers who only wants to promote affiliate products? If you are, you’re not alone. Affiliate products are great – you don’t have to create the product and you don’t have customer service problems. Heck, you can make a fortune promoting affiliate products, and I highly recommend that if your heart is set on affiliate marketing, that you pursue it without hesitation.
That said, if you are ONLY doing affiliate marketing, you are putting yourself and your income at the mercy of other people, other businesses and other entities that you have NO control over.
Plus, it’s not always a bag of laughs, either. You want to promote that cookware set on Amazon because it’s got great commissions? Cool. So go set up a website, get some lousy articles written by someone whose first language isn’t the one you need, buy a few thousand spam links and so forth to get this site ‘ready.’ Then find a way to send the traffic, and then do it all again with the next product.
Great fun, right? I’ll bet you don’t even care about that cookware set or the people who might buy it. But you should care that the seller can stop selling it at ANY time without notice. Or they can change the commission structure. Or they can do whatever they like.
Are you getting your traffic from Google? Then you already know how fast Google can pull the rug out from under you. Maybe you’re buying traffic from Facebook? Facebook has already banned countless businesses and untold numbers of marketers, and they will be banning more – without notice.
How do you like affiliate marketing so far? Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way. If you choose a great niche and focus just on that niche and build up your readers and your traffic and especially your lists, you can make a ton of money in affiliate marketing.
But you know what? You can make even MORE money by creating your products, and it’s not nearly as difficult as you might think.
Plus, creating your own products has great perks:
First, when you make a sale, you get to keep ALL of the sale.
Second, you can get your own affiliates to promote for you. Just think how much more you can sell with a hundred affiliates promoting your products, than if it’s only you promoting. The difference is beyond huge, it’s almost mind-boggling.
Third, if you’re a good affiliate marketer, you’re building lists anyway. Why not sell your own products to those lists, in addition to selling affiliate products?
Fourth, when you have your own products, you can earn money for months and years on work that you did ONCE. It’s like being a songwriter and earning money every time the song is played for the next 20 years, only instead of a song it’s an info product.
Now, I know your next objection:
And let me tell you, this isn’t a good objection for two reasons.
#1, YES you do. If you’ve been alive for more than, say, 15 years, then you know stuff that other people DON’T know but they WANT to know. Have you found a way to treat your own illness? Have you lost 20 pounds? Have you traveled somewhere? Do you know how to save major money on something? Do you have secret to seducing lovers?
Think of it this way – what do you know? Make a list. Write that stuff down, and keep writing over the next few days because you will realize you know a lot more than you thought. Do this and you’ll likely have three sheets of paper filled with things you know that others want to know.
#2: Let’s say that you do the exercise in #1 above, and you come up with nothing. NOTHING. You are the only person on the planet who doesn’t know ANYTHING that anyone else wants to know.
That’s okay, and here’s why: All you have to do is pick your topic, learn it, do it and teach it. That’s it. Learn it, do it and teach it. You don’t have to become an expert. Just learn enough to get started DOING it, whatever it is. Make notes of what works and the results you get, and guess what happens?? You have yourself an info product. YES, it really can be that easy.
True. So here’s a shortcut: Choose your niche, go find an expert and use THEIR knowledge to create your product. Then cut them in on the deal. You get a percentage, they get a percentage.
“But then I’ll have to share the profits – wouldn’t it be better to just promote affiliate products?”
True, you’re sharing the profits with the expert, but remember – you can then get affiliates to promote for you, something you cannot do when you are an affiliate yourself.
So even if you give the expert 25% and you keep 25% so that affiliates earn 50%, that’s 25% that you continue to earn for as long as the product is selling.
One more thing before I forget – when you sell your own products, you are building lists of BUYERS. And as you know, one buyer can easily be worth 10-50 people who are just looking for freebies.
So when you have your own products, whether you create them alone or with partners, you are building lists of buyers that your affiliates send to you. And this alone is HUGE. So much so, that even if you gave away ALL of your commission up front, it would still be highly profitable because of all the backend products you could sell to your new buyers.
