The Problem With Affiliate Marketing

There is no doubt that you can make money by being an affiliate for someone and promoting their products. It’s something that I started doing first of all so I know that it works. However, there are some problems with affiliate marketing which is why I no longer base the bulk of my main income from relying on affiliate commissions.

When you drive traffic to an affiliate promotion you are actually driving traffic, at the end of the day to the website that has the product that you are promoting. Therefore the effort that you make driving traffic is actually benefiting someone else a lot more than it is benefiting you.

Obviously you get paid a commission if someone buys something from your affiliate link and that is your thank you payment for driving traffic to that site.

However, the amount of money that you can generate doing that is limited and therefore in order to create a full time income being an affiliate marketer you have to drive a lot more traffic to generate the same kind of sales than if you were selling your own product.

Example

If you create your own product and you sell it then you generate almost 100% of the income so let’s suppose you were driving traffic to an affiliate offer that paid you 10% commission. You would need to drive 10 times more traffic to generate the same amount of income than if it was your product with the same price tag because you would be generating virtually 100%.

Obviously that makes sense and you can see that it would be worth your while producing a product that was your own and then selling your own product. However, there is another reason why being an affiliate marketer has difficulties.

Delayed Payment

Have you ever signed up to an affiliate program and then you realise that you won’t actually see the money, you don’t get your commissions, until you have generated a certain amount.

Let’s just say for this example, you have to earn hundred dollars in commission before that money goes into your PayPal account.

This is a huge problem because if it takes you months to generate enough commission to actually receive that money it is very easy to give up and lose motivation.

I often wonder how many affiliate programs there are whereby commission has been generated but never enough to actually redeem the payment because it has taken far too long and the affiliate marketer has moved on and given up.

I know from my own experience that when I started promoting Amazon products it took me almost 8 months before I was able to see the commission that I had earned in my account.

Now, if you are promoting physical products then obviously it’s not so easy to produce those yourself and therefore being an affiliate for a big company like Amazon makes sense if you’re promoting a physical product.

Don’t Miss Out Producing Information Products

However, if you are promoting information products as an affiliate then you are really missing out. Just think if you spent a week and you did nothing else except produce a product – you could be driving traffic to your own site and therefore be building your own business and of course generating and keeping virtually 100% of the profits yourself.

So, if you are thinking about becoming an affiliate bearing in mind that you may not see any money for quite a while! And the amount of time and effort you spending promoting that product if it is an information product, would it not make sense to create a similar product yourself and then funnel your time and effort into building and profiting your own business?

Do you want your own business that you have control over?
What kind of products could you create yourself?
Do you have enough knowledge or do you need to do some research?
Make a plan to start building your own business and stick to it.

Click here to find out more about starting your own Information Marketing Business.