Net Frontier Marketing

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Nearly all the time, the best affiliates aim to dominate a niche before setting up stakes in the next one. It’s just plain good sense. Day by day, you learn more about the customers, the market and the products they want.

Armed with this information, you pick winners more easily, write better converting pages and emails and slowly but surely build up a strong base of buyers and subscribers. Assuming you picked a niche with decent size and breadth, you can potentially make a good living from just this one niche.

When this kind of niche domination happens, and it will if you play your cards right, you’ve become a big fish, but you’re still far from the top tier you could reach as a product owner. Let’s quickly go over the differences.

Advantages of being an affiliate:

1) Faster and Cheaper cost of entry:

This can be anything from a direct linking campaign to a squeeze page but you get to test the waters quickly with little risk involved.

2) Few Top Level Skills required:

With an average skill set and the right formula, you can do very well. No need for extreme copywriting skills that can make or break your campaigns, if you track your keywords well, you’re 75% of the way there.

3) Easier diversification of assets:

Arguably, your assets are somewhat more fragile since you depend on other continuing to pay you well for selling their products. Affiliate programs come and go. You may lose some but they won’t account for huge slices of your income if you keep the funnel well stocked.

4) No Customers:

While customers are what put money in your pocket, you don’t have to deal with them. They whine at the vendor, not the affiliate, they ask her for support, not you. Customers can be one of the most stimulating parts of any business. They can also be the most irritating.

5) No Inventory and Fulfillment:

Assuming you sell digital products, this isn’t really a factor but with physical goods it can be a huge headache that takes the pleasure out of your business until you can completely outsource it. Here the affiliate wins big.

Think the affiliates have it good? I disagree. Look at the benefits of being the product owner, especially digital products:

1) You get double the money on a good deal of sales and all your personal sales.

If you are promoting your own product on PPC, you can bid twice as much as you could as an affiliate and still be profitable. When the campaign is profitable anyways, you make twice as much money.

2) You get a bigger list faster:

Assuming equal marketing, you can put your own lead capture device directly in your sales page instead of making a squeeze page which means you get a good deal of signups without ever losing a customer because they refused to optin.

3) You have complete access to the buyers list:

Clickbank gives you the names of the buyers you refer as an affiliate. You can get them to optin to your list at a decent percentage but most don’t even do it. Nevertheless, most affiliate programs don’t give you access to buyer data and even when they do, you can never build a relationship with them on par with the vendor whose product they now own.

4) You have your own affiliates:

This is a bit like your second family of customers: they require some investment and work. But they use their own money, time and resources to sell your product without you ever risking a cent! This is a ridiculously good deal. On many digital products, you make 50% of the sale price doing absolutely nothing.

You get access to buyers and subscribers you never could have gotten otherwise because they come from other people’s lists and sites where you can’t advertise as an affiliate.
When other people start busting their hump to make you money, you can’t really ask for anything more.

5) You have access to JVs:

This is another sickeningly powerful advantage the regular affiliate doesn’t have access to. As a product owner you can make twice as much money promoting the same product with the same size list.

As an affiliate, you just mail out and get commissions from the sales you make. As a product owner, you get those profits and the ones generated by the other product owner mailing out for you at the same time. Your list grows and your campaigns make twice as much money. That’s hard to beat.

6) You get Notoriety:

As an affiliate, you can gain some notoriety for your success as a seller. If you build huge authoritative VRE sites, you might get recognition for that too. As a vendor, you get interviews, media attention and expert status in your niche. More sales and more power coming your way.

Assuredly there are more such good reasons, but those are the main ones that can’t be ignored.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking being an affiliate and have no plan to stop being one any time soon. I just wanted to show how good the product owners have it.

What do you think about this?