One of the biggest decisions facing an Internet marketing newbie wanting to make money online is: what to sell? (Duh!)

Seriously though, it’s a critical decision, whether to create your own products and sell them, or whether to just act as a sales broker for other peoples’ products—the so-called “affiliate” role.

You can do both, of course. But at the outset the choice may seem a little baffling to the beginner. There are pros and cons of both methods. Let’s talk about that…

Selling your own product may seem obvious and easy: you make more profit. You get rich faster! But it’s not quite that simple. If you don’t have a product, you have the time delay and hassle of creating one. Also, the unknown factor: will it sell?

Not just that but what would be the optimum selling price? You experiment and track, we all know that. But it takes time and weeks may go by before you hit the winning formula. And if you can’t get sales, no matter what you try, you’ve wasted a lot of effort.

There is another complication, which is that maybe the product would sell fine—if only you had the right sales page. But you’re new and can’t be sure you are working with the best possible sales message.

These objections remain valid, even if you already have a product and want to sell it. Just because YOU love your own creation doesn’t mean Internet surfers will want to grab it like an iPod or iPhone.

So it’s wise to give careful consideration to the other role, that of being an affiliate. You only make half the money (typically an affiliates share of the sale is 50%, though some vendors go higher). But the rest is all in your favor.

You don’t have to dream up and create what you hope will be a best-selling product. You choose one you know is already selling well and has proven itself. After all, it’s only logical that 50% of a lot of sales is better than 100% of few or none.

It gets better, because most vendors will help you with selling aids. You can get sales banners, pre-written emails and even, in some cases, whole web pages supplied by the vendor. In fact a sales web page may not even be necessary: as an affiliate you just direct your people to the sales page on the vendor’s site, using your unique ID link.

This saves you a lot of time and allows to you gain valuable experience of the marketing process, without having to create every single detail of the step by step stages of parting the prospect from his or her money.

For a beginner this is especially important because you won’t need a payment system (shopping cart) or merchant gateway ID for processing credit cards.

One other consideration to bear in mind, which could be very important for some products, is the issue of follow up support. If the product is your own, you will have extra work to do answering queries from customers who just don’t get it. Trust me, there can be a lot of issues, no matter how carefully you design and explain the product.

Then, if you have your own product, you really should try to attract affiliates to market it for you. You need to offer them 50% or more of sales. So in fact you DON’T make that much more money selling your own product.

And finally, to make the choice seem very easy, there’s the problem of refunds. People do ask for their money back. You have to refund them, otherwise it gets ugly. But you may not feel comfortable about deducting the refund amount from your affiliate. This is especially difficult if you have already paid out the affiliate checks. It’s hard to ask for your commission back! Sometimes, you just have to take it on the chin and accept the loss.

I would recommend affiliate marketing for beginners. I still do a lot of it. It makes me a ton of money. Not quite a no-brainer but definitely a no pain-er!

Popularity: 67% [?]