Introduction
The focus of my blog is is getting traffic to your website. But there has to be a reason why you’re getting traffic and it’s usually to sell a product or service and make money.
So in this post I want to focus on the advantages of having your own product to sell. Sure there are wonderful stories about people making a gazillion dollars being a super affiliate but the truth is that most affiliates never make any money.
There’s just a lot of competition and hurdles to overcome in order to become a successful affiliate. Having your own product removes some of these hurdles.
So I want to outline some of the benefits I have found from having my own product.
1. You can get paid right away with PayPal
For many of my products I use PayPal to do my payment processing. One of the things that I love about PayPal is that it puts money in my PayPal account immediately. From my PayPal account it takes about two or three days for me to transfer money to my bank account.
If I were to be an affiliate I usually have to wait 20 to 90 days before I received a check in the mail with the money earned
For some of you this may not seem like a big deal but sometimes it can make or break your online business.
Let’s say for example that you are selling something for $100 and you had to spend $80 in advertising to make the sale. Your net profit is $20.
If you are an affiliate and you spent $80 today than you have to wait a month or two to receive your $100 check. You are actually in the hole for $80 until you receive that check. When you finally receive it you can pay off the $80 expense, take the $20 profit and reinvest it in your business. But the whole process takes a lot of time!
This is especially painful if you’re starting with a very small budget.
However if you have your own product and use PayPal as a payment processor it only takes a few days for you to get the money back.
Using the same example as above, if you sold a product for $100 with $80 in advertising your profit would be $20. But you only have to wait 3 days before you can pay off your advertising expense and reinvest the $20. After three days you can go through this process again and make another $20 profit.
2. With click Bank you can recruit affiliates and have people sell for you
If you think super affiliates make all the money you’re wrong. The people that make the big money online are those that develop a great product and then recruit affiliates to sell for them.
If you have your own product then you can use services like click Bank to sell your product and also recruit affiliates. When doing this I recommend that you pay out a generous 75% commission on all affiliate sales. This helps to entice affiliates to sell your product.
Of course this is only possible if you have your own product to sell.
3. You have complete control over the sales page
Have you ever noticed that some sales pages just suck? There’s some good ones I’ve seen some doozies.
If you have your own product you get to determine what the the sales page says and how it’s structured.
One of the worst things I’ve seen are sales pages with links to other websites. These pages are losing potential customers and money by having links to other sites.
Other sales pages are not structured well or don’t mention their 60 day money back guarantee.
There have been many times that I’ve considered being an affiliate for product but chosen not to simply because they left out one important element that would dramatically increase the number of sales.
If you have your own product you can have everything be perfect.
4. You can give away free copies to get feedback and entice people to follow you on twitter or join your e-mail list
One thing I like to do is periodically give away free copies of my products to people when they follow me on twitter or join my e-mail list.
It’s also an effective way to get feedback from people. For example if I were working on a new traffic product I would ask people what their biggest traffic questions and concerns are so I could build a better product. To entice them I would offer a free copy of the traffic product just for telling me their biggest traffic questions and concerns.
You can’t do this (legally) with someone else’s product. You need your own product.
5. You control the price
Selecting the right price for a product will have a big impact on how many sales you receive. If you’re an affiliate then you have no control over the price.
But with your own product you can test different pricing models and determine what works best. You can even have different versions of your product and sell them at different price points i.e. the platinum version is the most expensive, the gold version is less expensive, and the silver version is the cheapest.
6. You can build a sales funnel
This is probably one of the most important reasons why you should have your own product.
You see, the best way to make money online is not just sell a product but rather create a complete sales funnel.
Your sales funnel usually follows this process:
- give away some sort of information of value for free
- promise more information if they opt in to your e-mail list
- once they’re on your e-mail list give them more valuable information for free so they stay subscribed
- once in a while send them an offer for a inexpensive product that you created
- on the sales page about product offer and upsell for a more expensive product (usually 2 to 4 times as expensive)
This process allows you to advertise to the same person over and over.
If you are an affiliate then you are driving traffic to someone else’s sales page and building their sales funnel. And in the end they will make all the money.
This is the process that all the gurus follow because it just works.
So if you want to build your own sales funnel and have long-term profits you will need to have your own product.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
funny I didn’t see this post earlier.
you are right about the financing of the traffic. Cost for adwords (in my niche) has gone through the roof in the last 2 years but the traffic received didn’t get any better.
Receiving checks from merchants or clickbank takes some time or requires a minimum amount to pay out (in CB you can change that yourself) which beginning affiliates quite often do not reach quickly.
With your own product you not only get instant money (like described above), but you can also do a lot of testing (for increasing CR) that is not always possible when you are an affiliate.