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Does affiliate marketing work ?
Posted by IMer | Posted in Internet Marketing | Posted on 02-07-2009
We all know the old saying why keep a dog and bark yourself, well that certainly true when it comes to affiliate marketing. Imagine if you had a product and you could get a whole bunch of people to sell that product on your behalf, they did all the marketing, they did all the hardwork and they only took a small percent of the profit. Sounds like the perfect scenero doesnt it, well there is another way to look at it. Imagine you could could sell a product for someone else, they pay you a percent of the profit but you dont have to worry about faulty goods, returns and complaints sounds like the perfect scenero doesnt it.
I run a number of free ringtone websites, the reason i run them as free ring tone web sites is because I dont have the the time or the energy to handle the complaints or the non deliveries, is that a mistake ? maybe if i’d charged just 1 cent to download a ringtone id have made an awful lot of money but then it would have been almost a full time job doing the admin. I run these websites as a hobby so I certainly wouldnt have time to do a full time job and run the websites, perhaps of I’d been braver then I would have ran the website full time.
So which is the best, being an affiliate marker or a website owner getting other people to sell your product for you ? If you have a decent website and you can get products which are just a natural extension of your website then you can make a lot of money, my site doesnt offer Mp3 ringtones for legal reasons, so I direct anyone who comes to my site to a 3rd party who specialises in mp3 ringtones, simple affilciate marketing , it means the people visiting my site can find what they want, it stops me from doing a lot of admin, worrying about copyright. On the other hand if id started charging for the ringtones from my website years ago and set up an affilite network then yes I have the hassle of returns, complaints and admin but id proberly be a very rich man by now
To sum in , if you have a website and you get plenty of visiors, maybe you give away something for free then find an affiliate programme that fits in with your website, you need to have a similar theme otherwise people wont click on the links. If you have a product to sell then let someone do the dirty work for you, let them work hard to get there website in the top 10 for google, let them spend the time designing a smooth attracive sales copy and its almost money for nothing
In summing up yes affiliate marketing can work, it can work very well but remember dont put all you eggs in one basket, every product only has a limited shelf life before a newer better product takes over
