By: Jason Markum
I’ve been making money online for a long time. Around fourteen years actually. I’ve seen everything under the sun. Believe me, I’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff.
But the question that I get asked most often from new people just starting out online who want to make some serious money is this: Should I create my own product or should I just market someone else’s affiliate product?
That’s a really great question, and one that I will answer in this article for you today.
First off, the broad answer is; it depends! I know a lot of people don’t want to hear that, but it’s really true. Whether to dive right in and create your own product or start off slowly by marketing someone else’s is a question that is different for every person.
First of all, what is your background? It’s cool to make money online, but it IS a business. Do you have any sort of business skills? Have you worked in business in general? Have you owned your own company before? Do you have seed money to get you off the ground? These things all come into it when determining how to start.
For instance, you may need to start a limited liability company or a corporation. Do you know what that is? Have you done it before? Do you know how to do it?
These are questions that need to be answered before you move forward. Why? Because they are relevant if you want to create your own product. There are tax reporting issues, customer support related issues, insurance issues, etc that need to be addressed.
On the other hand, if you want to dive right in with affiliate marketing, you don’t necessarily need to address any of those things. You may want to form a corporation to shield your tax liability a little, but strictly speaking, you don’t have to do that.
Affiliate marketing can be as simple as picking a product on ClickBank, signing up for free as a ClickBank member, getting an affiliate URL, and sending traffic to that URL. Then when people buy the product, the purchase is handled completely by ClickBank, you just have to wait for your check to arrive in the mail giving you your cut.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea. It’s MUCH easier to get started in affiliate marketing than it is to start your own company selling your own product that you create.
So keep these things in mind when deciding how to get into Internet marketing. Its a very rewarding field, but it ain’t as easy as some people would lead you to believe!
I often recommend if you don’t have a lot of business experience, or technical experience in computer programming and such then you test the waters first with affiliate marketing before jumping into the deep end and creating your own product from scratch.
There’s a lot you can learn from affiliate marketing that you can use when you do take that final step into building your own product, and there’s no real easy way to learn without first jumping in and doing affiliate marketing.