Top 3 Reasons Not to Do Affiliate Marketing

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Many people, when starting out trying to make money online, want to be an affiliate marketer. Some tells them that they can make a lot of money, and not have to stock any inventory by marketing other people's products.
While this is true, and there can be good money in affiliate marketing, the winner in that arrangement is always the manufacturer (or distributor) of the product. It is never the affiliate.
There are many reasons why this is so, but here are the top 3:
1. You need a list to succeed long term.
If you want to make steady money as a residual, you will need to develop an email list of people to whom you can market. As an affiliate, it is possible to build a list, but it is not as easy as building a list when you have your own product, because you will usually need to capture the customer's contact info prior to them looking at your product offerings.
2. Volume is where the money is.
As an affiliate, you earn money only when you sell a product. If you had your won product, you would also make money every time you sold a product, but you would be able to make more money (no splitting commissions) or even better yet, you could have other people selling the product for you.
3. Hard to brand your name as an affiliate.
One of the goals of long term, residual earnings online is to develop a brand. It could be just your name, or it could be the name of a company you run or a product you sell. When you are an affiliate, you are improving the brand of the product and it's manufacturer, but not so much developing your own brand name.
Looking at these three reasons (and there are many more), it is easy to see that the money is not in being an affiliate, but in having your own product. You may not have a product to sell at the moment, and you may think you would not ever be able to develop one.
However, everyone can be taught to create a product, especially an information product. Creating an information product is a definite skillset that can be learned, and once learned, has the potential to bring in residual earnings.
There are many resources on the internet to learn how to develop and market an information product.

By Ed Akehurst