Affiliate Marketing is the moving of yours or someone else’s products or services and is information based. You can get real products like DVDs and books, but mostly what is sold is virtual and is information. Not consumable and so they cannot resell you the same products because once you have How to Sponsor 10 People in a Week, or Ways to Avoid The DREADED Phone, ebook or hard bound DVD or opt in video. You will not be buying it again. So they have to keep offering you new shinnies and holding that carrot out just a little bit further as they dip dab you to success- if you are lucky, or keep you chasing after Don Quixote’s windmills for those with less scruples.
But you can add additional income streams to your bottom line by adding one or more Affiliate programs to what you recommend to your customers on your blogs and web pages, or in your newsletter if you have started one. But be sure of what you offer as I have for research purchases went through many courses and programs found outdated information, broken and old dead links, impossible directions and more, in supposedly the latest product release (i.e. updated courses, newest ebook etc.)
Now I am very stubborn in giving up I will muddle though and attempt to make even the impossible work, so if I cannot or I have a great deal of trouble I KNOW, no one will go to more effort than I in trying to follow a course or directions to make a program work for them.
Some Affiliate programs I have liked the message enough once I did work though the headaches and bugs to gain all that was being offered- that I will take from them what I liked and later write my own in easy to understand and follow instructions that are checked and rechecked to lower the frustration level of my reader And create a course and ebooks to get that important information out. If you have a bit of a talent for the written word, and the soul of a teacher and can use Adobe, you could write your own ebooks and courses documenting what works for you as well and start your own Affiliate Marketing program going.
That brings us back to the difference in the two Marketing styles. And to me the big one is though you may buy into a Network Marketing company, you may feel it is your own business. Your parent company could still fold tomorrow as really you are a contractor there, and true it is your little part of the business you bought into, but only as long as there is one. You do not control the company in the big picture; Only how you run your business that is connected to it. You do not determine products or services only how you market them.
Affiliate Marketing can teach you to follow, yes it can. And it can also make you a tidy sum just passing on who you follow. But if you followed well, if you listen, if you read, if you embrace what you like about who you like, and filter away that knowledge, you can then write your own. Not everyone can do this, but you know who you are that is reading my blog. So you that can take those tools and use them to build your own Affiliate Marketing Company that belongs to YOU, that is yours to control. To damn or to succeed to take as high as you like or lay in the rumble of the idle laziness of those who talk a good game but do not know how to play. But for those that bring the ball and do play the game right it is something that no one can determine how high you rise or your success, but you. The Affiliate Marketing business is in your hands. And you control every aspect of it.
So in a sense Network Marketing is safer, because though we obtain freedom from the boss we still get a pay check we still have a company and board that dictates products and services we are to offer our customer base. Our security is attached to something larger they are the decision maker over the entire operation, and the company can disappear as fast as it came.
With your own Affiliate Marketing Company you are the board, you are the company and you control your destiny. No one will pack up shop and head for Timbuktu with your last check EVER! You are the decision maker. I think that is why so many Network Marketers get into Affiliate Marketing as it is truly what Network Marketers want complete control over our lives and for some of us, we are willing to take that path.
BUT it takes a lot of work and dedication to grow any Marketing business Affiliate or Network. So I am not recommending one over the other just showing the two different thought processes that go into both how they operate, and in how they effect you and your business.
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Sandy Metcalf
