The Truth About Affiliate Marketing & Reseller Products

I hope this email finds you and yours well, and that you are
having a splendid and blessed day. A recent email from a
subscriber asked me if affiliate marketing and reseller products
are still a viable way to make money online. The answer is most
assuredly "Yes" but you need to approach it realistically and as a
real business. Let me explain.

The best way to get into affiliate marketing is to find a
product that you need for yourself and see if it has an affiliate
program. Even if it doesn't, you may be able to approach the
creator of the product and work out a referral agreement.

Notice that I said find a product you like. I did not say follow
the pack and promote the same old thing to the same old crowd.
That will not work effectively long-term unless you change up
your marketing approach to differentiate your promotional message
from the next guy's.

I also strongly recommend that you purchase the product yourself
to make sure it is as good as it is advertised to be. Then and
only then will your referral be heart felt and genuine. And
that's critical to attract prospects and convert them to sales.

Most affiliate programs come with canned emails you can send out
to your lists. It is my experience that this does not usually
work well if there are hundreds of affiliates sending out the
same message to the same people as you are. I would bet that your
subscribers subscribe to many of the same lists, so this means
they will get hammered with the same promotional messages. The
only one who wins is the super-affiliate who gets the message out
there first.

So finding a good product that fills a need and buying it are
tantamount to your long-term success as an affiliate marketer.
You can't tell people who great a product is if you haven't used
it yourself.

This is the same advice for reseller products. Buy the product
first, then promote it.

Now with regards to reseller products, experience has proven my
investment always pays for itself in multiples of what the
original resale rights cost. So I purchase a product for $27.00,
you can bet your bippy (anyone remember the old TV series
Laugh-In?) that I will make back my $27.00 investment many times.

Will you get rich through affiliate and reseller marketing? That
depends upon many different things including the quality of the
product, how well you promote it with your well-written review,
how many others are promoting it with canned promotional text,
the price, the commission, etc.

Another thing you need to be wary of is the level of support
provided by the product creator after the sale. Typically, most
product creators do an adequate job of promoting their product or
service, but it has been just the opposite for me with reseller
products. Many times I have found myself on my own, having to
help a buyer find and contact the product creator for assistance.
So you do need to do your homework. Know the track record of the
person you are doing business with. Failure to do so may find you
having to refund many reseller product sales.

I first got started during the 1990's with affiliate marketing by
promoting products from Corey Rudl, Marlon Sanders and Mark
Joyner. I remember the thrill I got when I received my first
check for $60.00. I had no clue what it was for, when the sale
was made, which product ... but it was manna from heaven. True
passive revenue. There's nothing else like it.

Of course, you can't survive on $60.00 checks unless you are
receiving a lot of them every single day. Your own mileage may
vary, as they say, based upon your monthly nut and what you need
to live on. I would bet that most people who participate in
affiliate or reseller product marketing make very little money at
it.

In the early days of Internet marketing, it was not unusual to
find banner farms -- sites set up with nothing but affiliate
banners. This approach worked for very few for a very short time.
Now content is king, and your sites won't make many sales if you
don't have compelling content related to the products you are
promoting. That's why product review sites are best. The
CoolToolAwards.com web site reviews affiliate and reseller products
every month and makes money for me while I sleep. It receives
over 2,000,000 unique visitors a year, generates tons of
subscribers, and many commissions each month. You can learn my
secrets to creating a review site here:

http://www.rocketsciencerevealed.com

My earliest success was working with Armand Morin. Starting out
small, he released eCover Generator to the market about 10 years
ago. I was developing a similar product, but opted to pull mine
from the marketplace in favor of promoting his product instead. It
was more profitable for me to earn $33.95 on every sale of his
product than it was for me to complete development of my own
product.

Since then I have beta tested many of his tools and he even uses
some of my endorsements on his sites. He's come a long way since
those early days and is now a multi-millionaire. So here is the
other side of the affiliate marketing coin.

If you have a product or service of your own, affiliate
marketing can make you very wealthy by developing your own army
of super-affiliates. There are a select few product creators out
there who can release a product and in one day make a million
dollars as a result of their close ring of super-affiliates.
Often these product creators don't even promote their own
product. They simply turn it over to the expert affiliate
marketers and let them send the promotion out to their respective
lists. This has changed people's lives.

Back when I first launched EbookoMatic.com, I shopped for
affiliates to help me promote my instant ebook publishing
service. After a year, I had around 350 affiliates world-wide,
highly targeted and generating about 23% of my sales. That was an
enormous push for me, not just for sales, but because I had 350
sites promoting my service with invaluable back-links to
EbookoMatic.com. The search engines loved my site.

So, yes, Virginia, affiliate marketing and reselling other
people's products can be a very lucrative way to generate
supplementary income, but very few people I have met generate
enough to live on comfortably. Ultimately you need to manage your
affiliate marketing efforts carefully and critically, and make
sure you are focusing your energy and talent on the products
capable of generating the most money for you.

Several years ago I decided I needed a better system for
managing my own affiliate marketing efforts. I created My Affiliate
Marketing Manager. Click the link below to see how it can help
you with your efforts:

http://www.myaffiliatemarketingmanager.com


Until next time,


Steven Schneiderman