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Which of the two is more profitable?

It's simpler to make money with your own product, for which you can
set up JV, invent special offers, test and tweak the sales copy, rely
on other people to promote it for a commission, etc...
You have total control over your product so you have more tools to
make money than what you have with something over which you have
very little control (i.e. other people's products and websites)

But owning your own product also means that you have a big load of
extra work, in the form of providing support, updating the product,
keeping track of many more things, caring about security and other
issues like false spam complaints that could shut your business
down for some time (which means lost profits) etc etc.

On the contrary, affiliate programs allow you to have a much higher
degree of freedom: you don't owe support to anyone, if the website
goes down you can promote other stuff and keep the profits rolling
in, you don't have to worry about hackers and customer care etc...

When you sell your own product you have to provide a minimal level
of support and customer care, which in turn could generate more
sales (any sale after the first one is much easier, especially with
happy customers :) so there is more work and also potentially
more profits - if you work well enough.

If you're not organised well enough to guarantee proper support and
timely email replies, it will probably be easier to promote somebody
else's product.

So, which of the two is more profitable?
If you are faster at generating new affiliate sales than what you
would be at providing support for your customers, affiliate marketing
is the choice.

If instead you enjoy providing support, you could make more profits
with your own product (especially with the support of a good affiliate
team that brings in the orders for you to take care of ;)

So, how "lazy" are you? If you prefer "automatic cash machines", the best
choice is the promote otehr people's products. If you don't mind working
for your customers to provide excellent service and you're good at it, you
could make more money with your own product - or even better - your own
series of products (Armand Morin style: that's how you make lots
of money with your list of customers: you sell them lots of things! ;)

Brief recap: when you're an affiliate you're sending business to someone
else who - if s/he's good enough - will take advantage of the lifetime
value of the customer. When you're the owner, you work more but if you're
good at it you can also make more money: here's a short numerical example.

The Product costs $100.
An affiliate will make $50 for each customer they send to the owner.
The owner will make $50 + anything else s/he manages to sell to the customer
in the following months and years (if s/he's good enough at providing the care
and support that happy customers want to stay happy ;)

Here is why you have to be very well organised or at least why, if you own
your product, you MUST have affiliates promoting it:

More sales = more work for customer support
More work = less time to promote
Less time to promote = less sales

If you have a cool team of power affiliates instead you don't need to
promote, since *they* will be selling for you, but you do need to
provide them with tools and *support* (again) to help them help you ;)

cheers,
Saul

_______________________________

I've had an idea. One that many people have had before me.
But when *I* have the idea, I trust it more than when the
others have it (even if it's the same idea ;)

If making money online is comparable to a casinò, I would
compare the various tables (poker, black jack) to various
websites selling stuff - in all the various ways stuff can be
sold. Example: a minisite selling an ebook is like the poker
table. It costs to mantain it, it can make you good money
(especially when you're the owner) and it generally works.

But what else do you have in your average casinò?
Slot Machines.

Sure, maybe people don't spend $100 (or 97 - lol) all at
once in a slot machine like they could do at a poker table...
But to mantain a poker table someone must constantly
work at it. A slot machine once it's on it's on, it doesn't
need anything else other than the occasional maintenance
and maybe an upgrade every now and then...

So if a minisite is like a poker table, what is just like a slot
machine??? You'd like to know that, wouldn't you?
And what if I told you that from my research it looks like
slot machines make up for a large portion of casinò income?
It would make it even more interesting, wouldn't it?

There is one thing that makes the dream a little less dreamy:
if you want to make money with slot machines instead of
poker tables you need volumes: You need LOTS of people
that spend small coins.
A poker table with one player could bring in well over a
thousand dollars in an evening. A slot machine with one
player will make a miserable profit in comparison.
That's why for slot machines you need volume. You need
a LOT of people. And a LOT of slot machines. So that makes
it a little more difficult than setting a profitable poker table
that could need even just one good customer...

But a part from the volume aspect, this "slot machines" idea
looks really profitable. So what is it that I think could compare
quite well to the offline casinò slot machines??

Pay per click traffic: this is the slot machine of internet
profits. Like casinò players spending millions in little coins,
a considerable amount of people clicking on your pay-per-click
links should build an interesting cash flow.

So this is what I'm going to focus on my next researches:
making money with LOTS of little coins - instead of setting
up a poker table I'm going to set up a huge number of
slot machines, and I'll tell you if it works... and maybe (if in
fact it does work) I'll tell you how I did it too ;)

Cheers,
Saul

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Or the one of the day before?
No? Why not?
...because there isn't one - that's why!
yeah...weeeell... what do you expect? This is a marketing dork's blog!
I can hear you say: "And just what kind of excuse is that???" lol

Now, here's what a serious marketer does: PLANNING
I'm a dork, so I didn't plan anything ahead. I just started bloggin' away...
Lots of other people have too. And then they discover it takes time to blog.
Seriously, it's not something that happens without using up some time.
Even with free software blogging is expensive, because it consumes time.

Since I'm a dork, I didn't think of this and I didn't set some time aside to
use for my blog. I just found myself surrounded by things to do and I had
to let the blog without posts for some time... Which isn't very bloggish at
all ;)

So if you decide to make your own blog, PLAN some time for it. Make sure
you have at least 5 or 10 spare minutes every couple of days to post
something on it. People don't come back to see dead blogs. Blog readers
enjoy fresh content, daily posts, frequent updates... you get the picture.

I'm allowed to do what I want (like posting cartoons on a marketing blog :P )
because I'm a dork. If you want to write a more serious blog, make sure
you have the time to do it :)

Cheers,
Saul