Which Is Harder In Your Opinion?

Well, it really depends on whether there's demand for the product in question. In other words, if people are desperate for a product you are promoting as an affiliate, whereas there is no interest in a product you have created, then you're better off promoting the affiliate product.

I agree with having control when it's your own product - and there are a host of other reasons why you might create your own products - but the first thing to consider (whether as an affiliate or a merchant) is: is there a hungry market for this product?

With regard to affiliates being ripped off... yes, unfortunately, it happens. All you can really do is do some due diligence on the merchant and then trust that no merchant in their right mind would make it a habit to rip off their affiliates (i.e. not if they want to be in the affiliate business long-term).

Of course selling your own product is still a better idea than selling someone else's product. There are pros and cons when selling your own and someone's product. Selling your own, will require you to handle everything, email inquiries, customer service hassles etc, but as an affiliate, you don't experience those things.

Selling someone's product, as you've said, you have no control on it and you can be cheated. But if you have thousands of subscribers, you won't mind selling someone's product, as you want to recommend a helpful product to your subscribers, you're not after the commissions, but you're after your subscribers by knowing that you just recommended a product that might be helpful for them.

If you sell your own product, it would take time to set up, but it would be more profitable because you can also have bunch of affiliates promoting your product for you, thus, resulting to a higher profit. If you need immediate money, then being an affiliate would also be a good idea, just choose the appropriate product that you think might be useful to your subscribers.

So, selling your own and someone's product can be done at the same time. I don't think selling someone's product would be much harder or vice versa, because it has different approach. If we're just talking about "which is easier", of course selling someone's product would be much easier, you don't have control on it but you don't experience any hassles, all you have to do is to send your subscribers an email recommending someone's product.

Initially you'll think selling your product; but I think selling another product is harder...

I guess it really depends on how you define "harder." That could mean different things to different people. As far as the sales process, I would think that it may be a little harder to sell your own product, unless you have a list of loyal subscribers. However I am not in product creation really, so this could be totally wrong.

I love affiliate marketing because believe it or not there are actually a lot of great products out there that I feel comfortable promoting. It really just depends on what you want to do. Not sure that either one of them is really "harder" than the other.

I would say that affiliate marketing is much easier to get started, which is why it attracts so many new marketers. I think you need to know how to sell online before creating your own products.

Just my opinion

Own products IMO. I don't like promoting other people's products and there's only a handful that I do promote, but the money for me is in my own products.

If you're a skilled marketer, you should be able to sell both with equal competence. That being said, theoretically, selling your own products should be easier, because you know your products more intimately than anyone else - at least you should.

David Jackson

In my opinion it is much harder to sell someone else product, because you don't have enough confident to the quality of the product your selling . . . Unlike that if your selling your own product you had lots of confident on how to market the real product and motivate you much more than the others. . .

Without doubt it is harder to sell affiliate products.

When you try that, you are a "bottom feeder." You are picking up the scraps which are left after the big guns have already blasted the offer to their lists.

When you put your own product up for sale, you don't do so with the market already saturated by the efforts of marketers with huge lists who have all been pushing something identical.

You can also sell your own products by recruiting affiliates yourself. Get good ones, and making sales really is easy.

The only reason I have survived online as long as I have is because I realised very early on that affiliate marketing was a dead end, reversed out and started to run a proper business.

Andrew

I would say that it is pretty easy for me to promote another person's product. I really enjoy joining affiliate programs because then I can just focus on marketing, which is what I'm good at. All of the other things that need to go with your own product I would have to outsource.

I think it is better to sell your own products. With all the time it takes to pick a winner you could have made your own product. You know that it works, you can explain it better than anyone else. More motivation to succeed and less competition.

Nancy Fleck