why create a product is better than affiliate offers?

You keep all the profits ;-)

But really. You will build YOUR list which YOU can market to in the future. It's all in the list. Very rarely do you get to build a list promoting an affiliate offer.

Most people would say that the advantage of being a product owner as opposed to an affiliate is that you get to keep 100% of the profits. Although technically true, you will only be getting 100% of sales you make yourself. Smart marketers are those that utilize others to sell their products for them. So if you are a product owner you will want to have affiliates and partners working for you so you will only get to keep the smaller percentage of each of those sale.

But being a product owner means you now have a new customer and you can followup with that customer and sell them other stuff. So the real advantage to being a product owner is that you get the lifetime value of a customer rather than just the value of that one single purchase.

You keep the profits, but the bigger things are these:

You have affiliates doing all the running around promoting. You can do some too, if you want to.

You're both feet into internet marketing - you have many more opportunities that present themselves for joint ventures, other products, helping people promote their products to your list, and so on. It surprised me at first how many opportunities appeared from my first product.

Once you're doing these things, you're learning even more new stuff, and that gets you to work things out for yourself, and actually become a leader rather than a follower.

It is not so much the product profit but the LIST that is the key here. You are getting a PURE LIST of buyers. How cool is that?

Hi I have spent time trying to sell other peoples products and not been very successful. I now want to get my own product together after listening to different advice. I believe that then, I will really want to sell and promote it. I also just want to focus on one thing, after getting a bit lost, buying stuff that promises to make me money but doesn't....
Alex Jefferies (no affiliate link) really makes sense when you listen to him

Selling your own product will surely make you more motivated.
As the other warriors said before, you would be your own master, you be more convincing and will soon develop your own affiliates network.

I don't think it is better, for very many people.

I think being an affiliate has many advantages, and being a vendor has many disadvantages and risks (some obvious and some very much less obvious). I don't agree at all with people who imagine (and sometimes say) that becoming a vendor is the only way to start earning "big money".

I think there's a huge number of reasons for affiliate marketing being better, overall, for many people, anyway. Here are just ten of them ...

• Affiliates have almost complete flexibility of products to promote: we can add, remove and change products whenever the need arises and for whatever reason, without needing to create a new one
• When you're an affiliate, you get the chance to build up an asset-based business based on genuine residual income without your fortunes being tied in to the longevity, success and demand for any specific, individual product at all
• Affiliates don't have to do (or outsource) the market research necessary to determine exactly which type of product's going to be a success - not to anything like the same extent as vendors, anyway
• Statistically, just among the people I know really well (this point is clearly subjective and I don't pretend otherwise) the long-term successful affiliates I know are mostly earning far more from internet marketing than the long-term successful vendors I know, and their businesses are far more stable for the long-term
• Affiliates don't have all the potential legal liability, compliance and enforcement problems (which incur time, effort, energy, worry and sometimes money to resolve) that vendors typically have
• Affiliates don't generally have most of the customer service/support problems that vendors tend to have to deal with all the time
• Affiliates have far greater flexibility of income-sources than vendors do: once I've built up my lists in a few different niches, covering a large range of products, if any one supplier gets into trouble, I can fairly easily promote things from other income-sources instead, so the sudden demise of a retail outlet (or even a payment processing method) doesn't affect me nearly as adversely as it would typically affect a vendor
• As an affiliate, it's far easier to offer a range of promotions at very different price-points than it typically is as a vendor
• Affiliates don't have to do (or outsource) the actual product creation-process and "put it all together"
• Affiliates have to pre-sell rather than sell (it's much easier and it doesn't involve sales copywriting, which vendors either need to be really professionally good at, or pay quite a bit to outsource)

I could easily go on ... those are just a few of the more obvious advantages that spring immediately to mind.

You might want to bear them in mind if anyone tells you, mistakenly, that "all the real money is always in having your own products".

I do BOTH for all the reasons already mentioned in this thread for being an affiliate marketer and product creator.

They both have their advantages and disadvantages, many of which were already listed. Here's a quick example of what I'm referring to:

I created an online dating handbook a few years ago based on my experience from using online dating sites (Match.com, eHarmony, POF, etc.) but then I met a marketer who had a digital online dating course that just SHREDDED everyone else's, including mine. He paid a 50% commision on a $97 product that converted really well with the right presale.

His sales copy and marketing funnel was pretty bad a$$ and the conversions from my initial testing were pretty impressive.

I discovered that even though people bought my $27 online dating handbook, they were still buying his $97 course at my recommendation because it had a bunch of stuff that my handbook didn't have. They complimented one another really well and people in that market very seldom buy only one product (they buy many).

I also send people to eHarmony.com, Match.com, JDate.com, ChristianSingles.com, etc. and they have affiliate programs, so I sign up for those and I send out the appropriate links when I write an article, blog post, etc.

It's all in how you POSITION yourself, the content, and if it solves a specific problem or issue, they are more than likely going to buy it from you.

I believe in diversification as a great way of offsetting any risks out there that I take in business. So I'm going to create my own line of products so I can control my own commission structure, I only approve affiliates that I talk to or know (one of the many reasons why I don't have any products on CB, a personal choice for me), etc.

When you promote other people's stuff and you're a good marketer who tracks all their conversions, you can begin to build some great strategic relationships with some of the product owners. I've done many webinars and even a few offline seminars with some of my affiliate partners.

If you have a great product / service offering and you know how to sell, then you're going to get the attention of the big dogs.

So I say do both, and while you're at it, don't be afraid to look at other incomes streams. You can still buy traffic pretty cheap and send it over to CPA offers. You can invest your money in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, warrants, real estate, etc.

RoD

Well the absolute best situation to be in, in my opinion, is to be a product creator that also promotes affiliate products.

Just promoting affiliate products on their own, you don't really build a list of your own buyers. You are actually creating a buyers list for someone else. A buyers list is so much more profitable than a normal e-mail list. Because you know that people on a buyers list are willing and proven to spend money.

So create your own product, collect the e-mail addresses and names of people who buy your product, then turn around and sell them more stuff; either affiliate products or other products that you create.

It's usually the back-end products were most of the high level gurus make their millions. Front end products are usually low-priced and offer affiliates 75% to 100% commissions. This is evident in the current WSO market. Many of the items that you will find there are priced around $10.

What you don't see, is that they are selling products and coaching sessions for upwards of $2000 or more on the back-end. Offering 100% commission to affiliates for the low-cost front and product is basically a way of getting free advertising. It's genius!

There's nothing wrong with affiliate products, but owning your own products is really the holy grail of online marketing. The reason for this is because you own the product which means that you can modify and change it whenegver you choose to do so.

That alone is good enough reason to have your own products to sell. However, perhaps the other reason has to do with the money. You get to keep the entire sale whereas with affiliate marketing, you might only get to keep at least 75% of the profits.

There is two simple but important reasons imo.

1.) If you sell your own product, you keep 100% of your revenue
2.) If you own a product, you can have affiliates and sell a mass amount from it if your product is successful.

Think about vendors at clickbank and alot of examples...many people make no money from affiliate marketing but they make money as vendors . They have affiliates selling for them.