There are tons of people selling real products on the internet. Are you looking at selling as an affiliate or do you want to open your own ecommerce store where you provide the products?
Yeah I was just going to ask the same thing - you want to sell real products that you own, or just be an affilaite for "real" products? You can learn a lot of same marketing techniques in regards to how people promote items on clickbank and other affiliate agencies and apply them to real items, like ones you can find on amazon, for example.
You can always go the ebay route, although ebay seems to be like the marketplace of yesterday. I guess to better answer your question, we'll need to know what kind of products you're looking to sell.
If you're an affiliate, you pre-sell. You don't need a shopping cart. You send the customer to their site to buy. Sounds like you are focusing on an ecommerce site where you drop ship to customers -- Yes?
Not that I'm aware of unless you have some kind of drop ship agreement with them. I wouldn't call that an affiliate relationship though. Perhaps someone else could shed some light on this.
That would be dropshipping, or as a reseller, Shel. Affiliate marketing requires no shopping cart at all, just the pre-selling. And in some cases I do very little pre-selling, but focus on just putting the products in front of the people (in search results) and getting the click-thru to the merchant.
Ron,
You're in the right place
I actually focus on selling physical or tangible products as an affiliate. I actually promote a good mix of things. There is definitely money to be made there. In addition to LinkShare check out CJ.com, PepperJam Network, Share-a-Sale and other major affiliate networks. Tons of options!
Most affiliate networks rank their programs by perfomance, which is a good start. It's also important to keep in mind that conversions are affected by a number of elements, in addition to the product & price point. Some keyword phrases convert into sales at a higher rate than others, for example. And there's the quality of pre-selling too.
Personally, I don't build sites around products - I build around topics. And I always have a primary affiliate program or merchant, and at least 2 secondary or back-up merchants for any one site. That's good measure in case one program closes or drops a product, or you lose your affiliation with them for some reason.
I have found that the affiliate payout prcentage wise is very low on physical products I have sent a lot of traffic to mechants and a lot of stuff was sold but the payout was small.
Of course if you promote big ticket items and send a ton of traffic it might be different .
I like the cut on info products and subscriptions where you get paid every month as long as they subscribe.
This is a rather old thread, but curious if Ron is still around and if he did get around doing some affiliate marketing, love to know what progress you are making Ron or if you have given up and switched to a different direction.
I have done some reselling and affiliate marketing too before but right now more focused in promoting and selling my own products. If not for my strong desire to learn, I would have given up a long time ago.
Last edited by danwangert; March 27th, 2010 at 06:52 AM.
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