Why would I choose affiliate over adsense or my own product?

[Bruce61]

Hi,

total newb question, but I havent had a straight answer yet.

Basically as you will see from my signature I have a dog walking site. It has clean lines and no advertising. I did not build it to sell affiliate products, but if i can make some money to at least off set hosting costs, it would not hurt.

Can someone please explain very simply what would be most appropriate to my kind of niche site, that may have low visitor numbers. and why I would give up space for a third party when I could instead sell dog products for a local company in that space.

yes i get that affilate would be less hassle, with no hands on or negotiation after putting the link up, but am I likely to get more of a response to an affiliate product than say selling local organic dog food in that space?

If you can help, it would be much appreciated.

Bruce

 

[djbaxter]

Well, technically if you are selling dog food for a local company you're really acting as an affiliate for that local company.

I think the answer is diversity. If all of your visitors are local, you may do well with that one vendor and AdSense. But what if you get visitors from other regions, perhaps even other continents? Or what if some of your local visitors don't like that local vendor ot the products that vendor sells? Don't you to also provide options for them? If they don't buy from you, they'll go elsewhere and buy from someone else, so why not offer options?

 

[James S.]

Hello Bruce,

I think it would be very easy for you to promote dog training ebooks on your website. Most dog owners at one point or another, will look for either a dog training, care or grooming book for their pet.

So just about any kind of ebook that will help them learn more about being a better pet owner or taking better care of their pet is likely to do very well for you.

Because you deal with the pet owners, you can do word of mouth advertising to help increase your website traffic and maybe write a few article posts each week with tips on how to improve your dogs health.

For the second part of your question "why I would give up space for a third party when I could instead sell dog products for a local company in that space." here is my straight forward, short answer - "To make more money".

If you want to maximize the income that you can get from your website then you will need to focus on doing what is going to help you increase your websites income.

You may find that over time and by focusing more effort into promoting and improving your website, it may get to the point where it is making you more money on a daily basis than you are currently making on a weekly basis : - )

If on the other hand you are only concerned with using the website as a hobby on you just want to cover your cost, then it makes sense to just focus on one local product to market, (provided it does cover your cost).

So I think the real question you should be thinking about is do you just want it to be your hobby or do you want to build your website into an online business ?

 

[Linda Buquet]

I agree with everything said!

But I'd like to focus on a little different aspect of the question.

Time is money
And there is one thing everyone only has a finite amount of and that's time.

So bear with me. These #s may not be accurate, I'm just making this up as I go along, but I think it will support my point.

Either way you go, you need traffic as you won't make any money otherwise.
Here are 2 scenarios and some time scenarios of how you may spend a typical day.
Let's just say a day is made up of 10 time units. (Again, just totally making this up.)

Retailing someone else's product
2 units spent ordering, inventory
2 units spent negotiations, dealing with vendors, figuring out consumer pricing
2 units spent customer service & shopping cart/merchant services problems
1 unit spent sales returns and refunds
2 units spent adding products to site (images, writing descriptions, etc.)
1 unit spent webmaster/site design/troubleshooting/maintenance
0 unit spent marketing/driving traffic (No time left for marketing)
------------------------------
Total sales - likely low due to not enough time to drive traffic

(Note and I left a BUNCH of stuff out, like the extra time and hassle to collect, pay and deal with gov reporting re sales tax, etc.)

Affiliate Sales
2 units spent ordering, inventory
2 units spent negotiations, dealing with vendors, figuring out consumer pricing
2 units spent customer service & shopping cart/merchant services problems
1 unit spent sales returns and refunds
1 units spent adding products to site (easier, faster, merchant provides content)
1 unit spent webmaster/site design/troubleshooting/maintenance (needed either way)
8 units available for marketing/driving traffic
-----------------------------------
Total sales - likely higher, due to having more time for marketing

Now I do realize there are all types of scenarios and you could slice and dice those numbers differently to support other theories, but I hope the point I was trying to make is clear.

Having said all that, it depends a lot on you and what your strengths are and how you like to spend your time.