MBA1170 Q&A Wednesday: Should I build my own product or go deep into affiliate marketing?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show where making your business better is our pleasure with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Sean and Sean asks should I build my own product or go deep in affiliate marketing? Solid question Shawn. Creating your own product and affiliate marketing are two very different business models. It doesn't mean you can't do both, but there's challenges and there is a preferred order. In today's episode I'm going to cover the pros and cons of each and my recommendation when you're looking to make that choice at the start, both can be profitable business models, but you gotta make some tough choices to make sure you're doing the right thing for yourself, the way you want to run your business when you are in your life and the brand you want to build. We get into all that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Sean asks, should he build his own product, start his business with that, or go deep into affiliate marketing? And for those who don't know, affiliate marketing is recommending products to an audience in exchange for an affiliate commission. So I first want to address the affiliate marketing side of things. I think in online business, affiliate marketing has been really glorified in a way that makes it sound like it's an easy business model. All you got to do is sell somebody else's product. You don't have to create your own product. You can just sell somebody else's product and make money off that. Essentially being an affiliate marketer or somebody who builds a business off affiliate marketing. You're a salesperson, you're selling people on a product, and you're getting paid commission. Now, notice I said that you're selling a product to an audience. Well, you need an audience in order to be successful with affiliate marketing. Who are you going to sell to if you don't have an audience? And many successful bloggers do this because they have an audience. People coming to their blog, reading their blog posts, they sign up for their newsletter, their email list, and then they recommend products to them as an affiliate. They might do, like a joint webinar with the founder of the product. They might do a review or a video, a walkthrough. But the end of the day, they might even write a whole blog post about why this product is a must buy or create a whole sales page. They even might throw in some bonuses that they've created themselves or a coaching call or something like that. But the point is, is that they're selling. They're selling that product because both of them, you need an audience. You need an audience to sell a product that you created and one that you did not create. So the difference is you're not creating the product. You don't have to put in the time and the effort and the money it costs to create the actual product. But on the flip side, you're not getting all the actual revenue. You're getting a percentage of the sale. It could be 15, 20, 30%. If you created your own product, obviously you take home the whole amount of money, the whole profit of that sale. So I wanted to make that super clear. It's not that affiliate marketing is easier or creating a product is easier. They both have their own positives and negatives. You have to really weigh it out. At the end of the day, you need to be able to sell to A group of people, even the most highly, highly successful affiliate marketers that you can think of. People like Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. He's made hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on affiliate income. But recently, in the last couple years, he's built his own products. And Pat has a huge audience, huge podcast, huge blog, huge email list. Why would he create his own products if affiliate marketing is all gravy? And I spoke to Pat about this personally, and affiliate marketing is good, but it's a little scary to base all your income on somebody else's product on affiliate commission. So it's a smart idea to have your own products where you have control over, you know, what happens in the product itself and the quality of the product. So having affiliate commission supplemental to having your own products is probably the ideal situation if you want to get into affiliate marketing. So let's talk a little bit about creating your own product. Well, it's gonna take time. It's gonna take some money and effort depending on what the product is. If it's a software product, you're gonna need some help. You're gonna need to hire some people. If it's a content product, like an online course or a book or a training program, it's gonna take time for you to create this and to curate all that information. And it will cost you money to, you know, put this product together. And of course, if you have a physical product, there's costs involved there. So there is an investment here. But the thing that, again, is similar or is the common variable between affiliate marketing and creating your own product is an audience. So no matter what you do, my opinion is start building an audience in the market that you're in. If you're in health and fitness, start a podcast on health and fitness. If you're a financial planner, start writing some blog posts on the steps on planning for retirement. If you're looking for a place to start, start with an audience. Start building your audience. Not only do you need this audience to sell to, but you need credibility. When you write great content, when you create good content for your audience to build that audience, people start to trust you and see you as an authority, and therefore, they will trust you to buy either your own products or affiliate products. No one's going to buy from somebody who has no authority. So invest the time to build your audience. Right now, the best time was yesterday. The second best time now, right today, you gotta get started. Because whatever you choose, you need that audience. So after you start building that audience, what then? What do you choose? Well, in my opinion, I think you should create your own product. As small as it is, it could be a short ebook, it could be a seven part coaching call program, it could be a short video course. Even if it's at a low price point. $100, $200, $500, it doesn't matter. The point is that create something because you're gonna get people that are gonna wanna buy something from you. They love your content and just want more and they're willing to pay to go deep. When you start creating a product, you start building a brand and a business cause you're really actually now selling something and making money, right? That's what a business is at that point. If you want to start recommending products, it's gonna make a whole lot sense. You're gonna find products that are in line with what you do, align with your audience. You don't. You need to find products that will be a perfect fit for them and then become an affiliate for those products. I highly recommend that you don't over exhaust that though. What I mean by that is that there's nothing worse than being on somebody's email list and then every week they're pitching a new product as an affiliate. All these products can't be great. I mean it's just not possible. You gotta be selective and explain why you recommend that product to your audience.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's episode, Sean's question Should I build my own product or be an affiliate marketer? You know, sell affiliate products. I say start building your audience first. Start doing that. Build your own small product so you can have some authority and make some money and then find some affiliate products. If you want to get into affiliate marketing that are good, are good fits for your audience. If you don't want to get to affiliate marketing, that's totally fine. You can start building bigger products or improving upon the product that you just launched. But if you do want to get into affiliate products, I think you'll be in a better position for success when you have some authority. Thank you so much for listening, Sean. I hope that helped you and answered your question. If you have a question you want to ask, email me over@omar00mba.net and we'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. That's it for many of you guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. When choosing what you want to do in your business, whether you sell your own products or affiliate marketing or anything else, you got to ask yourself, does this fit how I want to live my lifestyle? Am I a creator? Do I like to create things for myself? If so, if I get fulfillment out of that, then you're going to want to create your own products. If you're a person that just loves a good idea and likes to promote things, likes to write good copy, likes to support something that already is successful or has the potential to be successful, then affiliate marketing is for you. So just also think about what you actually like, what you would actually be good at that's going to help you be more successful. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.

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