Affiliate Marketing May Not Be All It's Cracked Up To Be

It's like an amazing Houdini illusion.

Online hopefuls line up at the doors of people who will sell them a dream, any dream, to take them away from the reality of paying ballooned sub-prime mortgage payments, high credit card interest rates, and stumbling job security.

But, you have to be careful what and WHO you listen to, because it could all be a grand illusion designed to temporarily make you believe affiliate marketing is as easy as throwing a sloppy website together and driving traffic to it.

Some people are smart enough to catch it early on, while thousands more fall for one of the greatest illusions known to man: “Affiliate marketing”.  Hang in there with me while I try my best to put in layman terms what I mean.

Affiliate marketing is great. It can make you money hand over first, but what it's sorely missing is your special touch, your control, your influence and your creativity.

This wouldn't be such a bad thing if most of the successful online product promoters told you the real deal up front. But many won't out of fear of competition.

You see, affiliate marketing is good for a lot of things. Mainly, in helping you buck the learning curve associated with making money online. You can make money and "earn while you learn" as an affiliate far easier than you can as a product creator.

So how should you look at affiliate marketing? Through a different pair of eyes, look at affiliate marketing as a stepping-stone to learning a new market. Look at it as picking apart what works for the product creator as an affiliate and what doesn't and set a goal to create a similar product -- but better.

It's easy for me to say not to let fear stop you from creating products you can sell as your own, because the truth is that you are taught from the beginning it's "best" to sell other peoples products. Therefore, it will take more than me telling you to go for it before you come to that decision on your own, but I will say that it's "worth it".

Sell products as an affiliate to make extra income in addition to selling your own. That is the ideal strategy to approaching the business of making money online. When promoting a product as an affiliate and you know the product is converting well for you, get a product made that caters to that target audience and sell your version of a similar product where you keep 100% of the profits.

Never underestimate your ability to create a better product than your competitors and you'll be light years ahead of the curve.

In the end, affiliate marketing is an awesome vehicle to learn all the lessons and mistakes you will discover on your journey. It's great because these mistakes and lessons are pretty cheap in comparison to selling your own product -- at first.

Soon, you'll get a good handle on what works and what doesn't, and you can switch between both selling your own products and being an affiliate marketer with ease.

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