If you are just out of the gate starting your own online business OR expanding into a market where you do not yet have a product of your own then you may be wondering if you should enter that market by marketing an affiliate product before jumping in with your own product.
On the one hand, you feel confident that you have a great product idea or at least can come up with one and know the benefits of having your own products are many:
- Full control over the product and process
- Leveraged income as partners sell your product for you
- Higher profits – anywhere from 50-90% depending on your partner approach and commission
- Credibility and profile boost in your market
- Flexibility to bundle and formulate highly attractive and profitable product bundles and packages
- Building your reputation making you higher value to your marketplace
Yet, you have to keep in mind that no matter how well we KNOW (or think we know) a market, there are no guarantees that our traffic generation, lead generation or offer will sell.
Due to this uncertainty – a question we commonly get over at InfoMarketer’sZone is how online entrepreneurs like you should enter these new markets…should they market an affiliate product first or should they jump right in and sell their own products?
3 Critical Questions On How To Enter New Online Markets
Let me start by saying that by far the experience I have with many of the top online marketers is that they start with affiliate marketing to “learn the ropes” around both marketing online and how their market will respond to their offers.
That’s not to say I haven’t come across cases where someone led the market with their own product before marketing anything else into a given niche…just that we are talking about 10% of the cases compared to 90% that started with some form of either list-building/content generation program (to build a following and list) OR started by marketing affiliate products first.
To help you answer this question for yourself – here are 3 questions you want to consider before deciding to jump right into a new market and begin product creation and product marketing.
The questions you really need to answer are:
1. Have I tested the market with my product idea? If not, then affiliate marketing can be a way that you test the market with someone else’s product before jumping in with your own. Â You would be amazed at how many times people with deep experience in a market mis-judge the demand for a given product idea. Â Having past experience in a market is often insufficient as a “test” to see if your current product idea will fly. Â A much better way is to find something similar in an affiliate product OR build a list around some content to the point where you can test some content ideas that are closely matched to your product idea.
2. Do you have momentum for a launch (I like to launch into new markets with at least 500 people on my list that will help in several ways: testimonials/initial case studies, reviews to get final improvement ideas for the product, initial jv/affiliate partners and some early activity to push sales as well as word-of-mouth into your market at launch). Â The bigger the groundswell of support around your launch, the more successful it will be and the higher the “tailwinds” will be in terms of ongoing sales even after the initial launch.
3. Have you tested your ability to generate traffic and “warm” that traffic through a pre-sales funnel? You need to have this whether it is an affiliate product or your own product – I would suggest you try it first on an a related affiliate product (so your initial traffic and list are also relevant to your own eventual launch) so you can refine both your traffic generation and sales funnel conversion strategy
If you are either confident of all 3 of these areas OR decide to ignore them at your own peril – then you can jump right into your own product.
Have a question about creating or launching your own product online – post it to the comments, we’re here to help.
