Is Affiliate Marketing for Me?

[idolon]

Hello everyone,

I am the owner of a website that sells decorative items and housewares, and because of the economy, foreclosure rate, etc, sales have been slow. I'd like to supplement my income, and was thinking that an affiliate program may be the right way to do this.

Here's basically what I have:

a corporation which owns 4 domain names

1 is up and running, and I don't want to do affiliate sales through it (I do dropshipping and wholesale, and it works out well except for the current issues I mentioned earlier.)

The other 3 are just sitting there, but are suited well for selling jewelry, travel related items and craft supplies.

A pretty decent niche market/readership.


I was originally going to do wholesale for the jewelry site, but the start up cost is going to be pretty great, so I thought maybe becoming an affiliate would be a good way to go.

So my basic question is this: Would it be beneficial for me to join an affiliate program for the other sites? Or would it be better for me to scrape up the money and just do wholesale? Could I do both on the same site and make it seem seamless?

Thank you all for your time!

[Linda Buquet]

I think all my answers are yes.

Here is my very over simplified version or wholesale or dropshipping VS affiliate marketing.

In ans case, no one makes any money unless you do marketing, get traffic, have good copy and no how to convert (or in the case of affiliate marketing generate the click-through to the merchant.

So with wholesale or dropshipping if orders, customer service, support, cart issues and other stuff like that takes up 30% of your time, that's 30% less time you have to market and potentially 30% less sales.

To some degree it depends on where you like to spend your time, what you're good and where you want to focus your energy ie customer service, tech issues, order challenges, inventory OR marketing.

"Could I do both on the same site and make it seem seamless?"

Sure you could if you wanted to. But if it costs to get started,
is more work and not that much more profit, then why would you want to?

PS. I'm biased and affiliate marketing is what I do, so take that into consideration.

[Daniel08]

I would definetly use affiliate marketing because you can do it with no money. You might also want to get an adsense account with google so you can have google ads on your sites that will make you money. You can find products at cj.com to also promote on your site.

[MrCat]

Affiliate marketing could be a nice way to help you reach out to your target market. But that alone would not spell out success upfront. You would need to diversify for more results.

A good marketing mix is always a sound decision in this industry

[idolon]

Thank you all for your advice. I will continue looking around, but this does look like a great option for me to expand!