Direct Marketing Vs Affiliate Marketing

Direct marketing and affiliate marketing are two of the most lucrative sources of income for many people who take advantage of the Internet. Direct marketing involves selling your own product or service directly to your target customers.

Affiliate marketing is more like retailing, which involves selling a product or service you do not own and receiving commissions on every sale you make. Choosing which one to get involved with depends on you, but in terms of advantages, direct marketing can give you the upper hand.

Why Choose Direct Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be a very profitable online business, and there are many instances where the affiliates earn more than the product owners or service providers.
However, that is not usually the case. While super affiliates can easily make money promoting other people’s products, probably because they have bigger email lists or advertising funds, small affiliates only make a handful.

In contrast, direct marketing makes it easier for online marketers to build their own customer base and sell more of their existing and future products.

Affiliates can actually create their own customer base as well, by generating leads through email marketing. While this is true, the product owners also generate their own email lists, often gaining the trust of most customers, especially if their products are top notch.

Hence, when it comes to gaining repeat customers, it is the product owners make more money by bypassing the affiliates.

What’s Involved

Affiliates only need to find a product to sell, and promote it through various means online. However, direct marketers have to make their own products or offer their own services.
This is necessary, because without a product or service to provide, there can never be any sales to make.

If you want to get involved in direct marketing, you need to make the product or service accessible through a website, and should have a merchant account to deal with payments.
If you sell a physical product, make sure to hire a reliable company to handle the shipping. It also involves providing customer support.

Direct marketers have to ensure that their customers have access to technical and sales representatives. This is crucial to the success of any online business.

After the business website has been setup, you can use direct marketing strategies to attract new customers. There are many ways to do this. You can employ search engine marketing, email marketing, telemarketing, social media marketing, and the many more.

The Bottom Line

While affiliate marketing is a good way to earn money online, direct marketing can offer better chances of online success.

First> of all, you earn 100% from sales if you sell your products directly to your customers.

Second, you can create your own customer base, which allows you to generate repeat sales and pre-sell your future products.

Third, you can track and record useful customer data, which can be used to predict future sales trends and the like.

Fourth, you have the option to offer an affiliate program, which makes it easier for you to generate more sales with less effort.

Hopefully this article will help you decide what methods you want to you use (whether it be direct marketing or affiliate marketing – or both) to make money online and grow a stable and profitable business.