Mathematical Proof Affiliate Marketing Is Pointless

dizzspaceteam said:
You are almost there but you look over that you are selling in mass.you as the writer want to get as many eyes on your product.So you get the affiliates to do this for you.

Dizz
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Without disregarding any other opinion, this guy managed to explain it with just a few words. In the offline world it is the same: book authors get 12-18% of the proceeds, musicians oscillate around this value as well.

So, OP, if your turnaround is low, it will be pointless to do it. If it is high, it won't be pointless but in that case you don't need a middleman like CB. Some Affs make a deal directly with the provider when they see a high conversion ratio. Some authors contact their best Affs for the same reason. CB is useful when no big player is interested and you need to somehow manage sales through hundreds of small time promoters.
 
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You are also forgetting another major possibility that is more feasible than your theory.

You create a product and sell 100 copies for $9.75 (your share) = $975

Now you get 100 affiliates but you do not need 25 sites to equal what you have made. One affiliate makes 1 site and ranks it for several keywords. Now that affiliate sells 34 copies of your ebook for $29.25 (affiliate share) = $994

This is from one site not 25 like you stated. Now for every copy sold after that gap widens by $19.50 per sale.

Now tell me who makes the most, affiliates or product creators? You are going off the assumption that you will only make one sale per product as an affiliate marketer.

You see, you have to make 100 sales while I only need to make 34 to get the same amount of money. It's not about the number of sites, it is about the number of sales.
 
Just like in any company there are sales staff who work for a commission, there are the product creators and bosses as well.

Not everyone is cut out to be a product creator (although it is something learnable).

Some people are lazy and prefer to take the easy way (at first) but then realise they have to compete against thousands of other affiliates.

While others prefer to take the hard road (at first) and then relax at the end of the day knowing thousands of affiliates are competing against one another promoting THEIR products.
 
This has got to be one of the worst threads ever on BHW. :(

OP is ignoring:
* people have specific skill sets and prefer to work in different areas (some prefer making products, some people prefer building sites and traffic, some people like managing affiliates...)
* cheap outsourcing (on both affiliate and product sides)
* automation (on the affiliate side)
* the affiliate split is much closer to 50% than 75% for the majority of products that are out there (not just on CB)
* shaving
* upsells & mailing your buyers
* affiliate site building time vs product creation time

I know people on both sides of the equation who are millionaires (sometimes many times over) and / or make six figures a month. The best solution is the one where you maximize your income and minimize time spent by working with your own best skill set.
 
I was just throwing out some numbers so that i could better understand what people are doing in IM and why. Thanks for all the responses. I know IM wouldn't really work without affiliate marketers, i just wanted to see what people thought of the differences between product creators and affiliate marketing. I know people have become multi millionaires doing affiliate marketing though it's significantly much harder now to do that than before.
 
The only truth about marketing is it really is a numbers game. So you can say that the odds are never in your favor but this is not a game of chance.We choose on the numbers that we want to make.This job is just that a job.I hope the OP has learned alot here this has been a great discussion about the truth about what we see ourselves as.A smart man would see this thread and have an idea for a new e-book.

Dizz
 
Brilliant thread , I couldn't of said it better myself ....... LOL
 
Please, do not kill affiliate marketing. I have many clickbank products. I'm a lazy boy. I dont do much. Affiliates are the ones making more than 98% of the sales for me. They take 60% in some and 75% in others. I'm ok with the little I get without doing anything. Not too bad. Thanks affiliates. Keep up the good work and let's continue making money together. :D
 
Let's not forget the high authority sites. One decent review for your product could potentially grab a fair bit of sales for you. But the affiliate will earn at least 50% of the sale. Don't forget also, that's just one product. Next week another product and so on. While your product has been shelved the marketeer can review another cb product.

Do you know how much these top blogging sites a raking per month through affiliate products/services?
 
DocBrown said:
I?m going to throw out some figures here which I?m open to correction on but I think they are worth taking note of.
Lets say you create a product ? an ebook with a sale price of $39. I?m taking the magic of making up as an example (no I?m not the creator of it). You create the ebook and then create a sales page for it.

Now lets say you put it up on clickbank and I don?t know whats the normal number of affiliates you?d get to sign up to your ebook but lets say it?s 100. I could be completely over optimistic or under optimistic on this figure (someone might correct me on it).

So you have 100 affiliates selling the ebook for you at the normal rate of 75% commission (this happens to be the commission rate for magic of making up). So everytime an affiliate sells your book, you get 39/4= $9.75

So lets take 100 sales at $9.75. That?s equal to $975. Now, if you were to have sold the book yourself as the creator and without any affiliates, it would have taken you 25 copies to sell to get that $975 (975/39=25)

So in other words, if you?re an affiliate marketer you need to set up 25 affiliate sites in order to be making the exact same amount of money as the guy who just went off, carefully researched and created an ebook. Now I?m not talking about just any old ebook you?d get made up for you at elance for $1000. I?m talking about spending 4-6months researching and writing the ebook.

What I?m saying is that 1 carefully researched and written ebook is approximately equal to 25 quick cheap affiliate websites. The only difference is that the guy who owns the ebook is safe in terms of getting de-indexed by google (after all it?s just a sales page so SEO isn?t that important). The affiliate marketer on the other hand has to throw stuff at his sites such as UAW, scrpaebox etc to get traffic which run the very real risk of upsetting google and having your sites de-indexed by google some day.

So if you spent the next 2 years writing carefully constructed ebooks (or whatever type of product you want to create), you might be better doing this rather than creating 100 crappy affiliate marketing sites which could be de-indexed at the drop of a hat as often happens to people on this forum.

It?s often stated that the people who make the real money in IM are the ones who own their own products. Are my above calculations proof of this? And therefore proof that affiliate marketing is just a waste of time?


Just my 2 cents. What do people think of my numbers?
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Hey, this is a pretty good point, but you are wrong... This doesn't prove Affiliate Marketing is useless, because if you are the creator of a product, you rely on the affiliates obviously. Without them, you just have a sales page and an ebook...right?
 
I hate to say it but all of your so called mathematical proofs are really assumptions and speculations pulled out of someone's azz.

You do not have any real data,.... empirical or otherwise.
 
You have a very valid point but there are a few differences in peoples skill sets really as to what you want.

Take me for example, I am not the greatest writer and get bored real quick, could I write a decent ebook, probably, can I be bothered, NO :p

Of course if you can do this then you have to start creating your own products. If I was going to do this then I would set something up, make sure it is making money and then put it on CB to see how it goes, at least this way you have your own site ranking for the good terms and then other marketers send you lost of traffic, help build your list and then you can do a quick spinoff ebook and then resell to the lists you have without paying commissions and just throw it through your paypal account or whatever. Then of course, launch it on CB for more affiliates and current affiliates and the cycle continues.

Most of the time I get bored with this and just want to throw up a site and rank it and move on. I just get really bored staying with the same product/idea for too long (yes even doing some research and learning something is generally going to be too long for me, I have issues!!).

All this being said I am thinking of getting together a concept and paying someone to write the ebook for me, concepts I can do, finishing them I cannot!!
 
Yes. Affiliate marketing is officially dead now.
 
If you're an affliate, you can promote ANY PRODUCT you want, compare to being a product creator that has 1 product and dealing with refund and customer.
 
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