Affiliate Marketing VS Amazon FBA: Which One Is Right For Me?

Check out the below video to see which works for you: affiliate marketing or Amazon FBA.

Unedited Transcript

Do you want to know what’s right for you, affiliate marketing or Amazon? Stay tuned as I answer which one is right for you? The filled by Amazon or the affiliate market.

[00:00:16] Hello and YouTube. It’s Alston. And what my channel, where I discuss affiliate marketing, passive income, and making money online, be sure to like subscribe and ring the bell so that you can learn tips and tricks and affiliate marketing. Today, as I mentioned, you are actually going to learn which one is right for you, Amazon FBA or affiliate marketing. But, before we get started, I want to let you know that both online businesses can and will work.

[00:00:42] It’s just a matter of which will work best for you. So let’s get started. We’re actually going to define affiliate marketing, Amazon FBA. We’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each, and we’ll discuss which one is right for you, depending on your circle. All right. So, a question of the day, how did you come across affiliate marketing and Amazon FBA?

[00:01:02]What do you like about each? Leave a comment below, and I will answer every single comment, a personal story. When I actually stumbled across it fulfilled by Amazon or Amazon FBA when I was looking for additional ways to make money, but we were actually coming across, or my wife was pregnant with our third child, and I realized.

[00:01:22] To maintain a current standard of living, I would need to have a different a more passive set of income to make some money to supplement. Or if a child, if you think about college and higher education, it’s going to be pretty pricey to send three kids to college within a span of three or four years.

[00:01:41] So Amazon, I came across, I also came across marketing and personally, I. I feel that marketing is a little bit better for me, but we’re going to talk about the two differences and which one is right for you. Let’s get started with affiliate marketing. So basically, what affiliate marketing is, you are a creator who creates content.

[00:02:02]You are providing a solution to a problem. For example, one of the most common ones is how do I make more money online? And so basically what you do is you talk about the solutions, and then you recommend. A method that can make that solution a little bit easier. So if, for example, we are using how to lose 10 pounds.

[00:02:21] What you could say is, or what an affiliate marketer would say, you could lose 10 pounds by working out every day for two hours a day and having in expending more energy than you consume. That’s how you lose 10 pounds, but if you want it to make it faster, if you want to lose 10 pounds in a week, you may try this supplement, or you may try this diet.

[00:02:40] So that’s basically what affiliate marketing is. The product or service you’re recommending aims to make the solution that the customer is looking for a little bit easier very general overview. Basically, there, there are several strengths with the affiliate. There is no actual product that the person has to have on hand, no product they have to have in stock.

[00:03:01] There’s actually really no product that they can recommend or that they have to recommend. One of the things you’ll see with affiliate marketing, especially when it comes to YouTube, is that many affiliate marketers don’t necessarily recommend it. Okay. Certain products or services because those products and services can change over time.

[00:03:21] What they’ll do, what they’ll do is they’ll tell you to click the link in the description so that you can be taken to you’ll be taken to a landing page where they collect your email address, but then ultimately you’ll be taken to. A product or service that they’re recommending. Like I said, one of the good things about affiliate marketing is you can actually recommend multiple products.

[00:03:39] There’s no one product that you are tied to. There’s also no customer service that you have to worry about. One of the issues that you run into with like drop shipping. If a customer has a return, those are problematic and things that you don’t have to worry about if they never received their order. Another strength is you can create content.

[00:03:56] You can create tons of content. For example, if you look on my channel, I have over 150 videos on affiliate marketing. But you can create lots of content around different topics, recommending different products and services. And you can also test different. Products and services so that you can get a good idea of what you’re recommended.

[00:04:15] Another great thing with affiliate marketing is you can actually make money 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One of the best things, in my opinion, with affiliate marketing, is you can wake up in the morning and see that you have an email saying that you have earned a commission. One of the greatest things in the world to me is waking up in the morning and seeing that I’ve already made a hundred dollars or $500 or whatever.

[00:04:36]That is a great feeling. So a few weaknesses affiliate commissions are low when you compare them to other types of online businesses. For example, Amazon associates are the largest affiliate network in the world. Amazon associates are linked with amazon.com, which is the biggest retailer. You retailer.

[00:04:56] And they only do between four and percent, four and 10% commissions on their product. So if you’re recommending a $50 product and it’s only a 4% commission, you’re basically getting pennies on the dollar, and that can be a problem. So what will happen is you’ll have to record it. You’ll have to make a lot of commissions based on your recommendations.

[00:05:16] And so you’re going to have to probably do a lot more work and recommend a lot more product. So you have to create more content. Another drawback is you have to create an ecosystem. And what I mean by the ecosystem is you may have to do a YouTube video. You may have to do blog posts, podcast methods, do three or four different types of content to get the desired level of results.

[00:05:36] And so that can be a little bit of an issue and a little bit of a drawback. Another issue or drawback with affiliate marketing is it’s very competitive because there’s such a low barrier to entry with affiliate marketing. You don’t need any money to get started so that people can do it on a whim.

[00:05:53] Put their toes in to test the waters, so to speak. And so because you have that, you have lots of people creating content of various levels and making it difficult for people that are serious or true with making affiliate, marketing, their primary business model. So it can be a little bit difficult to find sustained success.

[00:06:12]There’s also a lot of little nuances with affiliate marketing. For example, going in, you don’t realize that you need an email. To scale and to meet your final financial objectives, you will need to spend money and get an email list and get an auto-response to get that success.

[00:06:29] You also probably need a website. So while you can get in for low cost or free or cheap to scale it out and make significant money, you’re going to need to invest some money. So that is basically what affiliate marketing is. I just painted with an extensive brush. It can get very nuanced depending on your niche and high ticket versus low ticket.

[00:06:50] There’s a lot of sub things that you can talk about in there, and I could spend another hour. Talking about that, but in general, that’s what affiliate marketing is. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about Amazon BA, and FBA stands for fulfilled by Amazon and basically what this means and what Amazon FBA is you send a product insert, or you send several products to Amazon. Amazon will sell them on their side.

[00:07:18] And they’ll take care of all of the shipping, which is pretty cool. When you think about it, you don’t have to have, again, any stock on hand. You don’t have to worry about having a warehouse and fulfilling orders and shipping and all of the other stuff that’s all taken care of by Amazon. So it’s a pretty seamless process.

[00:07:35] You can either have items shipped directly from one source. For example, a lot of people use Alibaba, which is basically the Chinese version of Amazon. You can have that shipped directly to Amazon. Most people probably have it sent directly to their homes. They make sure the order is correct. And then they send it out to the nearest Amazon warehouse actually has a warehouse, probably about two miles from here.

[00:07:56] So it wouldn’t be too bad for me. Basically, as I mentioned, Amazon FBA, you basically get a product, you get a product. Send it over to Amazon. They take care of the shipping of the online sales page. They take care of all of that. So that’s pretty cool—Amazon’s largest retailer.

[00:08:17] So it’s easy. It’s seamless. Your product will probably get sold. But, again, there are some nuances in there—another great. The thing about using FBA is they take care of all of the shipping. You can actually take advantage of Amazon. There are just so many cool things to do with it. That’s why it’s so appealing.

[00:08:34] So those were the streets. You can sell products that you own, that you make, that you don’t know. You can source them from somebody somewhere else and bring them in. You can send them over to Amazon. Amazon is the largest e-commerce in the world, we’ll say. And you can take care of crime.

[00:08:51] Here are some of the weaknesses, and there are a few that can be shallow margins depending on what you bought the product for and what is sold. Online it’s highly competitive because Amazon because you’re competing with both Amazon and other sellers and resellers, the price can fluctuate a lot.

[00:09:10] So where you may buy the product where you’re going to make a dollar on each widget, we’ll say each Sharpie pen. If you watch me, my videos, you know that I may Sharpie pen kind of thing. Let’s say you have done the price matching. You’ve done the research, and you can buy a million of these Sharpie pens and make a dollar profit by doing an Amazon FBA.

[00:09:34] By the time you get the product and you package it up, and you send it over to Amazon, that price could change to 50 cents or even negative where you’re losing money. So that’s the problem. There are a lot of people already out there doing it. And like I said, the price can fluctuate. There are a lot of rules when it comes to it.

[00:09:52] There’s a lot of things that you can and cannot do. You’ll have actually to check with Amazon and Amazon FBA as well. Those rules are. I did some research into it, and those rules do change a lot. So you have to stay abreast of those rules. So another drawback is there are fees associated with selling on Amazon, and you’ll have to factor that in when you source a product or service, and you may have sourcing problems.

[00:10:15]Because many people are doing this through Amazon and Alibaba, Ali Baba, you may have an issue finding a product that is priced well. Please buy it from Amazon or Alibaba, have it sent to you, and then 10 back out there sourcing issues there, there can also be customer service issues. Problem with the product.

[00:10:35]It gets returned to, it gets exchanged. They’re not satisfied. There are some issues there. Also, a lot of your success or failure is based on user reviews. So if you’ve ever purchased something on Amazon and you, a few days later, a week later, you received an email like, Hey, review my product.

[00:10:51] The reason why you’re getting that email. Someone is using Amazon FBA, and they need positive reviews to move up the ranking. A lot of them, a lot of the items sold on Amazon and a lot of the Amazon, a lot of the products sold on Amazon are based on a hidden ranking system that not a lot of people are access to or privy to.

[00:11:13] And so for a business or an individual to move up those rankings to somewhere. They need positive customer reviews. And, but one of the things that Amazon is strictly against is telling people, Hey, I need five-star reviews and other issues that you can email them directly. So if you have a customer, maybe a repeat customer or customers that are happy with your work, there are rules.

[00:11:37] Contacting them directly, you can only do through Amazon’s internal network. So there are many things that you need to be aware of, mostly rule-based, and when it comes to making money. So let’s talk a little bit about which one is right for you. As I mentioned, I like affiliate marketing because I can recommend a product or service.

[00:11:56] That’s a little bit easier for me to create content. And talking in front of a camera like I’m doing now and recommending a solution based on a problem. So to me, I feel like it’s the last work to create this content because I’m just sitting here. You’re talking to yourself via YouTube or some online method.

[00:12:17] Yeah. I don’t have to worry about customer service, which is a huge plus for me. I have done customer service for burger king, Walmart, Menards Kmart, and a few other places. And that’s probably the toughest aspect of the job is dealing with unhappy people, for the most part. You’re not dealing with people that are happy or satisfied. They’re coming back because they’re frustrated.

[00:12:40] They can’t find it. Whatever if you’re doing, if you’re doing Amazon, excuse me, if you’re doing affiliate marketing, you’re recommending a product or service, but you’re not in the supply chain at all. You’re not physically handing them or the product service. You’re not putting a shipping label on it.

[00:12:56] You’re just recommending a product or service. Whenever someone comes back to me in customer service, someone tells me that I did a great job on the video, or someone’s telling me that the video. Terrible. And I wasted my time, which can be dealt with because I can ignore it or block them.

[00:13:12] But if you are doing, let’s say, Amazon FBA, that’s something that you need to be concerned with. Really the only thing, the concern or the only other customer service type issues with the affiliate. It was. I guess you can get thumbs down on YouTube, and you can get hit with rankings issues on YouTube or Google.

[00:13:31] So those are some of the reasons why I personally like the affiliate model. I can create content. I don’t like it. I like to create content. I should say I don’t have to deal with customer service, and I am not physically dealing with the product or service. Amazon is Amazon. FBA is for you if you like. Dealing with the physical product aspect of it.

[00:13:54] You enjoy making comparisons and finding where the deals are. A lot of Amazon FBA is you’re either creating the product yourself and sending it over to Amazon to solve for you. For example, let’s say you. Pottery. And you wanted Amazon this holiday for you. That is a portion of it, but a lot of the bigger portion is doing research.

[00:14:13] So going over to Alibaba where another site and finding deals on pens or different widgets, and then comparing that to the current price on Amazon to make a profit Amazon FBA, believe it or not, it’s also for you if you’re a growing business. So let’s say you just started making. Let’s say you just started making like cleaning supplies, and you want to scale.

[00:14:33] Many people have noticed that your organic cleaning supplies are the best on the market, but you don’t want to deal with sending hotcakes all over the world. You want Amazon to worry about that. So you can send your products to Amazon and tell your customers to go to Amazon to buy the product. And then you can make sales there.

[00:14:51] So that would actually be if you’re a smaller, medium-sized business. It’s a great way for you to scale your business that way until you get the workforce to do it yourself. Another strength of Amazon FBA Amazon FBA is also good for you. Again, if you have products and don’t want to deal with the shipping aspect, you have done the research, and you’ve calculated and done the math and realize that.

[00:15:13] it’s actually more beneficial for you to send all the products to Amazon and let them worry about it and go from there. So let me know real quick. If this is making sense, am I providing you valuable information? If this is making sense, if this is valuable information for you to make sure that your comment and comment below and say that this is valuable, like this video, I can continue to bring helpful information for you.

[00:15:38]As I mentioned personally, Affiliate marketing because of the reasons I mentioned before I can sit here in my home office, create content, recommend a product, and make the solution a little bit easier to solve your problem. And again, this can be applied to anything. So, for example, if you are, if you’re a gamer and you have back problems, I could come on here and say, You can try getting up every 20 minutes or every hour, you could try putting a heating pad on your back, or you could try this chair.

[00:16:11] Oh, by the way, then I’m an affiliate for, I’ll try. This chair is designed for people that have back problems. It has a heating sensor, blah, blah, blah. So that’s one way that you can find success as an affiliate marketer. Also, again, I like making tons of content or connecting, as you can see. I like to talk.

[00:16:30]But that’s why I like affiliate marketing. So I have a couple of things that I need you to do. First, in addition to subscribing and ringing the bell notification, check out the links in the description. I have probably left three or four links to help you take your affiliate marketing business to the next level.

[00:16:47] The first link will be a free website. That will teach you the basics of affiliate marketing. I know that in this video, I have covered a lot of information. I’ve compared Amazon FBA to affiliate marketing in the balloons. The link below will be a step-by-step business blueprint or business guide to help you get started with affiliate marketing the right way.

[00:17:11] You can skip some of the issues that I ran into without an email list and not understand the value of an email list. Click that link in the description to get that free training. The second thing you want to do is check out the link for the income school slash project. If you are thinking about using blogging for your platform, too, for your affiliate marketing business, check out that link with project 24. They have created a blogging course to help you find success with blogging and affiliate marketing.

[00:17:43] It is a 60 step process that they have laid out for you so that you can find the success that you’re looking for. Now. 60 steps may seem like a lot. But in reality, the first five steps are to create a domain name and get your web posting. So it’s a very holding type course so that you can find that success that you’re looking for.

[00:18:05] No stone is unturned there. So if you are thinking about using blogging as your platform, checkout. You link below for it’s called income school slash project 24. Also, what you want to do is you want to add your email to my email list so that you can receive notifications. When I create new content currently, I’m creating a new YouTube video every single day.

[00:18:28] And what I do on Sundays is I’ll send you a list of the videos that are coming up. For the next week so that you can find accordingly. Also, I’ll send out information that I think is pertinent to you and your business. For example, if your business is affiliate marketing, I’ll send out information so that you can stay up to date and find that success that you’re looking for.

[00:18:46] Also, by adding your email to our email, you’ll actually get a free PDF guide that I have created to help you avoid the mistakes that I have made with affiliate marketing. So make sure that you do those four things thing. Number one is to like and subscribe to this. Thing number two is to check out the link for the affiliate marketing webinar to get started with the basics of affiliate marketing.

[00:19:10] Number three is to check out income school slash project 24. Suppose you are interested in learning about blogging as your platform. And the last thing that I want you to check out is edge learning to my email list so that you can stay up. When I create new content. So I, once again, this is all stint. Make sure that you like subscribe, ring the bell.

[00:19:31] Thanks for watching. And we will see you soon.