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Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shipping as a Work at Home Job

An affiliate is the middleman for buyers and sellers. Affiliate marketing runs in the same manner as a car dealership. Just as the salesman makes a commission for every car he sells you will make a commission for every sale you create. The amount of commission depends on the seller. You can see commission percentages as low as 1 percent or as much as 95 percent.

You direct people to your site (or landing page) and it is your job to convince them to buy from another website. If you achieve your goals, you will receive a portion of the sales, lead or click that came from your site. There are a few downfalls to this:

You have no control over the selling site.

You must rely on their ad-copy as much as your ad-copy to ultimately make the sale.

You lose sales tracking ability the minute the buyer leaves your site. Tracking sales to ad campaigns is very difficult.

You are competing against other affiliate marketers.

Relatively speaking, compensation can be low and out of your control.

Drop shipping. The closest program to affiliate marketing that reduces or eliminates the affiliate marketing issues is drop shipping. With drop shipping, you are actually selling the product; you are no longer the middle man. This is similar to buying wholesale and marking up the price for each product, but with a little twist! With drop shipping, you only purchase the product AFTER someone purchases the product from you. In addition, the product is never in your hands; it is shipped directly to the end customer.

As similar as the two programs are, they are quite different in what they have to offer you. Affiliate marketing usually requires a bit more front-end work, but once the commissions start coming, the maintenance is fairly minimal. As for drop shipping, you can get set-up and going relatively quickly. With superstores like eBay and Amazon, drop shipping requires no custom landing pages and minimal promotion. This, however, requires a little more work throughout the existence of the campaign. The per-sale-action ultimately requires more work in the long run. Both work very well, but it is up to you to choose which one works best. Maybe it is both!