Is Affiliate Marketing Better than E-commerce in 2024?

Why complete beginners to online business should avoid E-commerce and Drop Shipping and instead start with Affiliate Marketing, even if you don’t know what that is yet.

Welcome to the digital era, where opportunities to build a thriving online business are abundant. If you’re exploring the world of online entrepreneurship, you’ve likely come across the terms “e-commerce” also “Drop Shipping” and maybe “affiliate marketing.” But what the difference and which path should you choose? 

In this article, we’ll dissect both traditional e-commerce and affiliate marketing, shedding light on why the latter might be the key to unlocking your online first success and sooner rather than later.

But who I’m I? What do I know and more importantly, How can I help you?

My name is Mike Jacques and I dramatically changed my life at the beginning of 2019 when I walked away from a successful 30-year career in software sales, as for many years I had felt unfulfilled, finding myself drifting from job to job in a turbulent corporate ocean.

Since quitting the daily commute and the highly stressful stream of life sucking sales meetings, I quickly built my own online business from scratch, and now I’m working in partnership with the business community that helped me fast-track my digital lifestyle transformation.

My newfound passion and purpose is to help spark similar change in others looking to escape the 9-5 and build their own digital lifestyles. I’m here to empower people to take action and encourage them to discover their full potential once shown what’s possible within the rapidly growing digital economy.

I would never encourage others to recklessly quit their day job as I did. Instead, I prefer to guide people to alternative, far less stressful options, allowing for a more gradual, self-paced transition to what I call a “Laptop Lifestyle”. I believe that everyone has a unique purpose in life, and it is our responsibility to fulfil that purpose, become the best possible version of ourselves and to make the world a better place as a result.

With the time and freedom I’ve now created, I finally discovered what was missing in my life: the ability to give something back. This realisation has inspired me to help hundreds of other frustrated, entrepreneurs to take action and pursue positive change in their lives. Having the time to empower others provides me with a tremendous sense of self-worth and fulfilment. If your interested in finding how I made the transition to a “Laptop Lifestyle” so fast (within a few short months) you can take a look at the world class mentoring program and training I used that enabled me to rapidly transforming my life!

Navigating the Digital Marketplace: Unleashing the Power of Affiliate Marketing for Beginners!”

Traditional E-commerce: (The Classic Storefront).

Let’s start with the basics. It all started with traditional e-commerce, which simply involves setting up your online store, stocking products, managing inventory, handling customer service, and shipping goods. It’s the digital version of a physical brick-and-mortar store, demanding significant time, effort, and upfront financial investment to build your store, stock it and then promote it.

Advantages:

Brand control: Example: A boutique owner can curate a unique brand image, from logo design to packaging, ensuring a consistent and unique branding messaging. This can be tailored over time to better match your ideal customer target audience.

Direct Profits: Example: If you sell handmade products, you retain the full profit margin after covering production costs and possibly shipping.

Customer Relationships: Example: Direct interaction with customers allows for personalized service, fostering long-term relationships and brand loyalty.

Disadvantages:

High Initial Investment: Example: Starting a clothing line requires significant upfront costs for product design, fabric, manufacturing, export duties, website development, and marketing.

Inventory Management: Example: A tech store must constantly update and manage inventory to keep up with the latest gadgets and technology trends. This inevitably leads to some degree of wasted or discounted inventory.

Time-Intensive: Example: Responding to customer inquiries, handling returns, and managing day-to-day operations demand substantial time and effort which may require you to hire additional staff and eating to your profit margins. This could also impact your personal time freedom and ability to leave the business and run it remotely on autopilot.

Affiliate Marketing: (A New Dawn in Online Business)

Now, let’s shift our focus to affiliate marketing – a dynamic and innovative approach to online business.

Advantages:

Low Entry Barrier: Example: A beauty blogger can start promoting skincare products without the need for a substantial upfront investment.

No Inventory or Customer Service Hassles: Example: A beauty blogger can start promoting an in demand and high quality skincare products without the need for a substantial upfront investment. Or having to invest the time and money to build, brand, awareness and product demand.

Diverse Income Streams: Example: An affiliate marketer can promote products from multiple niches, diversifying income sources and reducing risk. While it’s best to keep the products and services you’re promoting relatable, you can completely diversify to different industries if needed.

Disadvantages:

Less Control Over Branding: Example: An affiliate marketer promoting someone else’s fashion line has limited control over how the brand is perceived by their audience.

Initial Traffic Challenges: Example: A beginner affiliate marketer may face difficulties in driving traffic to their content until they establish credibility and build an audience. Or invest in paid advertising traffic to drive awareness.

The Game-Changer for Side Hustlers So, why does affiliate marketing stand out, especially for those looking to initially start a side hustle alongside their day job?

Additional Considerations:

Flexibility: Example: A part-time affiliate marketer can create content and promote products during evenings and weekends, fitting it around a traditional day job to start with. That’s reducing the risk of starting their first online business.

Passive Income Potential: Example: Once established, an affiliate marketer with a well-maintained blog or YouTube channel can continue earning commissions passively from evergreen content.

Scalability: Example: As an affiliate marketer gains experience, they can scale their efforts by expanding into different niches or partnering with more affiliate programs.

Unlimited Choice: As most major brands of run, affiliate programs for their businesses (Think anything on Amazon), the choice of business niche or type of products or service is virtually unlimited. Although I would strongly recommend sticking to products you have personally used and can personally recommend. This enables you to promote products ethically in the knowledge that they will be of high value for others.

In conclusion: Both traditional e-commerce and affiliate marketing offer unique opportunities and challenges. The choice depends on your goals, resources, and preferences. For those seeking a flexible and low-cost entry into the online business world, affiliate marketing stands out as an enticing option.

If you are ready to dive into the world of affiliate marketing and turn your side hustle into a thriving online business? Equip yourself with the knowledge and skills needed for success (Marketing Skills). You may wish to start through a beginner-friendly, introductory online education service, I would highly recommend Modern Wealthy.

Once you have consumed the modern wealthy training, and chosen your business model and niche, expert guidance for building, launching, and scaling your business can be found within a follow on step by step training program like LaunchPad. There is a secret weapon within this training program that I believe is key to building a successful online business.  

Community: Starting out to build any business is a lonely and scary process. Particularly an online business as it’s just you and your laptop in the early days.

So imagine having a community of hundreds of individuals, from all over the world, all with the same “can do mindset”as you, all working towards the same goal as you. All are willing to help and support each other to overcome the challenges of building online income streams and businesses.   

The Launch You community supports complete beginners like you, through the LaunchPad training process and helps newbies aviod the common mistakes when first starting to build their online businesses. It provides the much-needed comfort and reassurance that you are heading in the right direction with the ideas and business strategies you’re learning and putting into practice. 

How can I recommend this training? This is the very same community, training and team of mentors that helped me get off to a flying start in the online world. 

Remember, in the dynamic realm of online business, adaptability and strategic choices are key. Choose the path that aligns with your goals and resources, and let the digital world become the canvas for your success story.

Having a Mentor on hand who’s already walked the path to guide you will.

• ​Massively shorten the learning curve
• Reduce the time it will take you to prepare, launch and scale 
• Increase your likelihood of actually taking action on the stuff you need to do to move forward because you’re ACCOUNTABLE to another person
• Increase self-belief. That it’s a realistic objective for you
• And of course, it’s the best and most tailored form of training you can get. Custom-fit so to speak

If you want to receive some free introductory videos highlighting what’s available within the LaunchYou training program and community then you can

Click Here