The biggest dilemma for people looking for an online venture to start is all of the possibilities. While looking through YouTube and other online resources, it could often create confusion to know which method is the best for you. Two popular methods are Amazon FBA and affiliate marketing. So, which one is better?
Affiliate marketing is a little bit more popular than Amazon FBA, and I believe most people would say it is better for many reasons. In the rest of this blog posts we will go over the reasons which include:
- Having To Source Products
- Competition
- Scalability
Having To Source Products
The first reason affiliate marketing is better than Amazon FBA, is because you have to source products. This involves finding a product that isn’t too saturated, ordering test products, finding suppliers that are reliable and trustworthy, and ensuring the products are always up to standard. This can take a lot of time, effort, and money.
On the other hand, if you choose affiliate marketing as your go to business model, all you have to do is provide content, and include a link for people to potentially make a purchase. Once they make a purchase, you then get a commission on a sale.
Competition
I often don’t like to discuss competition when it comes to business, as I believe competition is healthy and good. I believe you should always strive to outwork the competition. However, we’re comparing two different business models. Competition plays a much larger role in Amazon FBA.
Let’s say you choose to do affiliate marketing in the golf niche, there are 100’s if not 1000’s of products within the golf niche that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. To add on to that, you could find a lot of different underserved questions for each product, that no one has produced content for yet.
This gives the ability to separate yourself from the competition, and potentially rank your content on the search engines.
When it comes to Amazon FBA, it’s not that simple. You have to find a product that hasn’t saturated the market, or else you may potentially struggle trying to rank on Amazon search.
So basically, you’re purchasing a product and sending it to Amazon and you’re not 100% sure if it will even sell or not. Whereas with affiliate marketing, if you write up a piece of content, you’re spending your time, but not a lot of money.
Scalability
This brings me back to the point about having 100’s or 1000’s of products and finding underserved questions for them. Let’s say as a minimum there are 100 products in the niche you want to start an affiliate site for.
If you could find 5 underserved questions for each product on average, that’s 500 pieces of content you could create and make potential affiliate sales for.
You could also double down and repurpose content you make. For example, you could take a YouTube video and change it into a blog post, or vice versa.
Amazon FBA on the other hand, is much harder to scale. This is because if you add more products they aren’t guaranteed to sell, and you have to put in more time, effort, and money into finding the right products.
What Percentage Of People Quit Amazon FBA?
I couldn’t find an exact number, but the answer is definitely a high percentage. This is because people are often pushed courses from fake gurus, and they try to sell them on this idea that they’ll make millions within a year.
When in reality, it takes a lot of time, effort, and money into finding the right products, sourcing them reliably, and ensuring customer satisfaction. Many people give up before even trying or seeing any success with Amazon FBA.
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
During this comparison, I made affiliate marketing sound pretty easy in comparison to Amazon FBA. You need to keep in mind that this is a business, and just like any business it takes hard work, dedication, and consistency.
You have to create content day in and day out, and you may not see serious results until after a year or so.
YouTube takes a while to grow, and if you start a niche site, Google takes at least 6 months to start really picking up on your site. This is why it takes a lot of patience and dedication to be successful in affiliate marketing.
I recommend taking a course for both affiliate marketing and for the content creation side of thing (blogging or video).
Conclusion
So if you were undecided, I hope this blog post helped you figure out the better option for you.
Some people may like the challenge and business model of Amazon FBA better, however affiliate marketing is a much more popular and realistic business model for most people.
If you have any input on this topic, please leave a comment and let’s have a discussion. Take a look at the tags below in order to see related posts:
