What is the Difference between Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing?

Some newbies have asked me how affiliate marketing is different from Internet marketing. Well, affiliate marketing is definitely Internet marketing but it is a specialized branch. There are several ways of Internet marketing - affiliate marketing, niche marketing, Ebay marketing are the most popular and profitable and easy ones. You can have an online store, you can trade websites or domain names and make money.

You can enter affiliate marketing without a website or any investment.

In affiliate marketing, you are purely dealing with other peoples' products. You may own a website to promote your affiliate products. You make your money only through commissions on sales made. If your sales campaign flops, your money and efforts go waste.

In Internet marketing, you promote your own products through your own websites. First off, you do market research to find out the profitability and demand for your proposed product (probably an information product such as an ebook). Then you write, edit and publish the book. You create a powerful sales letter for each of your product. You spend money on ads and other ways to promote your products. You track all the links and ads that are bringing revenues. You identify the profitable sources and discard or modify less-profitable or loss-making products. You also recruit other affiliates to sell your products. Imagine you are selling your own product and your own affiliates are also promoting your products. You pay them only commissions on sale. So there is no expense involved. Imagine getting the full money for your product (compare it to affiliate marketing where you get possibly 50 percent of the sales amount). You can not only double the amount but much more!

However, the responsibilities of the Internet marketer are high. He needs investment. He cannot do all the work himself if he wanted to focus on marketing. So he outsources market research, writing, updating, Copy-writing, website management, etc. He has to host his websites. In return for his work he gets rewarded with profits.

Now you know what the affiliate marketer does as compared to what the Internet marketer does. My advice is once you are successful in affiliate marketing hire people to create a product for you. Once the product is done, you can sign up with Clickbank for a merchant account paying just $49. Clickbank will manage your sales as well as the sales of your affiliates.