Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shipping: The Difference, Pros and Cons

I get a few inquiries about the difference between affiliate marketing and drop shipping. So in this article, I'll share to you the mechanics of each model, the pros, and cons as well as what's the model is better than the remainder in my opinion.

There're the main different  points beetween of affiliate marketing and drop shipping

Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate Marketing is a way of promoting products or services on the internet where Merchants have products or services that they need to advertise through the affiliate or publisher network to the end user. 

Online advertising partners earn compensation when users visit ads and generate results such as shopping, membership registration, event participation from affiliate sites.

Affiliate marketing is the most effective way to advertising, marketing and generates attractive income for referrals, this form originated from the Amazon site in 1996

Here are some of reputation affiliate networks you can join

• Amazon

• Click bank

• Commission Junction

• eBay

• Rakuten

• Share a sale

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is a method where the retail store does not keep products in the warehouse.

When you sell a particular product, there is no inventory instead they'll buy the product from a third party and ship it directly to the customer. As a result, those sellers never see the product or handle the product.

In essence, drop shipping is simply buying low prices and selling at high prices

The biggest difference between Dropshipping and other retail models is that merchants do not need warehouses or inventory. Instead, these merchants purchase the product when needed from a third party - commonly wholesalers or manufacturers - to complete their orders.

Here ‘re some of drop shipping companies that allow you access to their items

• Doba

• Dropship 

• Direct Ali

• Salehoo 

• Sunrise Wholesale

• Investory Source

The Pros and Cons of Each Model

1. Affiliate Marketing

Pros

There're some of the main benefits of affiliate marketing

Low Investment Cost

You don't need to make your own product, that often takes a lot of money for customer research, materials, and other resources, you also do not have to buy or rent a warehouse for existing products or deliver products to your customers, because the merchant make it for you, in other words, your job is simply promoting the products you like and if someone purchases from you, you will get commissions.

Variety of Commission.

There're many reputation affiliate network with different commission levels that depend on the type of product you promote. For Example, Amazon has the variety commission for each category as the listed below:

With some people, that's too low commission they can choose another affiliate program that has the higher commissions like Click Bank or Muncheye 

Click Bank focus on the information product, this helps them avoid renting a warehouse and sale space, hence that allow the merchant share the large of profit often 50% or more.

Muncheye is a big site on the launching products, Because these are not well-known products, thus they are willing to pay high commission to affiliate.

                   

No Customer Care and Shipping

If the customer has any trouble with your product the product. The customer supporting team of the merchant solve it for you. 

However, some of the affiliate programs require consulting clients from you. So make sure you read the policy of each network to avoid lost the commission.

 As I said above most of them don't require consulting clients from you and that is not your duty. But if you write the article about the product, make sure you replay all the comment of your audiences. 

Because sometimes they desire to hear feedback from users rather than companies. That is why they come to your blog to read your opinion and buy the product from you instead of buying directly from the official site.

Passive Income

Another great thing about affiliate marketing that everything things will still work without you.

Because as I said above the problems such as shipping, warehousing, logistics, or customer care are all dealt with by the merchant.

So if you have a website that attracts a lot of traffic, It will automatically generate passive income whether you promote it or not.

Cons

Although affiliate marketing has many of pros points, there're a some of the cons you need to be noticed

You cannot adjust the product

That’s not your own product so you cannot modify the product as you or your customer want, in many cases, you can send feedback to the merchant to request a change or add some functionality.

Some manufacturers will probably notice that and they change the product in your opinion but this rarely happens so the high ability is your requirement may be ignored.

Hard to Make Customer Repurchase

People may be curious about your site or even be excited about the product you offer, you can attain the peak sale during this period but after that, you will see the sale began to decline.

There are many things to explain this and one of the main reasons is that when customers need to buy the product you refer, they usually go directly to the official site rather than to your blog and continue to purchase through the link you referenced.

In other words, you will always have to look for new customers to offset, but for most businesses repurchase customers is their main income source.

No Graduate Commission

If you get the customer buy your affiliate product, you win, but that's not the end!

If your customer doesn't satisfy with your product and what you say don't match with what they desired, they can return the product and then you'll lose the commission.

In Clickbank that display the Average Rebill total and Avg%/Rebill and that say somewhat of that product quality.

So make sure you give the honest review of the product such as functions and benefits, pros and cons. Do not be afraid customers do not buy your products, honest reviews are all that your customers are looking for and they are willing to pay for it.

The other thing is that some audiences can remove your affiliate link or buy directly from the official page. Some will buy through your link as a thank you for what you spend, but others do not.

2. Dropshipping

Pros

Low Investing Cost

One of the most benefits of drop-shipping is that you don't need to invest money in inventory. 

You only have to make purchases when someone has agreed to buy or pay for you. That helps you save a large of money compared to starting a traditional business. 

Sometimes with $100 and wifi connected laptop are enough for you to operate it

Easy to Run

When you jump a drop shipping business. You do not need to know a lot about management skills. Not only inventory problems have been resolved, but you also do not have to worry about:

• Manage the warehouse
• Packing and shipping orders
• Track inventory on books
• Processing declarations and shipments in domestic and abroad
• Constantly ordering products and managing inventory levels

So your job is just to find the right partner and customer to earn the spread between the price you buy and sell.

Easy to Expand Your Items:

With traditional businesses, it is very risky if they launch new items. 

But in dropshipping, it is almost risk-free, because you don't need to hire resources to build new products, manufacturing or storage them.

There're a lot of suppliers from many different markets in Inventory Source

So You can add as many items as you want on your site and it's completely free.

Flexible

You can do anywhere in anytime. Sometimes all you need is a laptop with a wifi connection. Many people carry their own businesses at home or while traveling.

Cons

As affiliate marketing, it's not a perfect model, there're some of the negative points of it:

Low Profits

Drop shipping is a highly competitive environment. Due to low the investment cost, then a lot of traders are willing to lower the selling price to compete with other competitors. And this quickly destroys the appropriate profit for each item.

On the other hand, with the evolution of technology, customers have more information to compare and this is clearly a disadvantage for you.

You are Responsible for Errors that are Not Yours

Although packing, shipping is not your responsibility and that is the job of the supplier.

But look back when there are shipping problems like delivery not on time, or do not have enough goods to provide to the customers, your business will be most affected because you work directly with customers, not the companies behind.

So if you want to avoid this problem, let choose reputable third-party suppliers to avoid the negative impact on your business reputation

Inventory Problem

Dropshipping solved inventory problem for you, that's great but sometimes it also creates the problem as you can not track the item existing or not.

If a certain item stops production or runs out overnight. Of course, you can not provide that as agreed, This not only causes you to lose profits but also badly affects your business

What's The Best Model When You just Start an Online Business

Both are legit models and has been proven effective over time, all of them have both pros and cons, but in my opinion, if you just start an online business you should choose affiliate marketing. 

Because in terms of profitability and accountability it is easier than drop-shipping, you don't need to find the supplier partner and it does not have any problems out of your control such as shipping or inventory issues as drop shopping.

Another factor that makes me rank affiliate marketing higher than drop shipping is that it does not cost you to join. If you want to join the drop-shipping network you will have to pay the fee before access to their items. 

Don't make me wrong I don't say that you shouldn't join drop shipping, it's also a great model to start because of the benefit it brings. 

But I personally get more benefits from affiliate marketing and I hope it also brings so many benefits to you.

Are you doing affiliate marketing or drop shipping? which model makes you more profitable, please comment it below.

How To Drive Traffic from Reddit for Affiliate Marketing

     Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world that allow people share their ideas, hot news, and many other things, it gets about 542 million visitors per month, however, it also famous with the low-quality traffic that means the section duration is very short.

Reddit's user love shock and weird content, that topics are always on the homepage and attract the most visitors, and they are often more entertaining than educational.

So few people go to Reddit to find solutions, or advice for their problems and therefore the chance of you converting the traffic from Reddit into a client is quite low.

However, Reddit still has the subreddit that tells you who is in your market, it's great for your affiliate marketing business, although it may not offer as high conversion rates as forums or specialized websites, if you marketing right way, you can still get a lot of benefits from this traffic source.

Get Started

Reddit is a strict forum about rules, That is also why their website grows as big as today,

So before attracting traffic, you need to read about their rules and follow, otherwise, your posts or comments will be deleted or worse you'll be getting banned.

When you know the rules, that is the time to approach the site and get traffic to your site as an affiliate:

Step 1: Find your Subreddit

Go to the subreddit in your niche, Each subreddit is identified by the URL structure https://reddit.com/r/subreddit.

Replace subreddit with your keyword or phrase, if not you can use the search feature on Reddit to find your niche, in this example, I search for the phrase “affiliate marketing” and there's a lot of communities for affiliate

You can subscribe to follow what’re they discussion

Go to each community you can see the discussion as well as the question of each member.

The top topics will be voted by another member in the community that displays by the karma score, that means these problem or topic’s also the matter of many people.

Of course, you can share what you thought via comment and put your link here, but like other forums, your comment must be constructive and not be personally promoted.

Trust me, that tactic is no longer useful and it can make you get banned.

Step 2: Participate

The better way is to build up the reputation before you link to your site, to do this you need to contribute to it, joint to the discussion, provide quality answer or useful article to get the karma score. In this stage, you shouldn’t promote yourself.

Because people don’t know who you are, I recommend you to provide the value your subreddit in at least one month. 

This is an example of providing value through the comment from the question: Is building a product catalog with a retailers inventory before applying for the retailer's Affiliate program common?

Or you can create a helpful article or topic in your niche 

By this way, you’ll build the awareness about your brand as an esteemed member instead of just one who is trying to promote

Step 3: Submit your Link

After you provide massive value and build up the reputation, the next step is to promote yourself,

Note that when you become a valued member that doesn’t mean you can promote anything you want. 

Reddit does not lack those who provide quality content like you, they can be more comfortable with you, but if you abuse and violate their policies you will still be banned like others. 

So be smart and provide the value through your answer or create a post and then put your link on it (properly).

Here's the example of the person who promotes successfully their site on Reddit:

You can see this post get a lot of karma score (296), It says that the article provides so much value

If you want your content to become to the top topic as well as get a lot of karma scores, your subject line must be irresistible.

If you don’t know how to create an awesome headline, read the article here: 11 Ways to Create Irresistible Headlines That Readers Love

The other thing that ‘ll help your content get a lot of karma score that is digging around your subreddit and noted what’re your audiences discussing, what’s the most popular problems, then create content around it.

Step 4: Retain Traffic for Affiliate Marketing

When you build some link on Reddit and start to get the amount of traffic from them. Here's the time to retain that traffic for your affiliate marketing.

One of the most effective tactics to capture the audiences email that is Content Upgrades. 

This tactic work based on the psychological phenomenon called “Consistency” that introduced by Robert Cialdini in the book Pre-suasion [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

As he said in the book” People try to act in ways that are consistent with what they have already said or done”.

So if they come for your content, It is very likely that they will continue to sign up for something that supports or continues with your original post.

Here is an example from Tim Soulo:

· In this article: What An Email Response From Rand Fishkin Taught Me About Influencer Outreach

He has shared a screenshot of his outreach email to Rand Fishkin and mentioned that he has used a cocky email subject to get Rand Fishkin’s attention.

But he didn’t share that subject in his article.

He told his readers that he can only share it with them if they give him their email address.

Like this:

If you click on that yellow box, a popup box will appear and ask for your email address:

After you submit your email, you will get a pdf that contains the email subject with extra tips on writing catchy email subjects.

You can use Sumo me to create your content upgrade or if you use WordPress platform, Content Upgrades PRO is also a great plugin to help you do this. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through Content Upgrades PRO link.]

Just create a new upgrade by just filling in some fields




Then that plugin will show you how your pop up’ll look like:




That plugin will add the collected emails to your MailChimp account

Finally, get the shortcode from the plugin and paste it on anywhere you want to display the content upgrade.



Remember as I said above Reddit traffic popular with the low session duration, so you need to capture them as fast as possible. To do that make sure you put your content upgrade near the top.

Step 5: Expand your Brand or Site by AMA

When people start to know about you and see you as one trusted source, then you need host an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.

That look like this

Here are some questions asked by the audiences

Of course, you can continue providing the quality answer or create a post to drive traffic but Ask Me Anything is a great strategy to build your personal brand.

The user on Reddit loves AMA because it helps them save a lot of time to find the trust sources to get the answer.

You should also host an ama on your subreddit because it’ll help you qualify the audiences.

Conclusion

Above is the strategy I’m using to drive traffic from Reddit and it really effective. Spam link in forum, website or broad was no longer useful but It also harms your site. 

So to become a success with Reddit or any website, you need to spend the time and work to provide value for your audience. That will help you build the trust, relationship, and reputation.

How about your idea? What ‘s your best way to get traffic from Reddit, please comment it bellow

A Step-by-Step Guide to Automating Your Online Business

     Do you want a business that runs automatically without you? Maybe you can say ok, but I need to hire other people, and sometimes that not effective. ok, maybe, but if I say you can build automatically online business without hire staff and it’s free, What do you say?.

Yes, it free and it ‘’ll help you save a lot of time, money and work! So cool, right

So now, I’ll share with you how to build it, let go:

There’re two important parts you can automatically for your business they're:
Social Media
Email Marketing

When I mention to social media, some of the people post manually, some pro blogger says you should use buffer to Schedule your sequence posts with different social media channels like twitter, facebook or LinkedIn at one time. This is considered to be more progressive and it saves you a lot of the time.

But I want to let you know that you can go farther than that by set up a completely automated system that auto selecting your posts, recurring your post in the free time, sharing your posts on various social networks at the same time, automatically thank those who have shared your articles and follow you , or automatically send a welcome message to those who follow you on the twitter.

In other words, it will work without you there, what you do is just answer the reader's questions through these social media

1. Social Media Automation

To do that you need to set up a Zapier account, then click on make a Zap

There ‘re 2 part Trigger app and Action app. That means when you Trigger one app, the other app (Action app) will perform another action follow

In this example, I ‘ll make a zap that automatically shares what on Twitter for Pinterest

In trigger choose Twitter.

There are many types of trigger like search mention, My Tweet, New Follower, Liked Tweet,…

Let choose My Tweet and click on Continue

Then the system ‘ll verify your Twitter account

In action, app choose Pinterest or whatever social media that you want to perform an action

Then click on Save+ Continue

Add your Pinterest account

In Edit template part choose the import twitter data that you want to display on the Pinterest account such as broad to post, image, tile, link,...

Finally, This sample display to make sure everything looks right, you can also test the Zap before active it
Click on Finish

Finally active the Zap

Congratulations! you just make a Zap that will automatically share what on Twitter to Pinterest.

So now you can make another Zap for Facebook and Twitter, Twitter and Linkedin or Linkedin and Tumblr,…

This will help you create a domino effect. All you do is try posting on any social network, for example:

When you make a Zap between Facebook and Twitter, where Facebook is trigger app when you share the post on the Facebook it will also automatically share on Twitter.

Zap: Facebook ---> Twiter: Facebook shares to Twiter

If you have another Zap between Twitter and Pinterest, when Twitter share the Facebook post it will automatically post to Pinterest, like this:

Zap1: Facebook --> Twitter + Zap2: Twitter --> Pinterest

>> Result: Facebook share to Twitter and Twiter share to Pinterest!

Now you can create a sequence of social networks as long as you want and make sure have a linked app between them.

Now you know how to create automated chaining shares the articles among different social networks.

But like I said earlier, I want you to have a system that automatically chooses your post and recur post on social media without you right? yes that it’s

Auto choose and repeat your post for social media

Let go to Recurpost (it's free), Recurpost is a tool that keeps your article evergreen, what you do is set up an account here [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you upgrade through this link.]

Next, go to Social Account to add your account

Then go to the Content Library, click on add new library.

Fill in your library name and add this

 Add your update

After that, write your message or drop your link as the image below

Then Add it to your library

Finally, choose to Add An Update 

Now go to Schedule and add the day you want to repeat the post as well as the post’s frequency of each social accounts

Add the days/router as well as the social channels that you want to repeat your posts  

So now the system will auto post your contents and recur them in the days/router that you choose.

You can go to smart queue to know when your post will be published by the system as well as the post that system choose to post

That’s, you have a system that auto choose your posts, schedule, publish them, and recur the post

Now I ‘ll share with you some of zaps and tools that help you send the auto welcome message, say thank your new follower or for share/like your link,…

Auto Send a direct message to your new follower

Set up an IFTTT account, like Zapier that also a tool to help you integrate many apps together

Then go to this link: Send the welcome message via DM to your new followers on Twitter

Choose the setting button and fill in your message content

         

Then click Save

Finally, make sure you activate the Zap

Auto send the newly published article from any website

Go to dlvrit. Add your social account by click on the Social button

Then and choose Feed ---> choose to add New Feed

Add the website you want to share content

Choose your edit output To adjust the components which you want to display on your like the title, their social account name, post URL, .. like this.

Then click on Save.

*Note: You should add other sites content on your social feed if you don’t publish your own article regularly, but if you post regularly, You should limit the use of this tool to avoid bombarding your audiences.

2. Email Marketing Automation

   Like social media, you can auto your email marketing campaign. However, email has more strict moderation and you must avoid using it for spamming purpose.

So if you just send an email with the purpose of offering or placing pressure on the customer, it is not the right way to go and can lead to the following bad consequences.

• Your email goes to your spam mailbox

• Your email is blocked by the automated email service

• Make customers uncomfortable with your emails

So before i guide you on how to build an automated email campaign, I would like to share some solutions to help your email campaign not fall into the above problems.

So How to avoid your email campaign go to spam box

When you send a ton of email at the same time and people don’t open them up, your email automatically going to peoples spam box.

This is a problem that most businesses make when trying to email as many people as possible and that happens in every email provider like AOL, Yahoo mail, Hot mail, and Gmail.

So if your list has 100,000 emails, you only start sending a few like 1000, and the next day you start sending 3,000 or 4,000, from then you start sending 9,000 to 10,000 then 20,000 then 40,000 then 60,000 and then maybe 100,000.

When you do this, you ͚ll be warming up, the email provider like AOL, Yahoo mail, Hot mail and Gmail they'll be more comfortable with your emails and they will put them to the inbox.

How to avoid email provider block your email campaigns

To avoid this problem you have to send quality email, and that related to your email content, to make sure your email is good, let use spam score check tool, just copy your content and paste it into this tool, that’ll show you the spam score, as well as the ways to reduce your spam score.

The other factor that affects to the possibility of blocking your email campaign that is the number of emails you send in one time, when you send a ton of emails at the same time, the high probability that your campaign will be censored by email service provider.

So avoid this happened Break your campaign down. That lets you reduce the number of emails you send in one time.

How to use email to build relationships with your audiences

Like I said above if you just use email to offering and putting pressure on customers, this will not bring you any results but also hurt your business.

People love shopping but they do not want to be sold, so instead of using one type of boring high-pressure email, you need to provide real value to your audiences before offering them

I recommend using the 6 types of following emails alternately

•    Promoting your company’s products and services
•    Providing additional educational content to your subscribers
•    Asking them to add your email address to their safe listener
•    Promoting another company’s products as an affiliate
•    Highlighting existing content on your website to your new subscribers
•    Asking subscribers for feedback about your content and your company’s products

By this way, you ‘ll make your customers feel more comfortable and feel like you provide real values for them than just try to sale

Read more: How To Use Email Marketing Right Way

So, you know how to avoid your email campaigns become useless. Go to the next. I’ll show you how to build an auto email campaign.

Build Auto Email Campaign

First, go to Benchmark Email (free) and set up an account [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you upgrade through this link.]

Then choose Automation

Next, choose to Automation Lite and Create New Automation

Then choose Contact List Automation and click Next

Next, in Automation Details part, fill in some required fields like Automation Name, Automation Description.

In Contact List Selection, choose the list that you want to send the email campaign

In Trigger Selection, there are many types of automation email you can choose like

• Send emails when contact is added to a list

• Send birthday, anniversary and other annual emails

• Send timed emails based on an exact date

In this example, I ‘ll choose the option: Send emails when contact is added to a list

In Sequence Email Details filling your name and your email address, then click Save & Next

Then choose to Add New Email, then filling your Subject Line, choose your Email Delay, in this example, I choose email will automatically send to my new subscribers after 3 day

You also can choose Select Send Days or Send Time

After that, click Save & Next

You go to the email editor, let choose DRAG & DROP EDITOR and click Next

Now you can design your email and add the content that you want to send. When you finish clicking on Save & Next

Finally, Active Automation and then Confirm it

Great, you just create an automatic email! And this email will auto repeat send to each new subscriber after 3 days they join your list!

Now you can create another sequence of automatic emails that trigger for each new subscribers like a follow-up email, a multi-part lesson, your series articles or your sale funnel.

Other useful tools for your email campaign

Hubspot (Free)
A great tool that composes many types of email templates such as first touch email, follow up email,...what you do is just  fill in the blank that fit for your business

OptinMonster (Paid)
OptinMonster helps you collect email addresses through a variety of popups, hello bars, welcome mats, and other innovative tools.

Deadline Funnel (Paid)
Deadline funnel automates product launches, landing pages, videos, email sequences by using personalized deadlines which help to optimize your campaign, driving more traffic, and generating more leads. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Conclusion

 Above are tools that I’m using to run my business.

So, what’re the tools and tactics that you like

And what’re the other tools that you want to share, please comment below