Affiliate Marketing or Drop Shipping?

After having decided on a market niche and having acquired a good domain name, the next step is to locate a source of product to sell.  Not being a maker of snowman ornaments, my two main choices were to locate a supplier that does and drop ship or enter into an affiliate marketing relationship with a company that does.  As I am actually getting a bit of a late start on the holiday season, I elected to take the affiliate marketing route.

Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing arrangement between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner places advertisements on his website to help sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers to the merchant's website in exchange for a share of the profits.  The share of the profits can vary from a few percentage points to upwards of 75% depending upon the merchant and the product.

In order, to find potential merchants to affiliate with I went to Commission Junction and opened an account.   Commission Junction provides a central place for publishers (me, in this case) to find advertisers with affiliate programs.  There I used their search features to identify those merchants in my market niche with affiliate programs.  Then I applied for affiliate status with a handful of those merchants.  Some merchants would approve the affiliate relationship online while others manually reviewed each affiliate application.  There is no guarantee that an advertiser will accept your application.  The application review process could take several days to over a week so you should jump on this quickly in order to line up merchants for your web site.

Now I have my market niche defined, decided how I was going to generate revenue and set up affiliate marketing relationship with a number of merchants in my niche.  The next step is to identify individual products I want to push and develop a web site.  I will cover these topics in my next post.