Affiliate Marketing vs Dropshipping

If you plan to push everything without solid experience in each or somewhat at least you will fail hard.

Respectively, I agree^^^^

I read somewhere that there are 2 basic ways to succeed. The 1st is to prepare the whole banquet, and feed a lot of hungry people in one go. (*Kinda like "Golden Coral") Obviously, this requires a 'group' effort, and would be a difficult task without having people in place.

The 2nd, is to jump into a "hot dog cart" and grow from there, as the demand/sales allow without any major expenses. This can easily be maintained and operated easily by an individual.

Neither approach is wrong per se. Naturally, the "banquet approach" can either explode success or blow-up in failure!

Unfortunately, my entire "niche" and "marketing plan" is a 'banquet style' ambition. I say unfortunately, because it takes more research, work, preparation, planning, and a timely execution...or fail hard! (as seolinker stated)

Now, the guy who starts small, and starts 'pushing' $1 hotdogs over a years time, will likely make smaller volume sales right away (and consistently) with less effort, product, or expense.

Sometimes, I think shoulda went that route.

In exploring the smaller and inexpensive opportunities online (i.e. affliate marketing, dropshipping, ecommerce, etc...) - I was looking for "rich soil" to plant a seed and grow from there.

Before chosing my plot, an 'epiphany' of the whole forest became visible, and changed my initial concept of marketing all together. By no means am I guaranteed success, but with all the time studying the psychology of marketing, understanding the different styles and markets, and collecting feedback and data concerning which ones have promise, I'm now unable to just push $1 hotdogs.

Now if only I can get 1000 people to buy their cart, hot dogs, and supplies through me....I'll never touch a single hotdog, and yet make a good living from those who chose to buy/sell hotdogs.

(*sorry about the metaphorically analogies, but I didn't want to reveal all the ingredients to my recipe.)

*edit: I used the term; webmastering in above post, but meant; web designing.
 


Dropshipping bullshit?

There are people making serious bank quietly in drop shipping. Mostly from their own sites. A guy I know made 10,000 a month AFTER he sold his site for $500,000 just on interest payments on the loan he made to the buyer. And that's just one site.

Affiliate marketing is really chump change in comparison.

Does your friend uses WorldWideBrands? Does he gets his products on-demand? Of course, if you can invest $50.000 for first buying the actual product you can make a decent margins.
 
Skip WebDAV, it's useless and slow on Windows. Not sure why you'd use it over FTP, SFTP, or software that works directly with files over FTP or SFTP.

Sounds like you need to find a basic/free online course on HTML, web editing, and maybe some PHP before diving into things.
 
Having explored several marketing strategies, these (2) appear to be a great 'concepts' for those not wanting to shell out tons of cash on products, warehousing, shipping and handling.

So, which of the (2) has the greater potential?

Affiliate Marketing?

Or

Dropshipping?

*It seems there's a couple of pro's and con's to both.
What kind of question is this? There is potential in both. That's like asking, what will make more moniez? Diet supplements or clothes. Fat bitches will buy diet supplements and lots of people will buy clothes. There are people who make serious bank from both. And with doing ecommerce, as mentioned, google likes you a bit more. In my opinion, it's also a better business model because you're providing a consumer with a good that fills a need they have. I would rather do this than slang shady rebills all day that are exactly like a million other sites out there. I think the future growth is a higher potential with ecommerce. Additionally, you may start with dropshipping, but then after growing big enough maybe you can start buying directly from a manufacturer in China and build a business from this.

Don't get me wrong, I've mostly done affiliate marketing, and I'm not saying don't do this, but I'm taking a closer look at developing some dropshipping stores and it looks like there's a good amount of money to be made. PLUS, have you seen the type of competition out there for ecommerce? They have garbage DIY storefronts and they don't know the first thing about SEO. Obviously there is much tougher competition in affiliate marketing.

This is just my thoughts on the topic...
 
I've got to agree with Illmill on this issue. There is definitely Pros and Cons for Both. My main income at the moment is from Affiliate Marketing, but you just can't ignore the profit potential of ecommerce and dropshipping. Its probably best to have your eggs in more than one basket, dropshipping is def. something I'm looking to get into for 2011.