Dropshipping as your main online business
Many online business owners who have tried dropshipping may found it rather difficult to monetize. The major problem is that it usually takes a long time to find a product that meets the requirements including: Low competition and high profit margin. Most people would have started with browsing through their choice of niche on the Aliexpress site and pick their choice of suppliers. They would contact the suppliers hoping that they would get a great price for what they buy and resell. Over time it has proved that this method requires too much manual work and guessing work, and the results are usually not what they have expected. All they need is actually a Shopify spy tool. This tool must be able to reveal the best selling products that are already doing well on other online store owners in the recent couple of days.
The business model dropshipping is about taking an order, finding the product, buying the product (when there is a demand), selling it, and shipping it to the customers. The possible risk that the online business owner must take is that many products on Aliexpress (if you rely on it for sourcing products) are of relatively lower quality. This leads the high frequency of product returns and credit card chargebacks from receivers of the products (i.e. the customers). As an eshop owner, you will likely have to take the loss. Overall, it is not easy to do really well with dropshipping.
Being an affiliate marketer
Most people are familiar with affiliate marketing, so I’m not going to get into the definition of it right now. You will need to have this knowledge when starting affiliate marketing business. Affiliate programs are not a business model for anyone to get rich quickly. Anyone involves will need mental the preparation to put in long hours of work upfront, and many affiliate marketers would struggle many times for a long time along the way before having their first affiliate item sold. When the first item is sold, the affiliate marketer would probably not have made a net profit (because they would have already spent too much money to get this item sold). It is never easy to find an affiliate offer that can provide low-ticket, mid-ticket, and high-ticket products and services that are premium.
In affiliate marketing, there is a good chance that you will have to force yourself to polish on multiple skills including online lead generation, copywriting, sales, presenting, SEO, social media marketing, PPC, and more. You will need to possess the ability to keep on learning new skills, and be aware that the internet world keeps changing. When you are able to keep up with a 1% conversion rate in your sales funnel, and build up from there, you will possess what it takes to do affiliate marketing and make it a very successful business for you.
One last aspect when doing affiliate marketing whether full time or part time is not to directly compare your results with the positive results of other affiliate marketers. The main reason is that you did not know before he makes it a successful business, how much he has had struggled.