You've sold a few affiliate products, and now you're ready to take the next step.
Your own product.
You know that having your own product is the key to true success, so how can you make it into the big time with your own product? What are the crucial steps to take? Well, of course you are going to promote this product, just as you did with your affiliate products.
This will double your income because you are getting 100% of the sale.
But the real money comes in forming your own affiliate program.
But wait, now you are only receiving 50% again.
True, but this is 50% of a much larger pie.
If you have 20 affiliates selling your product, then you are getting 50% of their efforts- potentially 10 times your original income, or more.
Once you have your affiliate program set up, your job is to sell your product to affiliates and let them sell it to customers.
So you should concentrate your efforts in giving them the tools and training that they need to sell your product.
There are several good ways to go about setting up your affiliate program.
You should spend some time deciding how to proceed so that you only have to do it once.
Clickbank is one of the forerunners in affiliate program management, and is good if you have only one product, or a very few.
The main advantage of Clickbank is that it has the attention of a huge army of affiliates.
But there are drawbacks to Clickbank as well.
Affiliates can promote your product without joining your affiliate program, so you will not have access to their email addresses.
You cannot contact them with helpful tools, motivation, or information about new products.
Another route to go is to run your own affiliate program using an affiliate management script.
JVManager is one of the best for this purpose.
It controls your affiliate program, as well as every aspect of your product delivery and follow up.
It also gives you useful information about who is selling the most, so that you can develop effective training, give them quality promotional materials, and notify them immediately of new products as well as solicit their input as to what products they need from you.
Running your own affiliate program will require you to promote it and sign up affiliates, but once you have located affiliates it gives you far more power to build an effective affiliate program.
There are directories of affiliate programs where you can sign up and get your program noticed.
I've seen some affiliate marketers using a combination of Clickbank and running their own program.
They place a product on clickbank to attract affiliates, get the affiliate to sign up for their affiliate program by offering lots of promotional materials, and then market future products through their program using these same affiliates.
I suspect that these are the most effective marketers, mainly because they are doing the work for their affiliates in producing the promotional materials and giving their affiliates what they need to promote the product.