If you’re an affiliate who’s been making money online by selling other people’s products for a while, you might realise that there’s big money available if you can launch a successful product of your own. This isn’t an easy feat and there’s a great of time, effort and money involved in promoting your own product but if it’s something you’d like to do, there are many ways to go about it.  Today’s post looks at whether or not to sell your electronic product yourself or get help from other affiliates.

Sell  It Yourself

If you want to work hard and reap all the rewards, you can set up your own e-commerce site with a shopping cart and sell the product yourself. Whether you’re doing an e-book or a membership site, this is a doable solution but one that will require an investment of time, money and resources. You do get all the rewards but the journey will require a bit more of you because you’re on your own with every step of the journey.

Get Affiliates To Sell For You

Just as you’ve sold products and earned commission from publishers, you could decide to go this route for yourself and try to attract those interested in affiliate marketing. Hopefully you’ll get some old pros as well as some newbies!  You can list your product on a site like ClickBank or for a low fee through a site like E-Junkie and get affiliates to help you sell. While you share in the commission you’ve also got people putting efforts into selling for you.

It’s a win-win situation for you because you only pay commission on items sold.  If you’ve got a product that really sells it can run practically on autopilot for you. Other people pay money to get the word out for you through setting up websites, investing in search engine optimisation and through pay per click ad campaigns. While there is often a set-up fee for you to get going and commission is shared, this can provide a great return on investment that allows you to reach a wider audience.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

We’ve all heard those stories of affiliate marketers making thousands of dollars a week by selling products from ClickBank. All the money pours into their account faster than they could hope to spend it and they simply keep on selling more and more all the time.

Promoting Products

But we have also heard the stories of people who join the site, try to sell a few things and never make a dime. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes when it comes to being affiliate marketers, but unless you are one of the happy few who are really in the top league, you will want to try and increase your sales in some way.

The best way to do this is to look at what you are currently doing first. How much are you promoting these products? Are you really putting the most effort into it, or could you be doing a lot more to become a better affiliate marketer? The people who really are at the top of this particular money tree are always the ones putting in the most effort, so you’ll need to do that yourself if you want to climb even the hard to reach branches to be sitting up there with them.

The Next Step

The next step is to look at the actual products you are promoting. Are they the best sellers? Are they appropriate for your particular audience? Are they likely to bring you a large number of sales or only a few from time to time?

A big part of being a successful affiliate marketer with ClickBank is to work out what works for you. This site has plenty of useful pages on it, so read them all thoroughly and make the most of them. Being an affiliate marketer isn’t easy – but it can be a lot easier than you might think.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

The best part of having your own site is being able to do whatever you want with it. But that comes with a huge caveat which you should fully understand if you want to make the most of your internet or affiliate marketing business and bring in some decent income.

Benefit your Visitors

While you can do what you want with your site, you should make an effort to attract the kind of website visitors who will benefit you in the long run. If you don’t find out what your website visitors want and need, you will find that your site will exist purely to please you and it will be very hard to keep anyone else interested.

In this sense your website visitors begin to control what you can and can’t do with your site – at least if you want to make money from it. If they ask for something it’s a good idea to at least give it serious consideration, otherwise you may find you will disappoint them and they will go elsewhere. And if they do that, you will lose money and some other lucky webmaster will be only too pleased to take it.

Watch Site Stats

Pay close attention to your site stats and work out what your website visitors seem to appreciate. Which pages are the most popular for you? How many people are signing up to your newsletter offer? If that figure isn’t as high as you would have liked, try and work out how you could get it higher.

In the end your site is controlled by both you and your website visitors. It’s a fine balance but if you get it right you will soon reap the rewards when it comes to cold hard cash. Put the right content and products in place and you will be on a winning streak in no time.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you’re new to internet marketing it might be tempting to sign up with every affiliate marketing plan you can find. The problem with this is that until you know what you’re doing and are hitting pay dirt on a regular basis, you should probably stick with one or two affiliate networks instead of a bunch of individual affiliate programs.

Benefits of Affiliate Networks

You should consider deciding to focus on a narrow area so that:

a) While you get your feet wet, you only have to learn a specific set of rules instead of 10 different sets of rules based on different agreements. Keeping it straight can be tricky when you’re assimilating new info.

b)  You have one goal for your first payout.  If you sign up with an affiliate network, for instance, you might have a $100 payout level before you get your first check. Because you’ve got the opportunity to sell more than one product under that network, you’ll have more of a chance of hitting that payout level sooner. This is better than waiting for 10 different affiliate programs to add up to $100 each.  The sooner you get your first payment, the better!

c) Not all affiliate marketing programs are created equally and if you sign up with individual plans, you’re at their mercy if they change policies or go belly up before you get payout levels. When you sign up with an affiliate network instead, you’ll get the opportunity to get paid regardless. The network has the onus of paying you and it falls under their responsibility to chase for payment.

This doesn’t suggest you should never sell affiliate programs that are run independant from networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam or others but suggests that when you’re first getting started, you focus on an affiliate opportunity with proven results before you dabble in foreign waters.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

A lot of people are drooling for the fat Google cheques. Google Adsense can be a bit of a catch-22 in internet marketing.  When you display Adsense ads on your website or blog, you’re offering your competition a chance to grab your customers. When you use the ads to promote your own site, they’ll often be displayed for your competitors as well.  A lot of people sell affiliate marketing products on their site and therefore optimize their website for traffic in a specific niche with particular keywords. When you display Adsense ads on the same page, you’re competing with others who may grab the sale you worked so hard for just because their twenty word ad is more compelling than your whole page.   Should you use Google Adsense?

Internet Marketing Strategies

Many internet marketing experts do monetize some of their sites with Google Adsense ads in order to have multiple chances at income. They figure that if they don’t get the sale for a product advertised on the page, perhaps they’ll at least get some click revenue.  The choice is yours.  Some marketers are very strategic about what types of ads they’ll place on certain sites and reserve competing ads like contextual advertising for very specific types of internet marketing opportunities while leaving specific sites with nothing but internal links to avoid having people venture off to see their competitor.

The best site monetization advice? Research your options and closely watch your analytics to set your own strategy.  Multiple streams of income with varying strategies is always a good idea!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008