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

Using free articles can help you make sales.  Once you write those articles and get them approved thorugh article directories, go one further and use social marketing tools to promote your articles.

Using a social media tool can help you sell more of whatever it is you’re selling. And because there are so many online water coolers that you can share your links at, you should take advantage of as many as you can!

Do you have a regular to-do list of things you follow when you start to promote something new?  You should! Social media will help you get the word out and it can go viral, reducing the need for you to agonize over getting traffic on your own.

You don’t always have to repeat the exact same pattern but every time you launch a new sales page or write a new blog entry or article, you should consider following a stream of habits that can help you get the word out. These habits will increase your SEO and help you get humans to your site as well.

Social Media & Article Marketing

If you’re marketing with articles, for instance, in order to sell products from ClickBank or E-Junkie, there are some things you should do. Here’s a list of a few things that might work for you:

• Post in your life stream about it. This could be on a service such as FriendFeed or Ping.Fm. Some of these sites will update your streams automatically, which is a bonus!
• Blog about it on your site’s blog (either through a post or through your blogroll)
• Write a HubPage or Squidoo lens about the product or subject and link back to your site.  Link to the hub or lens in your article if you can’t use an affiliate link. Don’t forget to put links to all your promotional efforts into the link section on that lens or hub, as well.
• Start a free blog about the subject on some place like Blogger and write a few articles about the topic, linking to your sales page, article, hub, lens or hoplink.
• Submit all the above locations to one place each. You might use Delicious, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Onlywire and others.

Get The Word Out!

As you can see, there are a lot of ways you can get word out and create multiple linking points back to your site.  Your to-do list will help you get traffic and get potential sales!

Have a most outstanding day.

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

Of course you shouldn’t read everything you read, right? This is especially true in internet marketing.  There is a lot of good information out there but quite a lot of misinformation is out there as well.  People fake their ClickBank earnings to sell you a product, people have their ‘friends’ or professionals write testimonials for them and people online are occasionally out to scam others.  But, not all internet marketers are painted with the same brush. In fact, most people working online are looking to make an honest dollar and enjoy what they do. Many are just like you and are considering the law of attraction and karma and paying it forward in the way they conduct their lives.  The benefit of the doubt should be the case when dealing with your loved ones but when dealing with strangers, it is wise to do your due diligence.

Tips for Checking Out The Integrity of a Person or Program Online

The great thing about the Internet is that you can find stuff out quite easily.  Behind  the rhetoric you’ll find most people are fairly transparent.  Here are some places to check to find out if someone is for real or a program really will do what it says:

• Rip-off or scam report sites:  Like it says, it talks about rip-offs.  Be careful though…not everything on the list is truly a ripoff. Disgruntled customers aren’t always right although finding more than one piece of evidence saying someone or something is a scam is worth paying some attention to.
• Consumer review websites: If you’re planning on buying a program, there are bound to be reviews about it. Some will have affiliate links so look for a review site that offers more than just a glowing review about everything listed on the site.
• Community forums.  If you’re buying a product for website design, check webmaster forums and if you’re buying something that has to do with affiliate sales, check out an affiliate marketing forum. Chances are, there will be information listed or you can ask a question about something specifically.

With anything that requires an investment of time or money, just do some due diligence research before taking the plunge and you’ll typically make the right decision in the end.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

There is a lot of free information available online about internet marketing.  But, there may come a time when you’re ready to delve a bit deeper and buy an e-book on marketing.  Which ones are the best? Which ones are duds?

It’s a good idea to do a bit of digging on the author of books you’re considering and see what that author appears to be all about.  A good reputation can be determined and lucky for you, a bad reputation can be even easier to find out so have a look at the author and their reputation closely before spending money on an e-book or marketer mentoring program.

How to know if an e-book is worth buying

Ask others in your niche if they’ve bought the book and see what they say.  Check for reviews on the book. While you’ll find a lot of endorsements with embedded and cloaked affiliate links, you might consider looking for the opinion of someone you know will give a negative opinion if the e-book warrants it.  Finding mentors and gurus in internet marketing can take time but if you spend time researching and learning through the many free information sites that are out there, you’ll pick up a lot of knowledge.

Buying an e-book with a money back guarantee through a trusted payment processor such as ClickBank or PayPal is also a good idea as you know you really have nothing to lose but time reading the book.

There’s also a great internet marketing forum called the Warrior Forum which is probably the largest and oldest internet marketing forum on the net. you’ll find plenty of free and honest information there.

Have a most outstanding day.

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