Affiliate Marketing for Own Products

Another way to make a profit as an affiliate marketer is to start creating your own products and/or services to promote to your audience too. As you work with your audience and gain customers due to the products you promote and the content you publish, you may gain insight into the audience that gives you the idea to create a brand-new product for them. Your product can be free or for a fee, depending on how you’re going to use it.

Offering Bonuses

One way that you can add your own products to the mix is by offering a bonus for the purchase of a different product for which you are an affiliate. The bonus product offers you the ability to add them to your list, boost your revenue, and perhaps demonstrate more of what you can do for the audience regarding their problems.

Some affiliate systems enable you to add your bonus product right to their funnel on the affiliate platform (such as is offered via aMember.com or JVZoo.com) if the product creator activates that ability for you. In other cases, you may have to get creative and send the bonus another way. However, there is a lot of technology that will do it automatically for you too.

Building Your List

As an affiliate marketer, you can create your own products that are only for list-building purposes. A good example might be a checklist to help your audience choose the right affiliate marketing software or help them set up their first webinar. Anything that your audience really needs and wants that is simple to create makes a handy list builder.

Another Income Stream

Additionally, as a product creator you can create products as a separate income stream over and above your income generation as an affiliate. Maybe you can make a better cleaning organization calendar than the one that you’ve been promoting. Perhaps you have written a course about keeping your home organized that you want to market. Once you create the product, you also can recruit affiliates to make the sales for you.

As a product creator, you’ll need to ensure that you have the right software like aMember.com that helps you set up a shopping cart and even a membership site that enables you to distribute your digital products and services to your audience. You can also use any number of affiliate networks mentioned to list your products and attract affiliates to boost your income.

Finding the Right Affiliates

Once you create your own products for sale, it’s time to set up an affiliate program of your own so that you can maximize your reach. Having your own affiliate program is like having an army of salespeople on your site building your business every single day. But finding the right affiliates takes a little thought and consideration.

Quality not Quantity

Having 1000 affiliates will not help you if they are not good salespeople. If the people who want to promote your product use unscrupulous means to make sales, that can also affect you very badly. By focusing on recruiting quality affiliates over a lot of affiliates, you can avoid most of the problems that can come with affiliates – namely fraud and spam.

Their Website

Check out any applicants’ websites. Do they have an active blog? Does the content fit your audience? Is the website secure? Are they following all the pertinent laws for their country and yours regarding spam, privacy, and other issues? Do they appear honest and confident based on the information you find on the website?

Their Domain Name

One way to find out about the person behind the website is to do a “Who Is” search. Some of the websites are going to have the information hidden. If that happens, do a little more digging on to ensure that the people behind the site are honest people that you’d want to deal with in person.

Their Content and Information

When you go to the site and read the content and information, does it speak to your audience such that they will choose to buy from them? What sort of keywords do they use? Is the content and information direct and above board? Would you feel safe sending your mother to that site to get information?

Financial Validation

The other thing you will want to do when you get an affiliate is to ensure that they fill out all the right legal forms required. Even if you are not going to send out 1099s because you pay via third party like PayPal, getting that information is still important because it establishes their legality and validates them in a way that helps you keep your customers safe. Additionally, have they proven themselves to be effective affiliate marketers?

When you are first starting out as a product seller, you may not be able to be too picky about who becomes affiliates, but at the very least ensure that they are who they say they are, that they are not criminals, and that they serve their customers honestly and transparently. Just realize that if you choose people who are new to affiliate marketing, you need to offer training and encouragement to them so that they make more sales.