Whilst being an affiliate is great, as it usually means no customer service, there’ll come a time when you may wish to be on top of the food chain and have your own product, which when done right will lead to much faster success (although it’s more costly to set up initially) This is excellent as you can have thousands of your own affiliates doing all the hard work for you provided you entice them with an offer that can convert. Coz think about there is a whole army of super affiliate potentially wanting to promote your offer….now that’s what I call the power of leverage! Generally speaking, being a product owner is the next step up, and while you can create the product yourself (a digital product for instance) you can always outsource it at places like elance.com. Once you’ve tweaked the salescopy until it’s converting, then you can recruit your affiliate army on places like clickbank and affiliate related forums. In this way you become an affiliate for your affiliate program so to speak, by creating more campaigns as you would for your normal affiliate products…except in this case you want people to sign up to your affiliate program and start promoting…which in the long term, if you provide them with the adequate training and resources will pay handsome dividends. Furthermore, you can also approach huge websites in your niche and offer to JV with them. As long as your product converts then you will have them biting your hands off. It should be noted though, that all successful product owners used to be successful affiliates. This is key because they know intimately what their affiliates want and need to set up a profitable income stream. Anyway would love to hear your thoughts!!
Some good points in this thread. There's also an element of excitement when it comes to promoting something you've created yourself which can be very motivating. There are only a few affiliate programs I've promoted that I've been really excited/motivated to promote, and it's usually been because they give a good commission on each sale.
That's my whole business model, there my own programs though I agree aswell with launching products are the way to go once you've got your feet wet in the affiliate side of things you need to learn to walk before you can run in this game or a lack or experience can be very costly, although if you are good at product launch hijacking then you can make a tidy pile of cash out of a $3k product that pays 40% commission.
If you put in the research you can create a successful vendor campaign without being an affiliate first.